Infinite Variety: Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688-1730 9780812299908

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Infinite Variety

INFINITE VA R I E T Y Literary Invention, Theology, and the Disorder of Kinds, 1688–1730

Wolfram Schmidgen

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Schmidgen, Wolfram, author. Title: Infinite variety : literary invention, theology, and the disorder of kinds, 1688–1730 / Wolfram Schmidgen. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021003509 | ISBN 9780812253290 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: English literature—18th century—History and criticism. | Literary form—History—18th century. | Order (Philosophy) in literature. | Voluntarism—History— 18th century. | Religion and literature—England— History—18th century. | England—Intellectual life— History—18th century. Classification: LCC PR445 .S36 2021 | DDC 820.9/005—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003509

Für Henning, Bruderherz und akademischer Mitstreiter

Contents

Introduction

1

Chapter 1. Toward a Voluntarist Aesthetic

15

Chapter 2. Glorious Arbitrariness: Science, Religion, and the Imagination of Infinite Variety

33

Chapter 3. Energy and Structure: Remaking the Given in Blackmore and Pope

69

Chapter 4. Embarrassed Invention: Stillingfleet, Locke, and the Style of Voluntarism

108

Chapter 5. The Constructive Swift: Between the Hope and Fear of Decomposition

134

Chapter 6. The Providence of Gathering and Scattering: Dynamic Variety in Defoe

172

Conclusion

209

Notes

213

Index

255

Acknowledgments

261

Introduction

Infinite Variety offers an intellectual history of literary invention in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It argues that the religious, political, and scientific revolutions of the preceding half century changed the way writers thought about the relationship between order and invention. Jointly, these revolutions helped foster the sense of a disorder of kinds that challenged the hierarchies that had seemed to orga nize nature and society. This sense converged around the mushrooming of new religious kinds in the seventeenth century (Quakers, Seekers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Deists, Socinians, etc.); the emergence of political parties in the 1680s and 1690s (Whig, Tory, Country, Low Church, High Church); the booming discovery of new animals and plants from distant and not-so-distant locations; and the demonstration by scientists that new kinds could be created experimentally. For many observers, these developments suggested that social and natural kinds might be irreducibly various, their creation arbitrary, and their hierarchies contingent. Human and divine invention appeared boundless. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, many thinkers began to ask some ner vous questions. Were the kinds and the hierarchies we have placed them in real entities in the world or merely human projections? Could kinds really be defined by durable essences? Was form still the cause of matter’s organization or could matter make its own forms? What happens if an infinite variety of distinctions cannot be reconciled to the structural requirements of unity? Faced with such uncertainties, many concluded that order was not the natural state of things. Order did not inhere in things. Instead, it was imposed from the outside on social and natural movements whose inconstant energies could not be arrested. Disorder was natural and order a construction.

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These realizations led a number of influential writers to acknowledge that the belief in a principled order of kinds secured by essential differences was misplaced. Richard Blackmore, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, and others came to believe that reasonable principles derived from the nature of things did not drive invention. The will did, a truth that had become especially clear in the remarkable proliferation of new religious kinds in midcentury England. But even as this truth unnerved some of these writers, it made them contemplate a tantalizing prospect. Perhaps, they considered, literary invention could also proceed willfully, without too much regard for established principles and structures, whether they resided in nature or tradition. Responding to this possibility with fear, boldness, and hesitation, these writers began to contrive compositional strategies that created pleasures and modes of being that lay beyond the order of kinds. I call these strategies constructive decompositions. They rearranged the hierarchies that subtended the order of kinds. The superiority of whole over part, structure over energy, form over matter ceased to be the measure by which these writers shaped and judged their texts, from poems and letters to novels. The intellectual backbone of constructive decomposition was voluntarism, a theological orientation with roots in medieval culture that emphasized the sovereignty of the will. Voluntarism played a significant role in seventeenthcentury moral and natural philosophy, in such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf, John Locke, Walter Charleton, and Robert Boyle. For voluntarists, the absolute sovereignty of the divine will was the reason why order did not inhere in nature. God was too distant, powerful, and vast to bestow his perfections on the little planet humans called earth. Being and goodness did not coincide. Voluntarists believed that the world’s creatures, their relationships, and their actions were neither good nor bad, beautiful nor ugly. They became so only through the sovereign imposition of structures and laws. All order was arbitrary and, because it was not inscribed into things themselves, lacked finality. Order was provisional, revisable, including the order of kinds. This basic orientation to the world had several effects on literary invention, as the following chapters will try to show. I mention two important ones here. Voluntarists believed that God’s will was incapable of being restrained by principles or rules and that the act of creation was therefore free. This meant that there was no compelling reason why the world was the way it was. Because creation was free, every thing that God created could have been created entirely differently. Horses could have had six legs, wolves horns.

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Planets might have traveled at different speeds. No universal value or eternal truth resided in the way things were, be it in nature or society. In this way, voluntarist beliefs loosened the normative hold of the given. The practitioners of constructive decomposition did the same, as we will see. The second effect is related to this first one. Because they believed that order was arbitrary and did not reside in the nature of things, voluntarists expanded the value of the imagination and the scope of human invention. The speculation about other worlds and other modes of being, for example, was not idle. It illustrated God’s free will, and it could illuminate truths that lay beyond the stunted perception of human beings. Counterfactual thinking and imaginative experiment gained theological and cognitive standing under voluntarist premises. Nothing has to be the way it is also meant that human beings can freely construct the forms that shape their lives. The skeptical acknowledgment of the infinite variety of human forms gained currency in the seventeenth century. For the voluntarists that interest me in this book, this acknowledgment did not lead to a blind embrace of established custom and tradition. No matter how threatening the explosion of religious and political differences in the seventeenth century seemed to Hobbes, Blackmore, or Swift, they accepted the plasticity of being and relied on it to imagine transformative possibilities. This second effect adds the constructive dimension to decomposition. As these two effects may have already suggested, constructive decompositions are indifferent to distinctions of literary kind. My study aims for a different arena of invention than the one identified by genre critics. These critics have long argued that the declining authority of traditional kinds fuels literary invention. Alistair Fowler observes, for example, that “the general tendency of literature” has been to move away from “ritually determined forms and syntagmatically prescribed genres, and toward looser and more flexible conventions,” toward “more implicit and assimilated generic indicators.”1 Over the long run of literary history, in other words, we can see an increasing modulation, mobility, mixture, and proliferation of genres, which are transformed into various modes, subgenres, and countergenres. Many genre critics believe that the development of looser and more flexible generic conventions quickens in the early modern period and expands after that.2 Fowler notes that this increase in generic experimentation has led some scholars to suggest that “the kinds have undergone so many variations and historical changes as to be indeterminate.” But this suggestion he firmly rejects: “The kinds, however elusive, objectively exist.”3 They may have no essences, as

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Fowler concedes, but the kinds’ mixed and mutable life is nonetheless governed by “literary laws” that help explain literary invention.4 Yet the world of established kinds, no matter how ingeniously mixed, does not contain the sphere of invention that I hope to access. This sphere was opened by a crisis that rendered the reality of kinds doubtful and made their arbitrariness palpable. The confidence that the kinds exist objectively was shaken in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This development certainly contributed to the increased freedom with which existing literary kinds could be combined. But while I occasionally address such combinations, my main focus in the following chapters will be literary experiments that spring more immediately from the disorder of kinds. While this disorder encouraged increased mixture, it also led to compositional experiments that took place independently of generic distinctions. Indeed, those experiments that were indebted to voluntarist thought pushed against the order of kinds to suggest possibilities of being that lay beyond existing hierarchies and distinctions, beyond what is given and probable. In such attempts an aesthetic of infinite variety defines itself against the order of kinds. Arbitrariness of the given, freedom of invention: voluntarists did not receive these truths with unqualified joy. Their reluctant acceptance was forced by the historical realities of the seventeenth century and often flanked by blunt calls for the imposition of order from above. The use of these truths in literary composition could be attended by shame and trepidation as well as excitement. Voluntarism enabled, in fact, the combination of contrary impulses. It insisted on a vital and continuous relationship between a primary level of indeterminacy and freedom and a secondary level of structure and law. This relationship allowed many voluntarist thinkers to be simultaneously radical and authoritarian. Armed with two disparate yet interdependent ontological levels, the same writer could celebrate irreducible variety as an expression of freedom and insist on the dire necessity of curbing it, imagine utopian possibility one moment and fear the will’s arbitrary power at another. This is the complicated terrain from which the acts of invention in this book emerge. Nor do the complications end here. The defenders of the Anglican establishment in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, we shall see, contributed to such emergence. Voluntarism’s double-edged ontology rendered it useful to Anglicans who were worried—increasingly so in the late seventeenth century— about heterodoxy and so-called atheism. “Atheist” is the label often used by defenders of established religion to tarnish heterodox thinkers and religious kinds (Deists,

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Socinians, Freethinkers, Arians, and so on). Such “atheists” as Charles Blount, John Toland, and William Coward took advantage of the materialist and empiricist doctrines that the new science had sought to Christianize and used them to question the nature of the soul, the trinity, and the incarnation. Their strategy was one of materialist and rationalist reduction. At a time when Jesus’s status as the redeemer hinged on the ambiguity of his species (divine and human), when the mystery of the trinity rested on the simultaneous sameness and difference of its three persons (father, son, and holy spirit), when the soul was seen as a spiritual entity incomprehensibly wedded to the body, arguments that reduced these complex unities to matter or a merely natural identity raised serious political alarms.5 Those who defended the status quo after 1688 against the atheist challenges often wound up contending for a more complicated, irreducible, and even incomprehensible world animated by spiritual and material forces.6 They spoke up for the powers of mystery and spirit, but their advocacy was not necessarily politically retrograde or anti-enlightenment. Rejecting the heterodox idea that the world was an object of purely rational comprehension, many defenders of Christianity (including some new scientists) mobilized voluntarist beliefs. They denied that order inhered in nature, elevated divine sovereignty, promoted the idea of an arbitrary creation, and authorized the imagination of modes of being that exceeded the actual, the probable, the perceivable. It is this authorization—provoked by the atheist challenge and facilitated by the disorder of kinds—that assisted the literary inventions of such writers as Defoe, Locke, and Swift. An enlightened literary culture, I suggest, is involved with the defense of spirit against atheist reduction.7 These introductory remarks will have begun to indicate that the category “infinite variety” has a specific meaning in this book. It designates a view of the world in which invention is, in principle, open. Already existing laws, structures, and beings do not impose a reliable limit on what is possible or a useful limit on what is imaginable. The sentiment that the world is infinitely various was frequently invoked in the period I study, but in many cases such invocation was metaphorical. The world was infinitely various, that is, only to human eyes. God could see through appearances to a deeper level where the principles and rules resided that created the surface effects. Human beings could intuit or perhaps even work toward understanding this deeper level. When infinite variety was understood in this way, it was not an ontological fact but an epistemological effect. It was invoked when human beings marveled at the extent of the world’s variety while maintaining the belief that it was a principled

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variety, a variety that could be reconciled, in the end, with an ideal order. The world was not literally or ultimately infinitely various. It just could seem that way to us. For the writers I’ll be addressing, by contrast, variety could not be reconciled with an ideal order. These writers assumed that the world’s appearances did not result from a divine recipe calculated to generate harmony and beauty— the best of all possible worlds. To them, God’s act of creation was willful, without elaborate plans for a complete whole, and this meant that perfections and imperfections were both freely created by God. Infinite variety was not merely a human impression that could always be moderated by linking it back to the ideal calculations that guided God’s creation. Imperfections could not be redeemed by pointing to the overall harmony of the world. Infinite variety was therefore real. It designated the endlessness of human and divine possibility, the potential and plasticity of being, fearful and tempting at the same time. It defined the world as an ongoing, unfinished process. Given these implications, it should not come as a surprise that a range of thinkers criticized the voluntarist tradition. Voluntarism was actively opposed by such figures as Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, Thomas Burnet, Leibniz, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and his follower Francis Hutcheson. They rejected the idea that order was not natural and sought to locate it in things themselves, which they believed possessed inherent value— natural goodness and beauty. Variety for these thinkers was always limited, even when it was a defining feature of God’s creation. I will stay in touch with this lively opposition throughout these pages. To illuminate the links between theology and invention, I will put voluntarist writers in conversation with More, Leibniz, Shaftesbury, Edward Stillingfleet, and Alexander Pope.

II Infinite Variety, like my previous book, Exquisite Mixture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), has implications for the history of gender, sexuality, and disability. I have not made much of these implications in the past, but I would like to take a moment now to foreground them. Broadly speaking, Exquisite Mixture and Infinite Variety attempt intellectual histories of the changing relationship between form and matter in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The belief in form’s superiority as a spiritual or spirit-like cause was still widely accepted in seventeenth-century England, along with its

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male gender. This view of form had been entrenched over centuries by Plato, Aristotle, and their commentators. It found its most widely known expression in ideas of sexual generation. Even in more popular seventeenth-century guides to pregnancy, for example, the belief that the male sperm was the more active, spiritual agent whose task it was to shape discordant female matter into coherent beings remained dominant.8 The theory of epigenesis—the idea that the embryo develops progressively without a guiding force distinct from the actual process of generation— emerges in the seventeenth century, but only in the eighteenth century did it come to be more widely accepted. Nonetheless, the hierarchy of spiritual male form and earthly female matter came under increasing pressure in the seventeenth century. Among the learned and new scientists, the revival of atomism under voluntarist auspices contributed significantly to this pressure because it permitted matter to generate form. At the same time, the emergence of new religious and political kinds demonstrated on a much more practical, social plane that new forms could emerge if matter pushed hard. For Swift, Defoe, Locke, and others, this was also the lesson of the political revolutions of the seventeenth century: political matter—the people—was capable of giving itself new forms to live by.9 Even as many argued that God maintained matter’s motions, it was now female matter that created male form, not the other way around. Infinite Variety traces some of the literary consequences of this shift in the relationship between matter and form. It is not entirely clear how much the male writers I will be dealing with were conscious of the gendered implications of this shift (they certainly were of the political ones). But that does not change the fact that they contributed to an intellectual sea change that elevated female over male agency. In this sense, constructive decomposition is not a male mode of invention. Almost as obviously as form, variety was a gendered concept. Take Alexander Pope. Careful to restrain variety, he prominently associates this quality with women: “Ladies, like variegated Tulips, show / ’Tis to their Changes that their Charms they owe.”10 Pope’s poetic skills, he makes clear, excel in the portrait of such variety, which requires “some wand’ring touch,” “some reflected light,” “some flying stroke.”11 Still, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra sets a more instructive precedent for my study. For Cleopatra embodies an “infinite variety” so unrestrained that it transmutes defects into perfections, undoes the effects of age, and indefinitely renews unsteady male appetites.12 As far back as 1832, Anna Jameson explained the representation of these powers in ways that resonate with my study. In Cleopatra, she wrote, Shakespeare was

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able “to make the extremes of littleness produce an effect like grandeur—to make the excess of frailty produce an effect like power—to heap up together all that is most unsubstantial, frivolous, vain, contemptible, and variable, till the worthless be lost in the magnitude, and a sense of the sublime spring from the very elements of littleness.”13 The formal logic Jameson captures—from the heaping up of various particulars to the sublime—is important to my argument about constructive decomposition. I find one expression of this logic in Sappho’s love poetry. As canonized in Longinus’s treatise on the sublime, Sappho’s mode of composition, I argue in Chapter 6, helps explain Defoe’s writing of infinite variety.14 The elevation of matter over form and the idea that order is not natural had another noteworthy consequence: these beliefs weakened the difference between deformity and form. Principled distinctions between the well-formed and the badly formed have no firm footing when there is no universal standard of form in nature, when the hierarchy of kinds is recognized as a human invention. If God’s creation did not realize an ideal order whose logic humans can discern, the difference between form and deformity can become strictly relative. For the writers I study, this difference is not secured by the nature of things; it is the result of human imposition and cultural variation. As a consequence, deformed beings cannot be treated as exceptions or wonders, as they had been for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From a voluntarist standpoint, deformities are not revealing or glaring flaws that have to be explained by appealing to nature’s playfulness, divine providence, the redemptive harmony of the whole, or women’s impressionability. They are simply part of the way nature works. And when creation is imperfect, as voluntarists believed, works of art are released, at least in principle, from the duty of imitating nature. They are authorized to go beyond what seems natural, beyond the limits of the given and the probable, toward the extraordinary. They may compete with nature. The integration of deformity into the way things are, then, not only legitimized a politics of deformity, as I argued in Exquisite Mixture.15 It also had important aesthetic effects. I emphasize these effects because they seem to run counter to a narrative line that has often been favored by scholars of disability. The emergence of modern disability and its distinction between the normal and the abnormal is often tracked via a transition that occurred in the seventeenth century. Aided by empiricism and secularization, this transition happened when deformity ceased to be viewed as wonder or prodigy and came to be seen— less religiously and more scientifically—as error.16 The distinction between normal

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and abnormal was built on this shift. But as David M. Turner has pointed out, the idea that deformities are divine signs was not just resisted by science. It was also contested from within religious thought in the early eighteenth century. In part because they still reacted against the providentialist habits of the Civil War and interregnum periods, some religious commentators argued that the best response to human deformities was to consider them simply as part of God’s creation. The birth of four disabled children in a single family, John Dunton’s “Spiritual Observator” recommended in 1701, was best met by “thank[ing] God who hath made the Difference.”17 Though unfolding on a more broadly philosophical level, my argument shows that several defenders of the Anglican establishment also let go of the value differential between form and deformity and thus helped authorize an aesthetic of infinite variety. The voluntarist acceptance of deformity in this period opened up aesthetic possibilities that did not contribute to the distinction between the normal and the abnormal, something that has been attributed, in particular, to the early realist novel.18 The one realist novel that I discuss at length, for example, creates ordinary, average, or probable realities only to realize the extraordinary, the improbable. Because voluntarists tend to see the deformed as an unremarkable part of the world God has created, they do not shun its artistic representation nor its contribution to literary form. The process of constructive decomposition makes the deformation of the formed, of the kind, and of the whole central to the compositional process. This process is deliberate, but it often issues from discomforting states of mind. Many of the acts of invention I focus on are shaped by feelings of disability, embarrassment, or incomprehension, by a sense of being overwhelmed or stumbling into something, of losing or letting go of control. As we will see in Chapter 4, even Locke—not usually known for losing control— suffers discursive incontinence in his debate with Stillingfleet before he exerts his will and makes something out of his embarrassing fall into matter. Constructive decomposition is not a strategy coolly adopted by masterful writers who pursue certain goals. Such a picture contradicts voluntarist assumptions about creativity. As Blackmore makes clear using the analogy of divine creation, God’s willful act was not smooth. It was punctuated by lapses of attention and fluctuating levels of energy.19 Willful creation means not having a detailed plan, wandering focus, imperfections. Translated into the human realm, such a process of invention involves the unsettling (and exhilarating) experience of trusting energy and matter with the generation of form. I have not written a book about invention and disability, but the scenes and modes

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of invention I am drawn to do not easily fit an ableist account of authorship centered on intention and control.

III Infinite Variety is organized around authors and their inventions—the ways of writing they contrive as they navigate the changing relationship between form and matter, the disorder of kinds, and the place of spirit. While my book contributes to a history of invention, it does not follow chronological lines. Though separated by over twenty years, Blackmore’s Creation (1712) and Pope’s An Essay on Man (1733–1734) occupy the same chapter. My analysis of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) precedes my chapter on Robinson Crusoe (1719). Instead of providing an account that develops chronologically, I compare ways of writing, in poetry and in prose, that were influenced by different theologies and ontologies. While my main focus is voluntarism, a more basic consideration should not be forgotten. I have in mind the circumstance that competing systems— Hobbist, Spinozist, Leibnizian, Aristotelian, Epicurean—became widely known in seventeenth-century culture and were actively debated. One indicator of how crowded the field of world-makers was, and how contested the conceptual territory, is the often puzzling proximity between different world-systems, which can shade into each other or be misconstrued for one another with some ease. Sometimes this happens for polemical reasons, but even when that is the case, a genuine potential for proximity often plays the enabler. Such potential might be attributable to the explosion of religious and philosophical differences in the seventeenth century, when ancient and modern world-makers entered the print market en masse and revealed or implied a confounding range of models. I hope to do at least some justice to this crowded field, in which different ontologies jostle against each other, overlap, and diverge. I seek to reconstruct a voluntarist logic of literary invention, but I do not wish to establish the primacy of any one particular model over another. Even voluntarist theology, because it mediates between two different levels, can sometimes look like it combines two discrete ontologies. The most important thing about the period I am investigating is not the prevalence or ascent of one world-system over another but the joint contribution of various systems to a threatening and tempting sense

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of a contingent world and a boundless invention. This sense possessed both defenders and critics of established religion, rabid materialists and high-flying spiritualists, and it helped counterfactual, aesthetic, and fictional realms make claims on a reality whose constructedness became palpable. I privilege the life, the liveliness of ideas, which provide the main thread of my discussion. My argument does not seek to show how a text makes sense in the particular contexts of its production and consumption. I am more interested in finding out how wider currents of intellectual history can help us connect ways of writing that stretch across several genres. This interest has committed me to reconstructing a logic of invention. Though this logic is not without tensions or contradictions, I will neglect opportunities for critique. My main goal in the following chapters is to explain how this logic works. I do not present an overly idealized, homogeneous paradigm, but the gaps, dysfunctions, or struggles that belong to any intellectual framework take a back seat nonetheless. I am more devoted to assembling than taking apart. My own writing is significantly vested in description, summary, paraphrase, and synthesis. Analysis in the following pages is almost always undertaken in the interest of constituting a logic of literary invention. There is no doubt that such an undertaking owes more to Arthur Lovejoy than Quentin Skinner, two major figures who represent different versions of intellectual history. Lovejoy’s work came under attack in the 1960s, when Skinner and John Dunn, among others, advanced powerful critiques.20 The core of their concern was that Lovejoy treated ideas as if they could “get up and do battle by themselves,” independently of the particular contexts in which authors thought and breathed.21 The eighteenth century, of course, licensed such treatment. The personification of abstract concepts, for instance, is one of the distinguishing traits of eighteenth-century poetry (or one of its cardinal sins, as some romantics thought). I am tempted to ask: what happens to Skinner’s view when it contemplates an age that enjoyed depicting ideas (or books) as things that lived, breathed, and battled? But even apart from such qualification through past practices, Skinner’s contention that ideas do not have a life of their own is no longer as intuitive as it was fifty years ago. One important reason for this is the growing recognition of non-human actors in the humanities and social sciences. Responding to this shift and others, such scholars as Darrin McMahon, John Tresch, Heather Keenleyside, and Peter de Bolla have begun to revisit Lovejoy’s work.22 Perhaps appropriately for an eighteenth century-ist, I am

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drawn in a similar direction, though I am not interested in an intellectual history that is devoted to some autonomous realm of intelligibility. I believe that ideas make available orientations to the world that writers draw on at particular historical moments to shape practices that respond to problems— in this case, modes of composition that respond constructively to the combined challenges of atheism and the disorder of kinds.23 My first chapter describes in more detail what a voluntarist aesthetic looks like. By foregrounding ontology, the chapter revises our arguments about literary invention in the early eighteenth century, which have privileged epistemology as an explanatory context. This context, I show, belongs to modernization narratives that I wish to step away from. I do so by drawing on an existential hermeneutic that embraces the historiographic sin of presentism and by showing how voluntarists think about invention. Chapter 2 argues for the utopian dimension of anti-atheist writing. It shows that Joseph Glanvill, Samuel Clarke, Richard Bentley, and others pushed back against claims for the necessity of the world’s structures by joining the scientific uncertainty about the order of kinds to two intellectual currents: a voluntarist theology and a skeptical tradition long used to defending established belief by emphasizing the world’s infinite variety and incomprehensibility. To make vivid the world’s arbitrariness, these writers cultivated the counterfactual imagination and asked their listeners to imagine different modes and kinds of being. I will address the cognitive value of imagination in the voluntarist tradition by analyzing the famous debate between Clarke and Leibniz about the theological foundations of Newtonian science. Chapter 3 shows how two poets responded to the disorder of kinds. Paying close attention to Richard Blackmore’s anti-atheist Creation (1712) and Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man (1733–1734), I show that both poets criticize the idea that the order of kinds expresses divine wisdom and defines the horizon of human activity and value. To push back against such deceptions, Pope features poetic strategies that approximate nature and society, animal and human, instinct and reason, matter and form. Guided by an immanent ontology with Deist overtones, Pope lets such proximity rouse a divinely sanctioned alternative order that slumbers beneath the deceptions of essential kinds. Blackmore’s poetic strategies, by contrast, are not guided by assumptions of immanence. Although he doubts with Pope the reality of our distinctions of kinds, Blackmore has a different goal. Rather than finding a structural alternative to the order of kinds, Blackmore seeks to show that structure is ontologically secondary. Recognizing the kinship between the sublime and

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voluntarism, Blackmore pursues an aesthetic program that values works of art when they allow us to recognize the structures of the world as arbitrary and provisional. Such recognition can then make way for more elevated realizations about the freedom of the will, the plasticity of being, and its dependence on an involved deity. Instead of immanence, Blackmore’s poetics is built around transcendence, around the finally joyful recognition that energy and will are superior to structure. Having addressed poetic possibilities associated with Deist and voluntarist theologies, I turn in Chapter 4 to forms of prose. The forms I consider took shape in a debate between a writer associated with Neoplatonism and one suspected of Socinianism and materialism. The public disagreement between Edward Stillingfleet, the leading apologist of the Church of England in the 1690s, and John Locke, the then controversial proponent of the new way of ideas, shows a different aspect of the intellectual contest between defenders of the established faith and atheism. If Chapter 2 focuses on the alliance between established religion and new science, this chapter shows a prominent Anglican battling one of the important representatives of the new science. The debate shows how a disagreement about the trinity and essences prompts the invention of a voluntarist style. It features an embarrassed and irritated Locke, who struggles to grasp his disorderly writing as a distinct form. With Jonathan Swift, the subject of Chapter 5, I turn to another conservative defender of the Anglican Church. Swift develops a remarkable analysis of non-biological kinds—of the political, religious, and philosophical species that spread confusion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His analysis blames essentialism and a mistaken belief in the primacy of form over matter for the flourishing of doctrinaire coherence, hermetic social groupings, and self-absorbed individuals. Swift’s response to the resulting disorder, I argue, was not simply authoritarian. Nor could it have formed without voluntarism. The chapter takes a close look at Swift’s strategies of invention and locates a constructive dimension in his satire. Swift is able to pin hope to decomposition, I contend, because he believes in a theologically warranted passage from deformity to an always temporary, preliminary form. My final chapter addresses variety effects in Daniel Defoe’s work. Defoe’s novels have long been associated with an empiricist fidelity to the actual and the probable. Yet Defoe’s quest for form, I argue, resembles Blackmore’s and Swift’s because it finds promise in the traffic between and across different entities. Blackmore and Defoe both recognize that the sublime suits a voluntarist ontology that views kinds, identity, and hierarchy as arbitrary human

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impositions. Like Blackmore, Defoe champions an infinite variety that cannot be contained by the order of kinds. And like Blackmore and Swift, Defoe believes that will and energy are more fundamental forces than structure. But unlike the other writers in this book, Defoe does not view infinite variety as an ontological fact. His providentialism allows him, rather, to see it as the direction of a dynamic process fueled by the divine injunction to multiply and replenish the earth.

Chapter 1

Toward a Voluntarist Aesthetic

That theology and ontology are central to understanding literary invention in the early eighteenth century; that genre may not be invention’s most vital arena; that anti-atheist writings help authorize the imagination of new modes of being in poetry and prose—these claims put me at odds with the most influential paradigm we have for thinking about literary invention in the early eighteenth century. Since the late 1950s, the conversation about literary invention among eighteenth-century scholars has been dominated by the novel. Our accounts of the novel have made it not only the most spectacular instance of literary invention in the period but also the central literary protagonist in the stories we tell about modernization and secularization. In these stories, epistemology has dominated. The novel’s purported realism— its empiricist devotion to particular places, particular times, and particular individuals—has been placed at the heart of its modern identity. Such mundane attentions, it has been claimed, keep the novel from directing its gaze upward, from the specificity of observed matters at hand to the general, the universal, or the spiritual. The novel’s form and content make problems of observation, reflection, and knowledge central and thus marginalize questions about being or spirit. The novel’s association with realism and secularization has been fortified by the alliance literary historians have built between a shift toward practical morality in late seventeenth-century religious life and the rising importance of epistemology in science and philosophy.1 The protocols of particularized attention advocated by empiricist science, these historians have argued, became a natural ally to the close examination of moral conduct, a good fit for the didactic cast of the early novel. This alliance helped these historians strengthen their argument that epistemology became the secularizing master discipline

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of moral and natural philosophy in the modern age and that the novel was its supreme literary expression. Epistemology was the obvious intellectual partner of the eighteenth-century novel because this new species of writing showed us self-reflexive, socially situated individuals who pondered minute circumstances to solve practical moral problems. Important aspects of the novel’s form and content have thus been construed through a modern epistemology that makes the powers of deliberate reflection central to emancipating the individual from unselfconscious participation in natural and social worlds. Emphasizing the secularizing, particularizing, and individualizing effects of a newly empowered epistemology, scholars interested in the emergence of the novel were able to assemble an intellectually riveting case. So much is this true that the limits of this epistemological approach to literary modernity have become newly visible only in the context of fairly recent historical changes that have redirected scholarly attention to the question of being and have prompted, among other things, a turn to ontology in anthropology, philosophy, and science studies.2 (I will say more about these historical changes in a moment.) But because such novel scholars as Ian Watt, John Bender, J. Paul Hunter, Michael McKeon, and Catherine Gallagher continue to shape much of our thinking about literary invention in the eighteenth century, a redescription of the epistemological tradition is warranted to clarify its ontological investments.3 This will help us see that the epistemological tradition has given us a rather one-sided history of the work of art and of aesthetic experience in the eighteenth century. It will help us realize what may be gained if we reintroduced theology and ontology into our conversations about invention. Scholars in the epistemological tradition argue that the novel’s way of representing the world and the way readers consume such representations are shaped by the complexity that results when the explanatory powers of traditional intellectual and social forms decline and when empiricist ways of knowing gain the upper hand. Once this happens, objects, subjects, actions, and circumstances can be leveled, differentiated, and particularized to such an extent that the relationships between these entities keep evolving and have to be continually reassessed. Probability thus becomes the highest form of certainty. It issues from within the operations of the mind, the reflections of protagonist and reader. Particulars, these accounts of the novel assume, no longer lead to the higher truths that lie above or behind them (universals, species, hierarchies, God) and instead become the only thing we have. As a staunch ally of the particular that bans universals, the novel is the nominalist genre par excellence.4

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Thoroughly this-worldly and without a metaphysical dimension, it refuses to transcend the perceived detail, the concrete and the immediate, and commits its resources to the probable representation of such detail. Such empiricist dethroning of essences and universals points to a world in which divine order is no longer legible and human participation in divine knowledge questionable. Transcendent spiritual or universal truths disappear in our ceaseless reflections on the worldly particular, whose meaning can only be approximated when we observe its interactions with other particulars. Only when transcendent spiritual truth no longer holds the world together, no longer permeates being, does the world emerge as an object to a subject, whose role it now is to construct purpose and meaning for the strange and distant particular. The object’s ability to orient the search for meaning withers. In a secularizing world, subject and object lose their community. Modern epistemology creates distance between individual and world, and the novel mirrors this when it asks readers not to immerse themselves but to reflect, with a cooler head, on the shifting probability of its representations. As Gallagher emphasizes, disbelief becomes the fundamental disposition in the modern world while belief—in fictions or anything else—finds its socially useful role when it assumes the form of “ironic credulity.”5 Gallagher uses this phrase to describe novel readers who have learned to appreciate the more sophisticated fictions of the mid-eighteenth century, but the phrase also resonates with Watt’s and McKeon’s characterization of Robinson Crusoe (1719) as a novel whose religious content is either insincere or instrumentalized.6 As is especially clear in Gallagher’s account, such ironic credulity serves a protective function that helps fortify the secular, detached individual. The willing suspension of disbelief—to use the more familiar phrase Gallagher and McKeon both adopt—protects readers from the harm the aesthetic object could do them. Under such conditions, the object’s siren call poses no danger, and novel readers are able to sail through fictional worlds with all of the enjoyment but none of the risk they would other wise incur.7 Implicitly or explicitly, exponents of the epistemological tradition reduce the novel’s agency to win its aesthetic autonomy along with the reader’s insulation from the existential risks of belief. A secularizing epistemology helps to disempower the object by the sharply limited, but now exclusive, interpretive power of the subject (reader and protagonist) to construct probable meanings for the object. Ironic credulity neuters the aesthetic object by limiting the subject’s involvement to the enjoyment, in Gallagher’s Kantian echo, of “a seemingly free space in which to temporarily indulge imaginative play.”8 Reading

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fictions has become a matter of indulgence and play. The history of modern aesthetics, then, can be seen to extend organically from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, when Kant completes the rise of epistemology in modern philosophy. And this is also where these epistemological approaches to literary modernity face a basic problem. They present the empiricist turn of the seventeenth century as the beginning of a story that ends with a Kantian aesthetic in which the subject is severed from the object as the cause of a substantive, concrete, or transfigurative involvement. The early novel is thus pulled into a teleology that nebulously weds British empiricism and German idealism. Obscured in the mist is the circumstance that seventeenth-century empiricism rests on ontological presuppositions that differ sharply from those of Kant, who, as Theodor Adorno noted, “castigates as heteronomous whatever is not born exclusively of the subject.”9 John Locke’s insistence that all human knowledge begins in the impressions that external objects make on our senses is an alien sentiment in Kant’s universe. There is no easy passage from such sentiments (which exposed Locke to charges of materialism) to the gulf Kant opens between subject and object.10 This gulf ensures, in fact, that a central element in the epistemological tradition of novel studies—probability—remains marginal in Kant’s aesthetic. In The Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant argues that exceeding the empirical, not heeding it, is the artwork’s most vital task. We can see this when he discusses artistic invention. Kant praises the ability of artists to stretch their imagination into the realm of ideas and thus “beyond the bounds of experience.”11 He explains: The imagination . . . is very mighty when it creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it. We use it to entertain ourselves when experience strikes us as overly routine. We may even restructure experience; and though in doing so we continue to follow analogical laws, yet we also follow principles which reside higher up, namely, in reason (and which are just as natural to us as those which the understanding follows in apprehending empirical nature). In this process we feel our freedom from the law of association (which attaches to the empirical use of the imagination); for although it is under that law that nature lends us material, yet we can process that material into something quite different, namely, into something that surpasses nature.12

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Kant makes clear that empirical nature should not be the final guide in the creation of works of art. On the contrary, he emphasizes the shortcomings of ordinary experience and the possibility to transform such experience by principles of reason that belong to a higher, non-empirical realm. In such transformation, a degree of freedom from the empirical is realized, the freedom of an imagination that, even as it works with established materials and associations, transforms them into something that surpasses or replaces nature. Kant praises the ability of artists to create entities that are not observable—from “invisible beings” to “the realm of the blessed, the realm of hell, eternity, creation”—as a central expression of their imaginative power.13 But even when the poet chooses more ordinary themes like death or envy, “he ventures to give these [themes] sensible expression in a way that goes beyond the limits of experience, namely with a completeness for which no example can be found in nature.”14 In this way, works of art move beyond the actual and the probable, beyond experience, and toward the realm of ideas. As will become clear later in this chapter, Kant’s views resonate with the account of literary invention I offer. But there is also a point of differentiation. When Kant declares that going beyond nature is the noblest task of the work of art, he explicitly links this task to the artistic genius, whose autonomy, one imagines, owes something to the separation of subject and object Kant presupposes. But because subject and object are not safely differentiated in the voluntarist tradition I examine, the acts of literary invention I observe derive from entanglements with matter and turn on embarrassment, incomprehension, and disability. A second problem of the epistemological tradition is the modernization narrative that underwrites the passage from epistemology to new literary form. This narrative centrally relies on mechanisms of differentiation. The tradition of novel studies I have discussed relies on three congruent differentiations: the differentiation of subject and object (including its aesthetic consequences: the insulation of the imagined from the real and the priority assigned to the mimetic over the transfigurative function of art); the differentiation of individual and nature (which helped break the divinely guaranteed unity of being and facilitates the scientific, commercial, and colonial objectification of the world); and the differentiation of individual and society (moving us from status to contract, gemeinschaft to gesellschaft and toward the related differentiation of private and public). Nature, society, and art are thus claimed to be taken up by a modernizing process that deploys rationalizing differentiations to resolve whatever remained of the premodern interpenetration of spheres and

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kinds by placing them in separate quarters. In this reorganization, the operations of a knowledge that has gained confidence in its analytic and reflective powers are primary. The passage from epistemology to novelistic form to Kantian aesthetic is charted around the idea that eighteenth-century people enhance their mental powers so they can differentiate themselves from nature and society, distance themselves from traditional beliefs and practices, and cultivate an autonomous interiority, in the self and in the domestic sphere. The novel promotes this process—or so we have been told.

II In retrospect, our reliance on epistemology to explain the invention of quintessentially modern modes of writing seems understandable. Larger forces were involved. I am thinking, for example, of the epistemological preoccupations of humanists and social scientists in the second half of the twentieth century, which made the mediation of reality through human perceptions and conventions fundamental to inquiry. Surely, such preoccupations contributed to the epistemological cast of arguments in the line of Watt, Bender, Gallagher, and McKeon. Surely, they helped make Kant’s philosophy a logical destination for literary historians concerned with the invention of the novel. Even broader developments in intellectual history, it seems to me, helped tune literary historians to epistemology. In “Overcoming Epistemology” (1997), Charles Taylor argues that the seventeenth-century rise of epistemology is tied to “some of the most important moral and spiritual ideas of our civilization,” including the ideas that free individuals are self-responsible, rely on their own judgment, and find purpose in themselves.15 How could our histories of literary modernity not be affected by such ideas, which still loom large in Western democracies? The novel became the paradigm case of literary invention in the eighteenth century through our one-sided focus on epistemology, but such one-sidedness is not entirely our own. Broader lines of intellectual and social history are involved. These lines, however, have been weakening. Today, the highway that the novel, epistemology, and secularization built toward literary modernity looks like a piece of aging infrastructure. During the last ten years or so, scholars have been paving different roads into literary modernity. They have rejected the idea that a scientifically warranted empiricism and probability begin to

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shape literary invention in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.16 They have qualified and repudiated the separation of subject and object that informs so many of our literary histories.17 They have shown that empirical and skeptical modes of thought sort freely with religious belief.18 And they have made clear that the question of spiritual authority remains central in the development of eighteenth-century literature, even as practical morality asserts itself.19 These developments in literary history have made travel on the old infrastructure of modernity difficult. This infrastructure has gotten into more general trouble in our current historical moment. One of the great engines of modernization, differentiation, is no longer driving development in the West. Instead of increasing differentiations, a globalizing and technologically advanced world appears to produce more and more malleable, complex identities and increasingly weak boundaries—between nations, economies, north and south, nature and society, private and public, humans and non-humans. In a less and less bounded world, categories of belonging come under pressure: the terms AngloAmericans came to use after the eighteenth century to describe the groups they belong to (national, ethnic, sexual) seem less able to capture the more complicated modes of being they inhabit today. To be this kind or that kind of person is no longer the compelling line it once had been— even in the United States, where reinvention is more of a tradition than elsewhere. At the same time, the distinction between natural and unnatural means less and less (think of genetically modified food, global warming, or the recent breakthrough that permits the storage of digital information in biological cells). And more and more of what we once considered private information is accessible to extensive electronic publics. When identities and borders open up in this way, abstractions lose power and the general can no longer comprehend the particular in any straightforward way. Under such conditions, it becomes both harder and more inviting to condemn the traffic across kinds, spheres, and borders as a violation of order. It becomes easier to concede such traffic’s productivity. In advanced Western societies, among middle and upper classes, the distribution of being into qualitatively different kinds and spheres no longer seems to organize life, whose unity and plasticity seem palpable again. A resurgent nationalist right in the United States and Europe, along with anti-globalization movements around the world, want to change much of this. In the United States, Donald Trump is doing his best to reimpose the distinctions and borders of the modern age. But despite rising political tensions,

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I still find it hard to believe that the current of increasing boundlessness will be reversed, not least because much of it is powered by global economic forces that are hard to police. A new engine has begun to drive development, an engine that no longer generates differentiations but increasing de-differentiations. Could our modernization narratives make sense of this remarkable change? For an answer, we might be tempted to turn to the explanation nearest at hand: that increased differentiation leads to increased opportunities for mixture. This narrative underwrites the genre critics’ account of literary invention as much as Bruno Latour’s revised modernization story in We Have Never Been Modern (1995).20 But before we settle for this explanation, I’d like to ask a question about narrative paradigms: Why do we have to tell stories with lines that move forward, from premodern interpenetration, say, to modern differentiation to postmodern hybridization? I’ve been looking for other modes of transport. Hans-Georg Gadamer has taught me to appreciate dialogue, a mode that abandons the broad lines of modernization, the narrative relay between beginning, middle, and end, and replaces these stages with an insistent circling between past and present.21 Such dialogue does without the middle and transmutes the difference of beginning and end into an exchange between past and present. It sheds the conceptual and narrative armor by which we place ourselves at the end of the developmental line and construct what came before us as a modernizing process. Such dialogue risks less mediated forms of contact with the past. It can therefore be transformative. These less mediated forms, I hasten to add, have little to do with the false immediacy of immersion, of going native, the lure of which seems to reappear in some versions of anthropology’s ontological turn.22 The past is a different country, but it is not alien territory. It is always both familiar and unfamiliar. Fredric Jameson insisted that “the human adventure is one,” and that is why dialogue between past and present is possible in the first place.23 I plead that we accept the present as the necessary starting place of a mutually transformative inquiry. In such an inquiry, understanding depends on the degree to which present and past have made contact and, through such contact, have changed each other beyond what can be found on either side. The hermeneutic circle, a version of which I allude to here, is often acknowledged by literary scholars as an important tool in the practice of interpretation. But we tend to confine this tool to the operations of knowledge, see it as a means only of securing the validity of our interpretations. That is unfortunate. I think we could learn something from historians and political

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scientists, who have turned to such thinkers as Heidegger and Gadamer precisely because they join being and knowledge.24 These thinkers argue that we are not free to adopt a stance toward the past. Instead, we are participants in human history. That is why we can neither immerse ourselves in the past nor achieve critical distance to it. I very much agree with Rita Felski (who recognizes the renewed importance of Gadamer’s work) when she argues that we should abandon the fiction of critical distance and the revelatory dissections it promotes.25 Such distance is simply not available. We are historical beings and therefore existentially involved when we seek knowledge of the past. It is this circumstance of our own un-freedom, Gadamer emphasizes, that gives dialogue its transformative potential. Our lack of freedom vis-à-vis the past links knowledge and being, epistemology and ontology. What I mean to say here is that the questions this book asks of the past come from the present. The present is the inescapable medium through which Infinite Variety contemplates the past. This is not a flaw or even a historiographic sin. It is the condition of historical work. Without the broad tendency toward increasing boundlessness in our time, I could not have written this book. Without this tendency, I would have asked different questions. The texts I am studying would have responded differently to my scrutiny. They would have different things to say. What Infinite Variety argues about literary invention in early eighteenth-century England is true not because it shows what really went on at that time. Hard as it is to give up on the belief that we can understand the past on its own terms, I finally don’t think that’s possible. I don’t even think that such a belief is a useful fiction, haunted as I am by its lure. Even as traces of this fiction remain, the truth of such a book as this probably hinges on the answer to the following question: Is it the product of a genuine dialogue between past and present that has the ability to alter what we thought we knew?

III In my Introduction, I sketched some of the theological assumptions that helped such writers as Blackmore, Locke, Swift, and Defoe devise compositional strategies that could exceed the order of kinds and suggest new modes of being. I mentioned two logically connected assumptions as basic to voluntarism. I will restate them here in their baldest form: God’s act of creation was arbitrary, and, therefore, order does not inhere in nature. It is now time

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to connect these assumptions more fully to the tradition of thought they belong to. Influential strands of moral and natural philosophy relied on voluntarism. In seventeenth-century moral philosophy, voluntarism is the thread that connects the thought of Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf, and John Locke.26 In natural philosophy, such figures as Gassendi, Walter Charleton, and Robert Boyle invoked voluntarist assumptions to Christianize Epicurean atomism, the bedrock of the new science. “The philosophers of the new natural sciences,” as James Tully put it, “advanced a concept of nature as a nonpurposive realm of atoms on which God imposes, by an act of will, motion and an extrinsic order of efficient causes or regularities.”27 Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke echoed this world-picture when they argued that moral order depends, again in Tully’s words, on the “extrinsic imposition of moral concepts and laws by a superior on to an unordered realm of human movements that lack any intrinsic moral properties [and] any innate disposition to moral and political life.”28 Hobbes put the same point this way: “The desires and other passions of man are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions that proceed from those passions, till they know a law that forbids them—which till laws be made they cannot know.”29 All value and virtue are created by imposition of law from the outside on beings who are driven by self-love and selfpreservation. In this way, seventeenth-century voluntarists break “with a long-standing tradition in which goodness and being are equated.”30 For Pufendorf and Hobbes especially, this dim view of the world’s inherent capacity for order and goodness had undoubtedly much to do with their experience of devastating religious and civil wars. This view was reinforced by an increasing awareness of human diversity, which grew through the explosion of religious differences in England in the 1650s, the revival of skepticism, early ethnography, the increasing availability of travel narratives, and other factors. The attempt by such thinkers as Pufendorf and Hobbes to discover the foundations of moral order was propelled by a growing conviction that the varieties of human forms are as stunning as their potential for conflict is alarming. Pufendorf makes such variety explicit when he comments on the “so wide . . . Diversity of Affections and Desires” that moves human beings “with Propensions as vast in their Number, as they are various in their Mixture and Compositions. Nay, the same Man is very frequently unlike, and unequal to himself, and what he once most eagerly desir’d, he shall at another time most strongly abhor. . . . Neither is there less difference in [men’s] Studies, their Institutions, and their Inclinations to imploy and exert their

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Vigour of Mind, as appears in the numberless Professions and the endless Methods of Living.”31 Such endless diversity, according to Pufendorf, existed because God had endowed man with the “Liberty of exerting, suspending, or moderating his Actions, without being confin’d to any necessary Course and Method.”32 Pufendorf diverges from Hobbes here (who did not believe in the freedom of the human will), yet both marveled at the varieties generated by human invention in the seventeenth century. There was strong evidence indeed that order did not inhere in nature and that it was arbitrarily imposed, by human beings and by God. It is in this historical context that a voluntarist theology was useful, for it frankly conceded what became harder to deny and what Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Locke sought to harness in different ways: the independent power of human invention. The separation of goodness and being in voluntarism, of course, did not go unopposed, nor did such unfettered powers of invention. Leibniz, for example, attacked Pufendorf’s, Hobbes’s, and Descartes’s voluntarism in his “Essay on the Principles of Pufendorf” (1706). “Justice,” he argued, “would not be an essential attribute of God, if he himself established justice and law by his free will. And, indeed, justice follows certain rules of equality and of proportion [which are] no less founded in the immutable nature of things, and in the divine ideas, than are the principles of arithmetic and of geometry.”33 Justice is not just willed, Leibniz contends: it resides in the nature of things, just like the principles of geometry. This last point had been questioned by Descartes, to whom Leibniz alludes here. Addressing the ontological status of geometry, Descartes had argued that “God did not will . . . the three angles of a triangle to be equal to two right angles because he knew that they could not be other wise. On the contrary, . . . it is because he willed the three angles of a triangle to be necessarily equal to two right angles that this is true and cannot be other wise.”34 Descartes’s distinction can seem subtle. The end result—the necessity of the sum of the angles in a triangle—is the same whether you assume that God willed it or God followed a preceding necessity. Yet the consequences of the distinction are significant. “To one who pays attention to God’s immensity,” Descartes continues, “it is clear that nothing at all can exist which does not depend on him. This is true not only of every thing that subsists, but of all order, of every law, and every reason of truth and goodness.”35 There is nothing in the nature of things that is true, good, or orderly. Things become so only through God’s will, on which every thing depends. By radicalizing divine sovereignty in this way, the voluntarists argued, as Leibniz saw, that God

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has “bestowed a mere extrinsic denomination . . . on things.” God has not, in other words, “conferred an inherent law” or produced “some kind of enduring impression . . . in the thing itself.”36 The voluntarist belief that God abstained from making enduring impressions in things themselves aligned it with empiricism, which “from Bacon through Locke had a strong affinity with voluntarism in ethics.”37 As Locke, Pufendorf, and Hobbes would argue, not only are there no innate ideas stamped on our brains, but humans have no a priori knowledge on which they can draw for understanding the world around them. Their mediocre and only gradually developing intellect confines them to the incessant labor of empirical observation and reflection. Particulars are thus the appropriate object of human attention. Universals and essences either are out of reach or do not exist in nature. More likely than not, they are human constructions that impose meaning and order on a world arbitrarily created by God. They do not tell us much about the actual nature of things. The nature of things, indeed, was out of reach for human beings, a belief that tended to mystify the particular. The doubts about universals and essences and the elevation of the particular indicate that voluntarist belief often went hand in hand with nominalism, with which it shares a long history of association, as Michael Gillespie, Amos Funkenstein, and Hans Blumenberg have shown (in fact, the association is so close that the phrase “nominalist theology” is sometimes used to describe voluntarism).38 As will become clearer as we go on, the meaning of nominalism and empiricism—two important elements in our epistemological accounts of literary invention—shifts when they are seen in the context of voluntarist theology. For it is only then that we can grasp their connection to a utopian sense of possibility, the imagination of other worlds and modes of being. Voluntarism authorizes this sense and this imagination. We can see such authorization in the way voluntarism empowers human invention and construction. Hobbes’s conception of science is a good example. As Gillespie has shown, Hobbesian science is not an exercise “in mere analysis and description but in artifice itself.” “The hypothetical construction undertaken by science,” he explains Hobbes’s program, is “akin to the actual construction by which God creates the natural world, and it can serve as the basis for the construction of one that is more conducive to human thriving.”39 Hobbes dramatizes the reach of human science in the remarkable opening statement of Leviathan: “Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in

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this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal.”40 Contemplated from God’s perspective, nature itself is an art, and that is why it can be imitated by man to make artificial natural things. Hobbes’s sentence elides the difference between the natural and the artificial, suggesting that nature itself is a made-up thing that can be studied and whose procedures can be replicated by man. There is no ontological difference between creation and construction. That voluntarism empowers construction can also be observed in Isaac Barrow, Newton’s colleague and mentor. Barrow was a mathematician who enjoyed devising “counterfactual mathematical universes” because he believed they could be true even if they did not describe the world we occupy.41 For Barrow, the truth of mathematics is not tied to the representation but to the construction of the world, and this includes the construction of different, equally possible worlds. As David Sepkoski puts it, in such a mathematics, “nature is not decoded, but encoded.”42 Counterfactuals and thought experiments gain cognitive value under such presuppositions, as we shall see in the next chapter. A voluntarist theology thus renders the world less durable, less certain and true, more constructed, and more subject to construction. Since order does not inhere in the nature of things but is only imposed, structure is ontologically secondary as it restrains and directs a primary realm of inconstant energy, movement, and will. This link between primary and secondary levels also characterizes divine power itself. Francis Oakley has shown this in his account of voluntarism as a covenantal tradition that seeks to mediate between God’s absolute and ordained power. According to this tradition, God’s power is, on one level, absolute and the world could be different for no reason at all. But on another level, God’s power is ordained and bound by his promises to mankind. On the one hand, the world is fundamentally unstable because God, as a willful sovereign, could change all the rules tomorrow and is not bound to a single cosmic script. On the other hand, the world is relatively orderly and stable because of God’s providential agreement with mankind.43 Even such agreements, however, can seem too restrictive to voluntarists. Pufendorf indicates as much when he clarifies that God’s promise to man doesn’t really impose any obligation on Him, who always acts from His “free Pleasure.”44 This indispensable linkage of primary freedom and secondary constraint, of chaos pulled into and sustained in arbitrary order, was important to apologetic writers in the late seventeenth century. It begins to explain the relationship between anti-atheist writing and an aesthetic of infinite variety. Many Anglican theologians recognized that two basic approaches fueled

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atheist reduction: the approximation of the divine to worldly structures or its removal to distant spheres that are no longer concretely tied to sublunar affairs. Either God could not be sharply distinguished from the place he was supposed to govern or he was so far removed that this place became an independent province. In the minds of many Anglicans, the effects of these two, often varied and adapted, approaches were broadly similar. Spinozists, Socinians, Deists, and others in the atheist camp hoped to reduce or undo the difference between the material and the spiritual, natural and revealed religion, the physical and the metaphysical. Spiritual power declined, natural and material forces gained. Their ascent nourished claims— fiercely resisted by Anglicans—that necessity or chance shaped the forms of life on our planet: laws of nature or morality that constrained divine agency, inescapable chains of material causes, or the accidental collision of atoms. The voluntarist mediation between absolute and ordained power helped apologists resist such chance and atheist necessity (of which Hobbes was accused). It allowed them to hold on to the idea of relative order and to replace necessity and chance with a divine will unbound by preceding ideals, principles, or even its own actions. Divine sovereignty increased dramatically, but at the cost of revealing the arbitrariness of the world’s structures. As some observers noted, the idea of a willful, arbitrary creator came uncomfortably close to Epicurus’s idea of a creation by chance. The voluntarist God proved a less problematic weapon, on the other hand, when used against the atheist assertion that the world is necessarily the way it is. When directing their arguments against necessity, many apologists illustrated God’s sovereignty by imagining different worlds, kinds, and modes of being, as we will see in the next chapter. In this way, the defenders of the established faith drew on voluntarism to resist atheist necessity by expanding the imagination of possibility and transformation. The aesthetic of infinite variety in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries cannot be fully appreciated without understanding that its expansionist program is linked to the battle against atheist necessity. When I now turn to the literary effects of the voluntarist framework I have sought to assemble, I have to begin by noting that none of the writers I feature inhabits this framework equally. Defoe’s moral philosophy, for example, is clearly voluntarist. He does not believe in the equation of goodness and being, and like Pufendorf and Hobbes, he considers self-love and selfpreservation fundamental forces. Yet he also discerns in nature some degree of providential design that supports human flourishing. My discussion of Samuel Clarke will show, by contrast, that he accepted the arbitrariness of creation.

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But his natural voluntarism is more emphatic than its moral counterpart.45 Clarke tries to mobilize a version of the distinction between absolute and ordained power to overcome this tension, but the strain is evident.46 Locke and Blackmore come closest to endorsing both moral and natural voluntarism, but even here the case for Blackmore is finally more compelling, in part because he is more interested in physico-theology, in part because Locke’s political theory concedes that some degree of order inheres in nature. Still, all of the writers we will spend time with share central voluntarist convictions. Even as their individual faiths prompt them to different strategies of literary invention, these strategies are related because they grow out of a shared set of ontological assumptions. We will be dealing with writers who assume that the world as given is not the durable embodiment of divine understanding and that goodness and being do not coincide. These writers believe that being is mutable and that the nature of things is changeable; that structure, form, and kind are ontologically secondary, either emergent or arbitrarily willed. Structure, form, and kind are not in nature. Human constructions can become realities that rival nature, and what is only imagined can be true or become real. Because the will is free, these writers believe that variety and invention have no natural limit. These ontological beliefs pair with epistemological ones. Most basic is the assumption that divine and human knowledge are separated by an unbridgeable gulf. Human beings cannot know the nature of things; they can only construct it. Innate ideas and a priori knowledge do not exist. To gain knowledge, to make discoveries, humans depend on the observation of a mass of divergent particulars and on reflections about what they observe. Because the disorder of kinds had raised profound doubts about the reality of universals, essences, and hierarchies of being, the inquiry into newly untethered particulars could be animated by fresh hopes of discovery. Yet such inquiry could also exhaust and wear down the inquirer, who easily could come up empty from a sea of particulars, filled with a renewed sense of the sublime distance between human knowledge and divine creation, between the weakness of human cognition and an omnipotent God who had not made the world for human comprehension. For the writers I will be working with, the assertion of a creation without inherent or comprehensible order does not signal God’s withdrawal from the world. Rather, this assertion effects a repositioning of God, often undertaken with the goal of strengthening both the difference and the relationship of spirit and matter. Motivated in part by growing fears of heterodox thought,

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this repositioning respiritualizes the world not only because it expands divine sovereignty but also because it renders the particular resistant and mysterious. Having lost its place within larger explanatory structures or categories, the particular becomes the unmediated object of hopeful inquiry, but it also becomes the resistant object of astonished incomprehension that renews the wonder of creation. When they are part of this structure of religious feeling, empiricism and nominalism can become allies in the battle against the atheist approximation or even reduction of spirit to matter. Some of the writers I discuss deliberately used this structure of feeling to achieve certain ends—winning an argument, improving moral order, fanning a sense of utopian possibility. Some scholars may construe such deliberate use as a sign of insincerity, as an instrumentalizing of religion that points to secularization. But sincerity of belief cannot be disproven by showing that the arousal of religious feeling was useful. Without usefulness, indeed, religious feeling may never have entered the world. Swift’s example is instructive. Though his faith was not as steady as he wished it to be, he vigorously defended the Anglican Church, its traditions and doctrines. From a certain perspective, this might look like someone who is compensating or caught in some genuine tension. But I don’t think that’s accurate. Believing that all order and value are externally imposed, Swift could argue that pretending to a certain faith, observing its outward ceremonies even without any real conviction, not only was socially useful but could produce sincere religious feeling.47 Because it is neither firm nor irreversible, the distinction between sincere and insincere belief is a tricky criterion to use when approaching historical actors who could be both. I will focus instead on something that I am more confident in establishing: the way religious ideas function, and this includes the arousal of religious feeling.

IV I can now begin a more detailed, if still preliminary, description of a voluntarist aesthetic.48 Based on my discussion so far, we should expect that a voluntarist aesthetic will feature a theological sanction for the imagination of different modes of being. We can also expect that willful invention finds a theological warrant, and that its value derives from its ability to generate entities, scenes, or sequences that do not result from or exceed accepted realities

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and standards.49 As a result, the transfigurative function of literature is likely to be strengthened against its mimetic function.50 In a voluntarist aesthetic that takes cues from anti-atheist writings, literary effects that suggest irreducibility will be valuable because they dramatize infinite variety. Since so much of what so-called atheist writers argued was seen to hinge on the reduction of spirit to its opposite, and since the defense of the spiritual depended on the complex and even mysterious union of opposites, the deliberate staging of irreducibility could suggest realms of existence where divisions and distinctions are either simply abandoned or suspended in a state of proximity and fullness, a simultaneous sameness and difference. A voluntarist aesthetic will certainly view standards of beauty as arbitrary. It will likely feature modes of composition that defamiliarize given forms and indicate their constructedness and their contingency.51 Because it will promote the recognition that kinds and structures are ontologically secondary and imposed on a more fluid, energetic matter that may lead to alternate forms, decomposition will be an important strategy. I have already noted how central decomposition is to the account of invention I offer, but some more explanation will be useful. Decomposition’s most immediate literary association must be the tradition of satire, which crested in Britain between 1660 and 1740. Blanford Parker has emphasized how the destructive energies of satire helped clear a space for an “empirical poetic [that was] foreign to the Aristotelian-Platonic theories which dominated late-Medieval and Baroque culture.”52 In such a poetic, he notes, “even differences of kind begin to disappear.”53 Fredric Bogel has similarly shown that defamiliarization and disequilibrium were important satiric strategies that aimed to upset categorical distinctions and undercut “naturalized assumptions of social and cultural traditions.”54 Central aspects of satire in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries expressed and contributed to the disorder of kinds. Yet decomposition in this period is not only destructive. It has a constructive dimension, as Bogel notes, and this is even true for Swift, as we shall see in Chapter 5. Along with Defoe, Locke, and Blackmore, Swift is attracted to the formative potential of dissolution. These writers and others make forms by unsettling the order of kinds—by crossing, combining, collapsing, multiplying, and expanding different entities so that they leave behind their established place, purpose, and identity and can assume new relationships, different lives.55

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That decomposition could become constructive in this way owes much to the voluntarist assertion of a metaphysical gap between the human and the divine, between the mind and the ultimate structures of the world. This gap helped make apparent or asserted order doubtful and reveal it as the effect of merely human perceptions or desires. Trusting this theologically warranted gap, the practitioners of constructive decomposition want their listeners to perceive the world without the timeworn structures that human ingenuity layered on top of the world and render it familiar. They want them to sense the unexplored potential and richness of the world’s objects and relationships. To these practitioners, composing or decomposing is not the same as making or unmaking order. Their decompositions contrive varieties whose incomprehensibility is prized because it opens up the world beyond the established order and logic of kinds. The contents and forms of such varieties aim to move readers past the manifest toward an enlarged sense of possibility and transformation. Were he to read my description of constructive decomposition, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, would likely associate it with Epicurean thought, which advocated, as he noted, “the Birth of Order from Confusion.”56 Associating constructive decomposition with Epicureanism would not be wrong. Indeed, such contemporary observers as Ralph Cudworth, Leibniz, and, much more recently, Blumenberg associate voluntarist with Epicurean constructions of the world.57 This makes sense. Historians of seventeenthcentury science have taught us that Gassendi, Charleton, Boyle, Barrow, Newton, and others leaned on voluntarist theology, often to baptize Epicurean matter.58 The association makes sense in a more immediate way as well. The writings I examine in this book variously experiment with the form-giving potential of decomposition and could therefore be seen as exemplifying tenets of Epicurean philosophy, including its rejection of the dualism between order and disorder, form and deformity. But unlike Blumenberg, who accepts Leibniz’s equation between voluntarism and Epicureanism and declares that the voluntarist God is the superfluous God, I will respect the fact that the voluntarist denaturalization of values rests on the absolute sovereignty of God.59 For such a God inspires beliefs about creation and creativity that influence the voluntarist model of invention. And because such a God is infinitely superior to human beings, the imagination of different modes of being and alternate worlds gains spiritual and cognitive value. Without such a God, an aesthetic of infinite variety could not have flourished between 1688 and 1730.

Chapter 2

Glorious Arbitrariness Science, Religion, and the Imagination of Infinite Variety

In the late seventeenth century, English scientists and philosophers began to realize that the number and variety of species was significantly greater than even the best informed among them had guessed. For over a hundred years, reports about hitherto unknown plants and animals had been pouring into England, swelling the cata logue of living things. These foreign life-forms had exerted considerable fascination, and they had raised questions not only about the order of living things but the border between the fabulous and the real, romance and science. The real could look rather fabulous—like the rhinoceros, a first specimen of which arrived in sixteenth-century Spain, or the giraffe, whose curious shape and coat were sometimes seen to result from the sexual union of a camel and a panther.1 Scientists, philosophers, and theologians struggled to integrate these unfamiliar forms into taxonomies, chains of being, and divine plans.2 The rapidly expanding list of species from far-flung regions around the globe, meanwhile, was matched at home, where members and associates of the Royal Society had become curious about their more immediate neighborhoods and the species that could be found there. By the end of the seventeenth century, nature seemed increasingly not just various but infinitely various. The expanding awareness of natural variety, along with some of its disorienting effects, can be observed in several natural philosophers who were predisposed to believe that kinds could be sorted by essence and hierarchy. Their predisposition stemmed from the assumption that the created world

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reflected God’s perfections. As John Ray, one of the scientists who will interest me, put it, “the ever Blessed Deity” delights “in his own infinite Excellencies and Perfections, and the Manifestations and Effects of them, the Works of the Creation.”3 Such sentiments aligned goodness and being, but Ray and others were forced to acknowledge the challenges such alignment faced when variety became so complex that it was no longer so clear how it was also perfect and excellent. Ray was perhaps the most important English chronicler of natural kinds in the seventeenth century. After many years spent recording, collecting, and classifying, Ray could sound baffled when he contemplated the richness of natural forms. Investigating the varieties of butterflies in 1691, he was stunned to find “the number of such of these alone as breed in our Neighbourhood . . . to exceed the sum I last year assign’d to all England.”4 In 1704, Ray wrote to a correspondent about his attempt to cata logue different kinds of moths that he “should despair of coming to an end of them, much less of discovering the several changes they go through.”5 No man, he believed, shall “by his utmost Industry attain to the Knowledge of all the Species of Nature. Hitherto we have been so far from it, that in Vegetables, the number of those which have been discovered this last Age hath far exceeded that of all those which were known before.”6 The leaps in numbers and the chronology of discovery are dramatic. An internationally renowned scientist of his time, Ray estimates in 1690 that the total number of butterfly species in England is two hundred— only to realize one year later that a preliminary investigation around the Essex towns of Braintree and Notley alone yielded two hundred different species. Ray’s point about vegetables—that more species have been identified in the seventeenth century than in all of European history— speaks to a similar realization. In both cases, Ray’s observations document a dramatically increasing awareness of species variety along with the challenges it poses to the assumption of an order of kinds. No wonder Ray felt inclined to speculate that other planets are likely to “be furnish’d with as great variety of Corporeal Creatures, animate and inanimate, as the Earth is, and all as different in Nature as they are in Place from the Terrestrial, and from each other.”7 Ray’s palpable wonder that a truly infinite variety of being may characterize the cosmos might still harmonize with hopes for more limited and sortable varieties on earth, but such hopes would have to be pretty sturdy. Charles Preston, a Scottish botanist Ray admired, was also aware of the challenges facing taxonomy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. “I confess I judge it a very difficult Matter,” Preston wrote to Ray in

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1701, “to lay down such Principles of Method as will comprehend even the Species of Plants already known, and far less those that are yet undiscovered.” Establishing the “true and exact Character” of a plant is a difficult business, Preston explains, because plants change so much from one season to the next that he has to conduct repeated observations across the entire year before he can attempt to assign the individual plant to a class or subdivision. “I have found,” he concedes, “that after having viewed a Plant with all the Niceness and Exactness imaginable at one Season, yet on a second Review I have been oblig’d to alter my Thoughts.” And while the identity of plants available to one’s observation is difficult to establish with precision, botanists are challenged even more dramatically by the “many new Species [that] have been discover’d of late Years in East and West-Indies never known in the World before, and how many lie hid to this Day.”8 Preston and Ray are daunted by the magnitude and difficulty of their task. The hopes for an accurate taxonomy of natural kinds were additionally challenged by the scrutiny of ambiguous species that seemed to elude existing hierarchies. Edward Tyson, a colleague of Ray’s, was impressed by the “new Tracts, new Lands, new Seas” that are “daily found out” by “curious Adventurers and Saylers.”9 He placed his own pioneering science— comparative anatomy— alongside such discoveries. Tyson was drawn to animals that seemed to dwell on the borders between kinds. Like Ray, he dissected a porpoise (literally, a hog-fish) and was struck that, “on the outside, there is nothing more than a fish; if we look within, there is nothing less.”10 Tyson was one of the first scientists to dissect a “Pygmie” (a chimpanzee that he also called “Orang-Outang” and “Homo Sylvestris”).11 His work indicates the excitement and difficulties intermediate species raised for taxonomists who assumed that there is an order of kinds. For Tyson, intermediate kinds deserve special attention because they reveal a central aspect of nature, its “gradual formation of the different Species of Animals.” Nature, he explains, is “like a curious Artist [who] in designing the richest Tapistry, does not hastily pass from one extreme Colour to another; but curiously shadowing and intermixing the same, does give a greater Grace and Beauty to the whole.”12 Intermediate kinds are thus especially privileged examples of the chain of being, whose plenitude and gradualism express the divine perfection of creation. Even so, such kinds pose challenges. The transition between them, Tyson notes in the dedicatory epistle to his work on the chimpanzee, can be “so gradual, that there appears a very great Similitude, as well between the meanest Plant, and some Minerals; as between

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the lowest Rank of Men, and the highest kind of Animals.”13 Such similitude lures Tyson, but it also compels him to assert several times that his chimpanzee, despite resembling man more than any other animal, is a “meer Brute.”14 Such assertions come to a standstill when Tyson examines the chimpanzee’s brain. Since the “Brain is reputed the more immediate Seat of the Soul it self,” Tyson wrote, “one would be apt to think, that since there is so great a disparity between the Soul of a Man, and a Brute, the Organ likewise in which ’tis placed should be very different too. Yet by comparing the Brain of our Pygmie with that of a Man; and, with the greatest exactness, observing each Part in both; it was very surprising to me to find so great a resemblance of the one to the other, that nothing could be more. So that when I am describing the Brain of our Pygmie, you may justly suspect I am describing that of a Man.”15 While the difference between a man’s soul and a brute’s is profound, the resemblance between a man’s brain and a brute’s could not be greater. Describing the one is describing the other. This is also true, Tyson points out, for another organ that should reveal a basic difference between chimpanzees and humans: the vocal chords that allow humans to communicate through language. Here, too, the organs look identical. These close organic resemblances prompt Tyson to a theoretical reflection that seeks to secure the difference between man and animal. Agents and their actions, Tyson considers, are not determined by organs.16 “If all depended on the Organ, not only our Pygmie, but other Brutes likewise, would be too near akin to us.” Organs are merely organized matter; what actuates such matter has to be the distinguishing factor. If the difference between human and animal cannot be established anatomically because important organs look the same, Tyson speculates, the different purposes these organs serve must be prompted by different “Humours and Fluids” that can cause higher and lower functions in the same organ.17 This is a sobering moment for the project of comparative anatomy. By itself, this new science cannot establish the difference between crucial human and animal organs. The grace and beauty that Tyson had attributed to nature’s art of intermixing cannot be captured by a comparative anatomy that can only note unsettling resemblances. These realizations dampen Tyson’s belief in the chain of being, which he had confidently associated with the Platonic idea that God left traces in nature to help us find ourselves in the divine order.18 All we need to do to understand this order is to find ways to read the divine characters of nature. Science bears an affirmative aspect for Tyson: it promises to show man’s place in creation. But because his anatomy of intermediate species reveals uncertain borders

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between different beings, it cannot stabilize a graduated structure into which living things could be sorted. The chain of being and comparative anatomy are uneasy partners. This is underscored in moments when Tyson is so excited by the promise of his approach that he is willing to unsettle the chain of being even as he celebrates its Platonic foundations. “A Fly,” Tyson tells us, “sometimes hath given greater light towards the true knowledge of the structure and the uses of the Parts in Humane Bodies, than an often repeated dissection of the same might have done.”19 “We must not . . . think,” he continues, “the meanest of the Creation vile or useless, since that in them in lively Characters (if we can but read) we may find the knowledge of a Deity and our selves.”20 One of the lowest forms of life, the insect, helps us understand man, the highest form of life on earth. The vile contains knowledge about the noble. In such moments as these, Tyson’s comparative anatomy values the connectedness of all life so much that it compromises the chain of being’s gradual ascent from the lowest to the highest forms of life. Even as it ties creation together in one continuum, a gradual ascent also insulates the lowest from the highest. Yet Tyson emphasizes more immediate connections.21 In this way, his anatomy is more than just an uneasy partner of the chain of being. When the vile teaches us about the noble, the meaning of nature is not tied to the graduated structure of being. The most revealing meanings come, instead, from the collapse of the differences that articulate the structure. Tyson’s friend Richard Blackmore, who popu larized his work in the early eighteenth century, acknowledged that the case of the chimpanzee raised pressing questions about the borders between species. As he prepares for a discussion of Tyson’s chimpanzee, Blackmore remarks about different kinds of cats that the “intermediate Degrees of like Animals . . . suspend the Mind’s Determination” because they make it difficult “to tell if their Difference is essential.” Does the lion not have the same appearance and parts as the cat? “This seeming Indistinction and Confusion of Species,” Blackmore transitions, “is no where more remarkable than in the Ape,” whose numerous different kinds are “so like one another, and yet so different.” In an endlessly varied scale of being, likeness and difference have trouble establishing species membership. Blackmore notes that “the Disagreement between the basest Individuals of our Species and the Ape or Monkey” is so small that the faculty of speech alone would suffice to let the ape or monkey “as justly claim the Rank and Dignity of the Human Race, as the Salvage Hotentot, or stupid Native of Nova Zembla.” The comparison offends us, but it dramatizes

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the shortened distance between different beings in a period when the forms of life appeared increasingly infinite. No matter how much Blackmore and Tyson may want to emphasize an orderly chain of being, the expanding awareness of species variety renders “Difference . . . so nice, that the Limits and Boundaries of Species seem left unsettled by Nature, to perplex the Curious, and to humble the proud Philosopher.”22 For Blackmore, who inclines toward voluntarism, Tyson’s anatomy is interesting because it suspends the human desire for determination and raises questions about essences as a viable key to natural order. The anatomy of such intermediate kinds as ape and monkey and their innumerable cousins deepens the mystery of species: of their borders, their identities, their meaning. The interconnectedness of being exhibited by these animals is perplexing and suggests that even the extensive mediations of the chain of being may not be able to map natural forms accurately. The reliance on ascending structures to represent natural order is questioned when differences and borders become uncertain, a circumstance Blackmore, as we shall see in the next chapter, is more ready to accept than Tyson or Ray. Yet even Tyson hints that the chain of being alone may not suffice to capture nature’s order. At the same time that nature keeps “Harmony,” Tyson admits, it also takes “Liberty” in the formation of kinds.23 For a long time, Ray had been able to contemplate the infinite variety of species that seemed to populate the world with a belief that accurate numbers and taxonomic principles were reachable. He had been confident for a while that species were real and that they could be identified by the right selection of structural parts.24 But in the mid-1690s, Ray’s belief in his ability to determine species on the basis of such parts faltered. As Phillip Sloan and M. M. Slaughter have shown, the most likely reason for this crisis is Ray’s encounter with John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).25 Locke’s Essay had argued forcefully that we cannot know the essences of things and that our division of natural kinds does not correspond to anything real. Species, Locke claimed, are constructs of the human understanding. Our sorting of natural kinds may very well conceal a differently constituted natural order, with entirely different groupings and classifications of natural things. “I would fain know,” Locke demanded at one point of the Essay, “why a Shock [a poodle] and a Hound [a foxhound], are not as distinct Species, as a Spaniel and an Elephant.”26 Locke’s Essay fielded a considerable number of in-between creatures to upend the mind’s desire for determination, including changelings, mules,

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gimars, rat-cats, man-dogs, man-hogs, bird-fishes, porpoises, amphibious animals, animal-vegetables, and even, in more humorous moments, mermaids and parrots (parrots who speak Portuguese and guard chickens, to be precise).27 Locke assembles these borderline creatures to illustrate how “uncertain . . . the Boundaries of Species of Animals [are] to us.”28 Himself influenced by the increasing awareness of species variety, Locke uses these intermediary creatures to support his contention that the order of kinds tells us little about the real differences between natural things. The chain of being is a product of the human imagination, a way of making ourselves at home in the world, not more. After reckoning with Locke’s argument, Ray ceased to be a confirmed essentialist. In 1696 he conceded: “since the essences of things are unknown to us, certainly the essential generic characters could not be known to us.”29 All we possess for the classification of things, Ray realized with Locke, are lists of parts, properties, and qualities: accidents, not essences. If we make selections from any of these lists and claim that they identify a species, we are imposing an order, but we are not saying anything about the actual structures of nature. Whether structure was nature’s way, indeed, became a question for some. A review of Ray’s Historia Plantarum (1686) published and edited by John Dunton in 1692 suggested that nature may be simply too inventive to be captured by an essentializing taxonomy. Dunton’s reviewer concedes that Ray does not claim his taxonomic principles account for all species. But he stresses a point that rubs against the basic direction of Ray’s enterprise in the 1680s. “The prodigious variety of Nature and the inexhaustible Riches which it prostrates to our Eyes,” he notes, “can’t be comprehended in certain Limits. There are almost infinite Combinations betwixt the diverse proprieties of Plants which necessarily constitute Anomalies and Exceptions from those Rules which are given to distinguish the different sorts.”30 Dunton’s reviewer draws a tempting conclusion from the seventeenth-century explosion of kinds: perhaps our desire to determine and capture natural order by analytic reduction gets nature wrong. Perhaps nature does not follow a limited repertoire of rules or elements that we can identify and then deploy to order the variety of things. Perhaps nature’s variety is radically infinite. Coming from a rather different background than the Anglican Whig Dunton, the non-juring clergyman Thomas Baker also emphasized the inexhaustibility of nature in the 1690s. In his Reflections upon Learning (1699), Baker sought to stem the tide of Deism and latitudinarianism by rejoining knowledge and revelation. He praises the Royal Society but has little patience

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for “World-mongers” and criticizes, in particular, the growing popularity of physico-theology (Thomas Burnet and William Whiston are singled out for critique).31 Ray is not spared. Alluding to his Wisdom of God Manifested, Baker offers a critique of epistemological depth that matches, as we shall see, Jonathan Swift’s in A Tale of a Tub (1704).32 “A Philosophers business,” he wrote, “is to trace Nature in her inward Recesses and Latent motions, and how hid these are, is best known to those, who are most conversant in Philosophical Enquiries: Such men by looking deep into her, and observing her in all her windings and mazes, find matter enough for Wonder, and reason to adore the Wisdom of God, but at the same time only meet with mortification to their own Wisdom, and are forc’d to confess, that the ways of Nature like those of God, are past Man’s finding out.”33 Deep searches are a symptom of human vanity because they assume that our minds are attuned to the complexity of natural things. “Physical knowledge taking in the whole Compass of Nature,” Baker admonishes, “is too vast a subject to be comprehended by humane Mind.”34 Nature, he believes, “is an unexhaustible Mine, wherein we may always dig and yet never come at the bottom.”35 The human being who wants to conquer a bottomless nature is on a fool’s errand. There is no end to divine creation. While Dunton’s reviewer strikes an almost enthusiastic note about the “prodigious” variety of nature, Baker’s insistence that nature is inexhaustible is more soberly tied to the metaphysical gap between human and divine spheres. Yet the seemingly secular celebration of nature’s inexhaustibility in the former is still close to the substance of the latter’s deeply religious account of nature’s complexity. The argument for nature’s irreducibility and human incomprehension can thus issue from rather different points of view, one eyeing infinite variety as an alluring prospect, the other seeking to restrain human inquiry into the divine mystery of nature. Both testify to the growing sense in late seventeenth-century England that nature is too varied, too complex, to be comprehended by general laws or principles.

II Baker’s work allows us to see that the new science’s uncertainty about the ultimate principles that govern nature aided the defense of established religion. Baker used an analogy that helped those who were keen to defend mystery against rationalist inquirers. He asserted that God’s ways were like

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nature’s because they could not be found out by merely human means. From assertions like this emerged a formula, popular with other defenders of the established faith (including Swift), which suggested that nature was as mysterious as mystery was real. The defense of the trinity, in particular, benefited from this renewed impression of nature’s incomprehensibility.36 New science and established religion found ways to go hand in hand. The uncertainties of new scientists about essences and a legible order of kinds were also useful to apologists who were in a more combative mood. These uncertainties were enlisted in the attack on new religious kinds. Several writers argued that the new religious kinds that seemingly sprung up everywhere simply were not real. They were accidental and unsustainable formations that acquired definition and power only because they cultivated a delusional certainty about the true nature of things. For such thinkers as Montaigne, Hobbes, and Swift, at the bottom of religious heterodoxy lay an enthusiastic essentialism that was at least as threatening to the establishment as atheism. With the new science increasingly uncertain about the knowability or reality of natural kinds, the fervent certainty of new religious kinds could be painted as vain and irrational, their claims to the status of a legitimate kind undercut. By the late seventeenth century, defenders of the established faith could point to the seemingly infinite variety of religious kinds and suggest that no genuine substance attached to them. Their multiplicity, like the multiplicity of natural kinds, raised questions about their identity and their place in the world. As these examples indicate, the defenders of the religious status quo found various uses for the new scientific uncertainty. Often, these defenders chose to ignore the exciting possibilities that might slumber in a newly strange and infinitely complex natural order. But even when they did so, they frequently conceded the infinite variety of the world, the plasticity of being. And some of them went further. They defended the established faith but attached utopian possibilities to anti-essentialism and incomprehension, as we shall learn. The use of uncertainty and infinite variety against those who challenged the religious establishment predates the late seventeenth century. The Anglican apologists of this period were able to draw on the resources of a skeptical tradition whose revival in the sixteenth century was itself implicated in the fight against increasingly assertive unorthodox religious groups. Montaigne, one of the most influential adopters of ancient skepticism, had shown how Pyrrhonism could guard against religious innovation. To Montaigne, the

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trouble raised by the “sects and schisms” that crisscrossed the religious landscape of sixteenth-century Europe echoed the more general epistemological and ontological disorientation caused by the discovery of the new world and the rediscovery of the great variety of ancient philosophical systems.37 The extraordinary diversity of life brought home by reports about foreign lands, the growth of religious diversity, and the multiplication of philosophical opinions seemed to relativize every thing. What could we really be certain of? The confidence that characterized the truth claims of those who sought to topple established dogma, in philosophy and in religion, was not earned but symptomatic, Montaigne thought. “To be convinced of certainty,” he quipped, “is certain evidence of madness” (607). Montaigne developed his critique of certainty by noting that “things do not lodge in us with their form and their essence; they do not come in by the force of their own authority: . . . if they did, we would all react to them in the same way: wine would taste the same in the mouth of a sick man and a healthy one” (633–634). All seeming certainty had to be chastened by the reminder of human weakness, by the idea that man is naked, empty, and endlessly changeable. Certainty is out of human reach, a belief that translated for Montaigne into respect for established custom and rejection of “the vain and irreligious opinions introduced by erroneous sects” (564).38 The vanity of certainty is for Montaigne connected to the claim of human participation in divine knowledge. He rejects this claim. His defense of established religion dramatizes instead our difference from the divine: “God is a cause completely above the order of Nature. His mode of being is too high, too distant, too magisterial to allow our logical conclusions to judge or to bind him” (595). Human knowledge about the divine order is fragmentary at best. Any assertion of certainty in this realm is hubristic, an easily ridiculous attempt to “make God subordinate to our human understanding with its vain and feeble probabilities” (585). Montaigne is exasperated by such arrogant pretension: “What! Has God placed in our hands the keys to the ultimate principles of his power? Did he bind himself not to venture beyond the limits of human knowledge? Even if we admit, O Man, that you have managed to observe some traces of his acts here in this world, do you think he has used up all his power by filling that work with every conceivable Form and Idea?” (585). Against such Platonic assumptions about the fullness and comprehensibility of creation, Montaigne asserts, in recognizable voluntarist fashion, incomprehensibility and infinite variety. He accepts the ancient arguments for the plurality of worlds and suggests that “the laws which apply to this

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world” do not apply to others, which most likely “present different features and be differently governed” (587). This seems only probable, he adds, because “even within our own world we can see how mere distance produces infinite differences and variety” (587). And if this is true in the natural world, it is even more dramatically true for human culture. “Nothing in all the world has greater variety than law and custom,” Montaigne wrote. “What is abominable in one place is laudable somewhere else. . . . Marriages between close relations are capital offences with us: elsewhere they are much honoured. . . . Murdering children, murdering fathers, holding wives in common, making a business out of robbery, giving free rein to lusts of all sorts—in short there is nothing so extreme that it has not been admitted by the custom of some nation or other” (654–655). The infinite variety of human forms is bottomless. We can see Montaigne making a bet here: the further you push the portrait of infinite variety, he wagers, the more you immerse the listener in the range of human possibility and the more plausible and urgent becomes the call to stick with what we have. Heightening the awareness of human plasticity is dialectically tied to accepting its historically congealed forms. In using ethnographic evidence to demonstrate such plasticity, Montaigne features a strategy that Pufendorf echoed and that Locke adopted in his chapter against innate ideas.39 Despite Montaigne’s and Locke’s different political and religious orientations, both rely on a metaphysical gap between the human and the divine.40 Leaning on this gap, they mobilize the incomprehensible variety of being and raise doubts about essences and natural hierarchies. Order does not inhere in nature or society. Yet Montaigne calls for the acceptance of traditional forms and Locke pleads for the legitimacy of new forms. That such conservative and prospective impulses can issue from within voluntarist and skeptical modes of thought can be observed further in two thinkers who are closer to the primary time period of my study. Samuel Parker and Joseph Glanvill worry about false certainties and the proliferation of sects. They push back by utilizing anti-essentialist arguments that they see reinforced by the uncertainties of the new science.41 Glanvill is especially important because he lets us clearly see the utopian aspect of this pushback. In A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie (1666), Parker bases his defense of the established order on a critique of fanatic certainty, which he sees as the main engine of religious diversity. Platonism is a vehicle of fanaticism in England, he suggests. Platonic thinkers are engaged in a vain

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pursuit of “a certain knowledge of the Natures of the things themselves,” and such a pursuit presupposes human participation in divine knowledge.42 Platonists presume, he sarcastically notes, “that God has hang’d a multitude of these little Pictures of himself and all his Creatures in every mans understanding, that by attending to them, he might direct himself in his Conceptions and Notions of the things themselves” (54). This assumption rejects all knowledge of the senses as “too gross and material” and issues in a vain pursuit of “abstracted Essences” (59). Platonists are on a path of purification. They take it upon themselves “exactly to describe the meer Essences of all sorts of Beings” (59) and to “resolve all Beings into their simple and unmixt Ingredients, and then attempt to assigne their precise notions and differences from each other” (60). Such a program leads to pride and vanity because true knowledge about the world issues from the patterns in the mind. Enthusiasm attends insight in Platonism because discovery is finally always a recovery of the resemblance between the divine and the human. And because resemblance is central to such cognition, metaphor and allegory are for Parker the figures that best describe the procedures of Platonic knowledge. Against such a model, Parker flatly asserts that “it was never intended that meer Essences should be the Objects of our Faculties,” which the divine maker suited only to the observation of accidents (64). This leads Parker to praise the new science, which relies on experiment and the evidence of the senses and thus accepts uncertainty and doubt, promising truer knowledge in the long run (45). When Parker criticizes the spagyric chemists for their belief that fire can reveal the ultimate ingredients of all substances (71), he joins Robert Boyle, who had criticized such faith in reduction in The Sceptical Chymist (1661). For Parker, reduction is suspicious because it assumes that human standards and procedures can uncover the ultimate principles of divine order. Elsewhere, he bristles at the restrictions Platonism places on divine power. Echoing a central voluntarist preoccupation, he fights against even the slightest suggestion that God is governed by necessity, even if that necessity is the necessity of goodness, of always doing that which is best.43 “The Beings and Subsistencies of all things are entirely at his disposal,” Parker emphasized regarding God’s willful freedom. “It was at his choice, whether he would ever or never create any thing; and it is still in his Power either to continue the frame of things in the same state that they are in, or to erect a new one, and that better or worse than the present.”44 Platonism and its sectarian adapters denied such voluntarist freedom. For Parker, man is not at

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home in the world. He is not a privileged being that participates in divine knowledge and is therefore incapable of recognizing himself in the world. Parker reinforces established faith by exhibiting uncertainty about the ultimate order of creation and our place in it, and he finds a strong ally in empiricist science. Like Montaigne, Parker thus defends the established order by an antiessentialist argument that strengthens epistemological and ontological precariousness. While such precariousness does not lead him to celebrate possibility and infinite variety (something that Montaigne glances at occasionally), other writers adopted a similar stance to precisely this end. Though Glanvill was closer to the Neoplatonist Henry More (who may well be one of Parker’s targets), his The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) also turns on the contrast between the “immodest obstinacy of opinions [that] hath made the world a Babel” and “the miserable scantness of our capacities.”45 Yet Glanvill’s skepticism was prospective and hopes to make our “short-sighted mortality” (193) the foundation of what he describes as a judicious credulity that would widen the circle of belief and possibility.46 More decisively than Parker, Glanvill opens up the order of being beyond established parameters. The gap between divine creation and human knowledge endows science with its empirical program, but for Glanvill this program has the potential to reenchant the world. The world is a complex place for Glanvill, who calls it “a mass of heterogeneous subsistencies” (192). Judging by visible appearances alone, he believes, is misleading: not only essences but causality itself is not accessible to human faculties. Anticipating Hume, Glanvill argues that the impression of causal connection is, more often than not, the result of “concomitancy”—the repeatedly observed coincidence of a certain action with a certain effect (190). We infer causal connection, but we cannot see it. Because “all things are mixed, and Causes blended by mutual involutions” (192), human knowledge confronts discouraging limits. To “profound to the bottom of these diversities, to assign each cause its distinct effects, and to limit them by their just and true proportions” (192) is the commendable goal of science, but the full realization of such knowledge may well be out of human reach. Further impeding the quest for certain knowledge is the fact that human beings themselves are marked by an irreducible variety. “Since so many various circumstances concurre to every individual constitution, and every mans senses, differing as much from others in its figure, colour, site, and infinite other particularities in the Organization, as any one mans can from itself, through divers accidental variations: it cannot well be suppos’d other wise, but that the conceptions

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convey’d by them must be as diverse” (220). Human beings are plastic creatures. As with Montaigne, custom is at least as powerful as nature: “there is nothing so monstrous, to which education cannot form our ductile minority; it can lick us into shapes beyond the monstrosities of those of Affrica. . . . education is our Plastick” (128). The world is not just metaphorically infinitely various. If Glanvill can occasionally sound as if the new science has to lose hope in the encounter with a world of infinite particularity, the diversity and complexity of such a world are at the same time the source of tremendous hopes. Glanvill fervently believes in empirical science’s potential for discovery. “Should those Heroes go on,” he writes about the scientists of his time, they will “fill the world with wonders. And I doubt not but posterity will find many things, that are now but Rumors, verified into practical Realities” (181). A voyage to the moon, he suggests, will in the future “not be more strange then one to America” (182). Soon, he adds, “it may be as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly into remotest Regions; as now a pair of Boots to ride a Journey” (182). If Glanvill cultivates a sublime sense of distance between the irreducible complexity of creation and a flawed human reason, he also turns this gap into a space of boundless possibility that empiricist science might access, making the now marvelous common in the future. Unsurprisingly, Baker ridiculed these fanciful flights.47 Glanvill’s belief in such futuristic prospects depends on the extent to which the difference between the divine and the human shakes the idea that the manifest appearances of the world delineate the scope of possibility. Again emphasizing the limits of the human intellect, Glanvill counsels us not to trust the appearance of finitude. “Can nothing be other wise,” he demands, “which we conceive impossible, to be so? Is our knowledge, and things, so adequately commensurate, as to justify the affirming, that that cannot be, which we comprehend not?” (193). “We may affirm,” he goes on, “things are thus and thus, according to the Principles we have espoused: But we strangely forget our selves, when we plead a necessity of their being so in Nature, and an Impossibility of their being other wise” (195). Glanville argues—no doubt with atheist challenges in mind—that natural necessity is a very human idea. Its flaw is the assumption that our minds are commensurate to an infinitely various world created by an omnipotent maker. This assumption has no place in Glanvill’s theology, which instead prioritizes incomprehension and imagination as appropriate human responses to an irreducibly various world. The assertion that natural necessity explains being is wrong because it makes

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merely human, ultimate knowledge. Instead of assuming that our faculties fit the structures of the world, Glanvill argues that their misfit should help us realize that every thing could be completely different. The world is much richer in possibility than our minds are. For human beings who are thrown into a contingent world of puzzling particulars, the embrace of infinite variety and possibility is the appropriate response. Against the “immodest obstinacy in opinions” (229), Glanvill recommends uncertainty, imagination, and empiricism.

III We can now begin to see how the new scientific doubt about nature’s ultimate order and, in particular, essences and kinds helped Anglican apologists undermine the tendency of religious and philosophical sects to assume that the human mind can grasp the ultimate structures and principles of the world. Where these sects presumed a fit between mind and world, such Anglicans as Parker and Glanvill asserted a gap. In the first half of the seventeenth century, as Peter Harrison has shown, scientists and clergymen often argued that this gap between human and divine knowledge was an inheritance of the fall that could be mended. The fall, this argument went, had deprived Adam of his superior cognitive and perceptive abilities. The task of contemporary scientists was to restore Adam’s powers, including his ability to grasp the essences of things. Glanvill himself, as Harrison notes, had invoked this narrative.48 But such enthusiastic projects lost traction after the restoration. The hopes for closing the gap began to sound too millenarian in a changed cultural environment, in which many were deeply concerned about the mushrooming of new religious sects. Glanvill, indeed, appears to acknowledge this changed environment with the much more restrained version of Vanity of Dogmatizing he published in the 1670s (alongside a detailed critique of sectarian extremism).49 While he adjusted his early hopes for Adamic restoration, it is clear that such hopes were not the only utopian aspect of Glanvill’s theology. Just as important was that the gulf between divine and human realms authorized a more judicious credulity, a radicalization of difference, and an expansion of the realm of possibility. Glanvill drew on skeptical and voluntarist motifs to enlist incomprehension and imagination as aids in revealing an infinitely various world whose plasticity had been obscured by human projections.

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The gap between divine and human knowledge was widened by apologetic writers in the late seventeenth century because of increasing fears of atheism, which had found a foothold in the “elite secularity” that sprung up during the restoration in reaction to the enthusiastic certainty of the sects.50 The gap had found influential articulation in the voluntarist belief that the divine will was radically free, that the created order was finally arbitrary and contingent, and that its fundamentals could not be comprehended by human minds. In the context of growing anxieties about atheist and materialist arguments for the necessity of the world’s structures, the voluntarist stress on freedom and arbitrariness became an attractive tool. We can see this in some of the Boyle lectures, which resisted the atheist tendencies of heterodox thought by renewing a sense of the world’s contingency and arbitrariness, by radicalizing difference and expanding possibility. Endowed by Robert Boyle to be given after his death in 1691, these lectures helped tighten the alliance between Anglican apologists and new scientists.51 I will take a close look at two of the most influential Boyle lectures, Richard Bentley’s and Samuel Clarke’s, given in 1693 and 1704, respectively.52 In preparing his lectures, Bentley corresponded with Newton, whose voluntarist theology would irk Leibniz so much that he attacked Newton publicly.53 Clarke stepped in to defend Newton, and I will discuss his famous exchange with Leibniz to articulate the cognitive value of the imagination in voluntarism. But I first wish to focus on Bentley’s and Clarke’s remarkable lectures. Like Ray’s Wisdom of God Manifested, they belong to the tradition of physicotheology, which sought to combine theology and natural philosophy to argue that the intelligent design of the world indicated an omnipotent divine creator. Physico-theology became increasingly popular from the 1670s onward. Jonathan Israel has called it “the strongest single intellectual pillar buttressing the moderate mainstream Enlightenment” against such radicals as Spinoza.54 Unfortunately, Israel does not mention the voluntarist tendencies of some of these arguments, which not only distinguish them from Ray’s book but also overcome a weakness of the design argument that made it susceptible to accusations of atheism. As Israel points out, the argument from design, because it assumed that divine order inhered in nature, could be conflated with “Spinoza’s unalterable laws of Nature ensuing from motion innate in matter.”55 Voluntarist theology, by insisting on an arbitrary creation, resists such conflation. Anglican apologists used voluntarist beliefs because they so decisively undid Spinoza’s equation of the actual and the possible. In doing

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so, these apologists integrated the imagination of alternate modes of being into the structure of belief. As it lines up against the radical enlightenment (to stay with Israel’s terms), the moderate enlightenment expands the sphere of possibility and promotes the imagination of other worlds and beings. Bentley and Clarke were very interested in rebutting what they deemed the atheist assertions that the world’s structures were either necessary, eternal, or fortuitous. To do so effectively, they relied on the voluntarist idea that, even though there is design visible in nature, the order of creation is ultimately arbitrary and imperfect and requires the continued involvement of God. As James Force has shown, this argument belongs to an apologetic tradition that involves the Royal Society from its foundation.56 Such Newtonians as Bentley, Clarke, and Whiston shirk exclusive reliance on the design argument because it could fatten atheist currents by portraying divine order as inherent in nature, settled and removed from God’s will and involvement. They contend that God’s preservation of the world is a continued creation. When general and special providence, natural and supernatural, first and second causes are not fully separable, God cannot be depicted as stepping back after the seven busy days of creating the world. This way of thinking relies on the dynamic relation of relative stability (ensured by God’s covenant with humans) and absolute instability (indicated by God’s willful sovereignty). This relation is not easy to manage, and the writers I will discuss are, on occasion, ready to let go of such management by playing up one side at the expense of the other. The most powerful angle against the atheist challenge, however, was found on the side that inflated the freedom and power of the divine sovereign. It was such inflation that authorized the portrait of an imperfect, contingent, and arbitrary world and rendered useful the imagination of different kinds and modes of being. The design argument is prominent in Bentley’s lectures, which are, on the whole, less strongly marked by voluntarism than Clarke’s. But Bentley uses this argument in a way that still reveals the contingent and arbitrary nature of the world. For example, when countering the atheist charge that human imperfections show that we were not created by an all-powerful maker, Bentley justifies these flaws as useful parts in a wise overall design. Bentley is interested in justifying our limits, but he does so by imagining what would happen if we went beyond them. In the following, he thinks about superhuman eyesight: “If the Eye were so acute, as to rival the finest Microscopes, and to discern the smallest Hair upon the leg of a Gnat, it would be a curse and not a blessing to us; it would make all things appear rugged and deformed;

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the most finely polish’d Chrystal would be uneven and rough: The sight of our own selves would affright us: The smoothest Skin would be beset all over with ragged Scales and bristly Hairs. And beside, we would not see at one view above what is now the space of an Inch, and it would take a considerable time to survey the then mountainous bulk of our own Bodies.”57 For a literary historian, the most striking feature of this passage is, of course, the extent to which it anticipates Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). I will discuss Swift’s remarkable narrative in a subsequent chapter, but it is worth mentioning here the possibility that Swift drew on anti-atheist writings to generate the organizing conceit of Gulliver’s Travels. Bentley’s detailed description of the grotesque perceptual reality that would result if our organs of sight were altered wants to demonstrate that our biological makeup suits the purpose of our lives. Bentley’s literary effort—the inventive display of a world beheld through microscopic eyes— suggests that he trusts his demonstration will be persuasive if he is able to bring his audience to imagine what it would really mean to perceive the world through different organs: a frightening reality would emerge. But as we imagine the transformation of the smooth into the rugged, the formed into the deformed, the even into the uneven, we also begin to experience the world on different terms. The justification of our limits leans on their imaginative transgression, on getting closer to experiencing a different mode of being. That mode produces repugnant realities and makes us see our own bodies as enormous heaps of flesh. But even if we turned away in disgust from such a vision, Bentley still lures us into a different way of being in the world. Though microscopic eyes are a poor fit for our purpose in this world, Bentley’s conceit has a less than straightforward effect because it wants to affirm the structures of the world by prompting us to imagine different ones. Bentley banks on the revulsion that the deformed human body is supposed to arouse, but his ontology renders such reliance problematic. When Bentley addresses beauty in a more general vein, he contends, in voluntarist fashion, that there is no natural distinction between the formed and the deformed (a position Ray had rejected).58 “There is no Universal Reason,” he argues, “that a Figure by us called Regular, which hath equal Sides and Angles, is absolutely more beautifull than any irregular one. All Pulchritude is relative.”59 Nothing that exists is necessarily or naturally beautiful; every thing is contingently so. “Deformity is in our Imaginations only, and not really in the Things themselves.”60 Deformity and disgust have no objective basis, a theme also rehearsed in Gulliver’s Travels.

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Relativizing beauty in this way complicates other moments in the lectures when Bentley provides vivid descriptions of different modes of being. For instance, Bentley’s parade of the deformed beings that would have resulted if life on earth had been created by the fortuitous collision of atoms (another atheist belief) has ambiguous results. Bentley’s impulse is again to paint repugnant realities in vivid detail. If the atomists are right, he contends, the bodies of human beings ought to be more various, exhibit more signs of their accidental formation. “We should now have some Nations without Nails upon their Fingers,” he notes, “others with one Eye only, as the Poets describe the Cyclops in Sicily, and the Arimaspi in Scythia; others with one Ear, or one Nostril, or indeed without any Organ of Smelling, because that Sense is not necessary to Man’s subsistence; others destitute of the use of Language, seeing that Mutes also may live: one People would have the Feet of Goats, as the feigned Satyrs and Panisci, another would resemble the Head of Jupiter Ammon, or the horned Statues of Bacchus: the Sciapodes, and Enotocitae and other monstrous Nations would be no longer Fables, but real instances in Nature.”61 Even as he belittles the authorities he invokes, Bentley’s scholarly relish in presenting various deformed beings is palpable. The laughter he aims for is muted, however, when we consider his belief that our distinctions between form and deformity are arbitrary. Bentley’s insistence that these beings are feigned and fabulous seeks to ridicule theories of an accidental origin of life. Yet these varieties are displayed generously. In fact, Bentley cannot quite dismiss truly infinite variety as fictional. This becomes clear when he offers a joke that sounds slightly nervous in the context of the increased scientific awareness of natural variation. We may still “make new Discoveries in Terra Incognita,” he suggests, and find some of the creatures that are merely “fancies and whimsies of Poets and Painters and Aegyptian Idolaters.”62 Bentley’s deformed beings are meant to serve as a counterfactual that reassures us, by way of contrast, that the world is a purposeful, well-designed place in which things fit together and make a coherent whole. And yet our distinctions between the well-formed and the deformed are arbitrary. The counterfactual may perhaps still turn out to be factual. The tensions I have highlighted in Bentley’s counterfactual conceits are likely a result of the complicated relationship between the two interdependent levels of a voluntarist theology: God is an all-powerful, arbitrary maker whose creative act is not determined by law or principle, and he is, at the same time, a creator who reassures us that his less than perfect creation will

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operate with some regularity and at least appear harmonious and full. It is the first God that stands behind Bentley’s joke and his assertion about beauty. It is the second God that lets Bentley mobilize the resources of the design argument. Bentley often leans on this second God, yet his lectures nonetheless rely on three central voluntarist motifs: they reject that humans have an innate idea of God, criticize our anthropocentrism, and argue that the order of the world is finally contingent and arbitrary.63 Bentley repeatedly emphasizes the world’s “present frame and constitution,” its “present Plants and Animals,” and its “arbitrary institution” by God.64 He thus reminds his listeners that the manifest order is not necessary or eternal but preliminary, imperfect, and subject to change. Other configurations of being would have been possible, have been realized elsewhere, and could happen here as a result of God’s will. Intended to prop up the design side of his argument, Bentley’s descriptions of different modes and kinds of being can be as indulgent as they are, I suggest, because his voluntarism relativizes that argument. Bentley’s justification of apparent order can so freely imagine its violation because such an imagination is native to voluntarist theology. Imagining different worlds and beings is helpful in voluntarism because it readily illustrates the arbitrariness and freedom of divine power. If we moved Bentley’s deformed beings from the secondary to the primary level of voluntarism—where an arbitrary God is absolutely sovereign—they could not contradict the divine will. Nor would there be a need to invoke the beautiful whole to redeem the deformed parts, a frequent recourse of the design argument. Bentley appeals to what seems natural and human, but that appeal is qualified because there are, ultimately, no universal natural and human standards. Nothing, in the end, is natural in an arbitrary creation. This assertion moves into focus when Bentley investigates the problem of intelligent life on other planets. Like Montaigne, he resists the anthropocentric notion that intelligent life on other planets would have to be related to human beings and their fate. Humanity is not the measure of the universe and God “may have made innumerable Orders and Classes of Rational Minds; some higher in natural perfections, others inferior to Human Souls.”65 Such variation, Bentley continues, creates “different Species,” and he then proceeds to imagine how this might happen. Pointing to God’s arbitrary construction of humankind (a point Clarke would rehearse at some length),66 he argues that there is nothing natural or necessary about the way we are put together and function:

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There is no reason nor foundation in the separate natures of [matter and spirit], why any Motion in the Body should produce any Sensation at all in the Soul; or why This motion should produce That particular Sensation, rather than any other. God therefore may have join’d Immaterial Souls, even of the same Class and Capacities in their separate State, to other kinds of Bodies and in other Laws of Union; and from those different Laws of Union there will arise quite different affections and natures and species of the compound Beings. So that we ought not upon any account to conclude, that if there be Rational Inhabitants in the Moon or Mars or any unknown Planets of other Systems, they must therefore have Human Nature, or be involved in the Circumstances of Our World.67 The human is confronted with its disconnection from the rest of the universe. It is only one among many other “Reasonable Animals” and has to recognize its marginality.68 Though clad in theoretical garb, Bentley’s speculation that the same kind of soul may be joined to different bodies raises the more colorful possibility of the rational parrot that Locke invoked. In a contingent world made by “the inexhausted fecundity of [God’s] creative Power,” our definitions of species cannot operate by reduction, by stripping away accidents to arrive at an essence.69 Non-human beings may possess reason (and Bentley is not thinking about God or angels here).70 “What is a Man?” Bentley asks at one point, addressing the question of species definition head-on. His answer reflects the more detailed and potentially open-ended list of qualities and properties that define the human species when we are no longer so sure about our essential difference, our place in the hierarchy of being, and face an incomprehensible, infinitely diverse universe. A human being, Bentley explains, is “not a Reasonable Animal merely, for that is not an adequate and distinguishing Definition; but a Rational Mind of such particular Faculties, united to an organical Body of such a certain Structure and Form, in such peculiar Laws of Connexion between the Operations and Affections of the Mind and the Motions of the Body.”71 The conceptual pressure on the idea of species is palpable. In a world that seems increasingly to bear out the endless malleability of natural forms, in a theological context that ultimately privileges arbitrariness and contingency over design, species distinctions cannot be secured by essentializing reductions. If we carefully articulated all the factors Bentley mentions—the faculties, structures, forms, and connections between mind and body—we would come up

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with a very long list. We would probably fall, in other words, from determination into uncertainty and perhaps infinity and wonder. Bentley’s lectures belong to a tradition of apologetic writing that wants to keep alive the idea that God’s influence on the world issues from somewhere above the world. As they watched atheists reduce divine power by posing a worldly order that managed without the guiding influence of God because it was either eternal, necessary, or fortuitous, such writers as Bentley came to realize that the strongest argument against atheism hinged on the demonstration that God had been utterly free in his act of creation. What we are contemplating when we look at the world is merely the present order of things—preliminary, imperfect, and revisable. At its highest, God’s power could freely realize all kinds of worlds and beings. Its seeming harmony and order notwithstanding, our world is not eternal or necessary. It was created at one point in complete freedom, and God had unlimited options in designing and adapting the things of this and other worlds. Lining up against those who attempted to limit God’s sovereignty by naturalizing order, Bentley and others realized that the argument that most effectively fought these attempts had to prioritize God’s freedom of will and thus entertain the ultimate arbitrariness and contingency of the world’s structures. Order was not natural. It was imposed and maintained by the divine being. Clarke certainly realized this. His Boyle lectures offer an especially vivid example of how arbitrariness was used to rebut necessity. I quote at some length from a passage that refutes Spinoza’s argument that “every particular thing in the World is by an absolute Necessity”:72 All Things in the World appear plainly to be the most Arbitrary that can be imagined; and to be wholly the Effects, not of Necessity, but of Wisdom and Choice. . . . Motion it self, and all its Quantities and Directions, with the Laws of Gravitation, are intirely Arbitrary; and might possibly have been altogether different from what they now are. The Number and Motion of the Heavenly Bodies, have no manner of Necessity in the Nature of the Things themselves. The number of the Planets might have been greater or less: Their Motions upon their own Axes, might have been in any proportion swifter or slower than it now is. . . . There is not the least appearance of Necessity, but that all these things might possibly have been infinitely varied from their present Constitution; and (as the late improvements in Astronomy discover) they are actually liable to very great Changes.

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Every thing upon Earth, is still more evidently arbitrary; and plainly the Product, not of Necessity, but Will. What absolute Necessity, for just such a Number of Species of Animals or Plants? . . . In all the greater Species of Animals, Where was the Necessity for that conformity we observe in the Number and Likeness of all their Principal Members? and how would it have been a Contradiction, to suppose any or all of them varied from what they now are? . . . How could it have been a Contradiction for a whole Species of Horses or Oxen, to have subsisted with Six Legs or Four Eyes?73 Such questions point to contradictions only, Clarke argues, in the book of natural necessity. In the book of divine liberty, horses could have easily had six legs or four different ones. Clarke aims to move his audience with a sense of God’s power, freedom, and creativity. He brings God’s incomprehensible, willful majesty a little closer to finite beings by telling them that nothing in the world has to be the way it is. The more he expands on his point that the natural order is arbitrary and changeable, the more he can move his audience toward realizing divine sovereignty. As he spurs the imagination of different planetary speeds and species, the manifest structures of the world recede and lose the appearance of being natural or necessary. The idea of an infinitely powerful God rises. Characteristically, Clarke’s embrace of an arbitrary universe in these lines is interrupted by the appearance of a qualified necessity. He calls it a “Necessity . . . of Fitness,” by which he means “that things could not have been Other wise than they are, without diminishing the Beauty, Order, and well Being of the Whole.”74 This tension between the arbitrary and the necessary, we now know, is not unusual in voluntarist thought. In fact, the tensions become even more extreme in later sections of Clarke’s text, where God’s absolute freedom is at one point presented as seeming like “the Necessity of Fate.”75 Clarke’s moral theory, as J. B. Schneewind has shown, seeks a similarly complicated reconciliation between individual freedom and moral obligation.76 Yet in the fight against atheism, relative necessity is not very effective. Clarke’s expansive speculations on varying planetary speeds and foureyed horses, on the other hand, are powerful. They clearly defy Spinoza’s necessity by loosening the normative grip of the actual. Such a strategy is not without risks. When Clarke imagines its potential effects, God’s absolute freedom in creation cannot be sharply distinguished from natural contingency and fortuitousness—from the effects, that is, of a

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free congress of atoms that arbitrarily composes the things of this world. The new species Clarke paints, indeed, are not far removed from the one-eyed, oneeared creatures Bentley conjured to discount the atheist account of creation. The force of Clarke’s stress on arbitrariness would commit him, I presume, to describe the satyr (if it were real) or the hog-fish as exceptionally convincing demonstrations of God’s freedom, and even more so if only a few specimens existed in one corner of the world. The Neoplatonist Ralph Cudworth clearly saw this consequence of voluntarist theology and accused its proponents of implanting in God atheist “Fortuitiveness and Contingency.”77 An even more compelling illustration of how voluntarism authorizes the imagination of possibilities beyond the manifest is Clarke’s classic exchange with Leibniz. It is well-known that the debate erupted when Leibniz challenged Newton’s belief in the impermanence and imperfection of the laws of nature. Newton thought that this circumstance required God to intervene in the world to make adjustments and repairs. To Leibniz, such a view seemed to derogate from God’s perfection. God’s creation, he argued, was surely the product of a superior artist and not of a bungling watchmaker. It required no tinkering. God had created the best of all possible worlds, and that is why such a piece of artistry possessed superior endurance and stability. God’s actions, Leibniz explained, had been guided by the principle of sufficient reason, which stipulated that everything that exists has a reason why it exists. Such reason becomes evident when we assume that an all-powerful being would naturally create the best of all possible worlds. “God does nothing which is not orderly,” Leibniz wrote, “what passes for extraordinary is extraordinary only with some particular order established among creatures; for every thing is in conformity with respect to the universal order. This is true to such an extent that not only does nothing completely irregular occur in the world, but we would not even be able to imagine such a thing.”78 “I lay it down as a Principle,” Leibniz asserts, “that every Perfection, which God could impart to things without derogating from their other Perfections, has actually been imparted to them.”79 To Clarke, who came to Newton’s defense, Leibniz’s criterion of sufficient reason looked like God’s power was constrained by some external principle. Leibniz attributed a kind of necessity to God’s act of creation.80 Though he was intrigued by Spinoza’s system earlier in his life, Leibniz’s necessity was not Spinoza’s, which simply equated the actual and the possible.81 Still, Leibniz’s God was constrained to create the best possible world. Clarke rejected this idea and had no doubt that the current order of things

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was preliminary and bound to deteriorate. “The present Frame of the Solar System . . . according to the present Laws of Motion, will in time fall into Confusion; and perhaps, after That, will be amended or put into a new Form.”82 No special excellence characterized the current system of the world, and God was free to exercise his will in any number of ways. Granted, God may have had “very good reasons for creating This World, at That particular Time he did,” but He “may have made other kinds of things Before this material World began, and may make other kinds of things After This World is destroyed.”83 Leibniz grants that there was “an infinity of possible universes” in God’s mind before creation but stipulates that there always is a “sufficient reason” that “determines him towards one thing rather than another,” one universe rather than another.84 God chose “the most perfect world, that is, the one which is at the same time the simplest in hypotheses and the richest in phenomena.”85 Leibniz offers robust claims about the infinite variety of the actual world when he points out that nothing that exists is alike and rejects the idea (not necessarily proposed by Clarke) of simple bodies.86 Nonetheless, Leibniz’s variety is limited by the framework from which it originates. God’s way of creating variety (a feature of the best of all possible worlds) is to make it “with the greatest order possible.” This is “the way,” Leibniz explains, “of obtaining as much perfection as possible.”87 For Clarke, on the other hand, variety is not tied to perfection. It is not the expression of sufficient reason. The fact that “all things in the World are very different one from another, and have all manner of Variety,” Clarke argues, shows that they bear the mark of “Will and Arbitrariness and Changeableness.”88 Rather than considering variety an aspect of perfection and order, Clarke views it as evidence of an arbitrary and changeable creation. The accelerating discovery of new species in the seventeenth century no doubt lent plausibility to Clarke’s argument. The different metaphysical beliefs of Clarke and Leibniz have consequences for the status of the imagination. Leibniz’s criterion of sufficient reason, the exchange with Clarke shows, is repeatedly pointed against Clarke’s belief in the arbitrary, unstable, and imperfect order of the world. But it is also directed at the power such a belief gives to the imagination. In their exchange, Clarke frequently uses counterfactuals to puncture Leibniz’s claims. Seeking to demonstrate that the will and not reason determines God’s action, Clarke asks why “this particular System of Matter [our solar system] should be created in one particular Place” when it could have just as well been put in some other place.89 In such cases of indifference, he argues, God’s will alone

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decides, without the guidance of reason. Leibniz rejects this possibility, noting that God cannot will anything without having a sufficient reason.90 Responding to another of Clarke’s counterfactual scenarios, Leibniz criticizes as “Chimerical” Clarke’s supposition that “God can cause the whole Universe to move forward in a Right Line, or in any other Line, without making other wise any Alteration in it” (Clarke here adopts a counterfactual scenario that was already common among medieval voluntarists).91 “There is neither Rhime nor Reason” to this, Leibniz responds, “but God does nothing without Reason.”92 “It is a like fiction,” he continues his attack on Clarke, “to suppose that God might have created the World some Million Years sooner.” From Leibniz’s standpoint, the question “why it was not other wise ordered [is] needless and insignificant.”93 And he echoes Cudworth’s charge against voluntarist theology, saying that “a Will without Reason, would be the Chance of the Epicureans.”94 Repeatedly in these discussions, Leibniz seeks to debunk the claim Clarke’s counterfactuals make on explaining God’s agency and the order of the world. He is increasingly exasperated with the role such fictions play in the debate. Impatiently, Leibniz declares that “the Principle of the Want of a sufficient Reason does alone drive away all these Spectres of Imagination.” “The vulgar Philosophy,” he quips shortly thereafter, “easily admits all sorts of Fictions: Mine is more strict.”95 Offering a broader cultural diagnosis, he notes that “Chimaera’s begin to appear again, and they are pleasing because they have something in them that is wonderful. What has happened in Poetry, happens also in the Philosophical World. People are grown weary of rational Romances, such as were the French Clelia, or the German Aramene; and they are become fond again of the Tales of Fairies.” “The true cause of Chimaeras” in philosophy, he concludes, has been the neglect of the principle of sufficient reason.96 The Clarke-Leibniz debate clarifies, then, the status of the imagination and of counterfactuals in voluntarism. While Leibniz’s argument for possible worlds in the Theodicy (1710) legitimizes counterfactuals, they exist in God’s mind alone and are found wanting as soon as God has settled on the best of all possible worlds. Counterfactuals in Leibniz confirm that the actual world is necessary.97 For Clarke, by contrast, the belief that the world could have been different (six-legged horses and all) qualifies the excellence of whatever is manifest to us and defeats materialist necessity as much as the necessity of Leibniz’s sufficient reason. If the atheist, in Clarke’s words, “must affirm it to be a Contradiction to suppose that any part of the World can be in any re-

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spect other wise than it now is,” he and Bentley emphasize that, even though our world is relatively stable, every thing could be completely different.98 On other planets, Bentley and Clarke imagine, things are already entirely different and without any connection to the laws that govern human life on earth. It is because the structures of our world are not necessary, eternal, perfect, or universal that their study cannot lead us to the highest or furthest-reaching truths. Clarke’s counterfactuals—his chimeras—have to step in if we wish to gain a fuller understanding of God’s creation.

IV Bentley’s and Clarke’s attack on atheism mobilizes the idea that God’s creation is contingent, arbitrary, and imperfect. This idea opens up and encourages the imagination of possibilities beyond the manifest and the mundane. It could be said that Bentley’s and Clarke’s use of counterfactuals varies. Following a distinction Amos Funkenstein has made, we could see this use as sometimes critical and sometimes constructive.99 When Bentley imagines what would happen if we had microscopic eyes, his intention is to show that the current structures of our world fit together. This indicates, in his mind, that a divine intelligence made the world. Bentley’s counterfactual scenario thus exposes the absurdity of the atheist claim that human beings are defective and could have easily been outfitted with superior organs (if there really was an omnipotent divine being). On the other hand, when Clarke asks us to imagine different planetary speeds or suggests that God could move the universe forward in a straight line, he makes constructive use of counterfactuals. He uses them to demonstrate that the act of creation was free and that the structures of the cosmos could have been arranged differently. Yet my discussion has also raised some questions about this distinction between critical and constructive counterfactuals. These questions were prompted by three factors: the detail of Bentley’s counterfactual scenarios, which lends them an experiential concreteness that interferes with their critical function; the arbitrariness of norms in voluntarism, which undercuts the critical function of counterfactuals; and the extent to which the emphasis on the mediocrity of the human intellect endows counterfactuals with cognitive legitimacy. For these reasons, the difference between critical and constructive uses of counterfactuals loses sharpness under a voluntarist lens, and especially when that lens is focused on atheist arguments for necessity. The threat

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of atheism, indeed, tempts even thinkers close to Ray to use the counterfactual imagination in a way that strays beyond a critical purpose. Ray had approvingly referred to Henry More’s argument in Antidote against Atheism (1653) and recognized its reliance on counterfactuals.100 Generally speaking, More is situated at the opposite end of the theological and philosophical spectrum Bentley and Clarke occupy (his Platonism moves him closer to Leibniz). More did not believe that God’s sovereign, arbitrary will was the cause of creation (he credited a deliberative God who followed reason). In Antidote, he expressed his belief that God represented his perfections in the structures of the world and that He created the world in reference to man, who is epistemologically and ontologically privileged. Creation is unified around mankind: “When we consider this so multifarious congruity and fitnesse of things in reference to our selves, how can we withhold from inferring, that that which made both Dogs and Ducks and Hares and Sheep, made them with a reference to us, and knew what it did when it made them?”101 The order of things is set up in reference to us, and things exist by a mutual harmony and hierarchy sponsored by the divine creator. Every thing has a purpose, use, and meaningful relation that we, once we reflect properly, can grasp. No matter how morally or physically deformed something is, for More it typically has a use and purpose directed toward us, toward humankind. Notwithstanding his belief that ours is the best of all worlds (which he shares with Leibniz), More decides that his most effective move against atheism is to raise various “what if ” scenarios: What if the position of the globe were different? What if birds did not lay eggs but had to carry out pregnancies? What if fish did not possess bladders to guide their movement in water? What if grass were red? What if birds had fish tails?102 Like Bentley, More can be remarkably detailed in imagining these alternative ways of composing the things of this world. Here is how he envisions a different position of our planet: If the Axis [of the Earth] thus lay in a Plane that goes through the Center of the Sun. . . . they that scape best in the Temperate Zone, would be accloy’d with very tedious long Nights, no lesse than fourty dayes long, and they that now have their Night never above fovr and twenty houres, as Friseland, Iseland, the further parts of Russia and Norway, would be deprived of the Sun above a hundred and thirty dayes together, our selves in England and the rest of the

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same Clime would be closed up in darknesse no lesse then an hundred or eighty continuall dayes. . . . And as for Summer and Winter, though those vicissitudes would be, yet it could not but cause very raging diseases, to have the Sun stay so long describing his little Circles neer the Poles and lying so hot upon the Inhabitants that had been in so long extremity of Darknesse and Cold before.103 As the exclusively negative consequences show, for More the results of this shift would “put the Inhabitants of the World into a pittifull Condition.”104 His counterfactual scenario is critical. Yet the scope and scientific detail of this imaginative experiment are so absorbing that the critical intention is blunted by fascination. More’s strategy throughout Antidote is to imagine different places, kinds, and modes of being only to conclude that the world we inhabit is the best of all possible worlds. This can be a little oppressive because More runs through all of nature only to conclude, again and again, that “we see all filled up and fitted without any defect or uselesse superfluity.” Yet More’s argument against atheism becomes more pointed when he introduces God’s freedom of invention. Some of his examples illustrate, More notes, that the creator had genuine choices in framing the creatures of this world. The fish bladder, for example, does not exist because of some necessity or fit with other things. It represents to More an example of God’s “perfect artifice and accuracy.” The bladder was by no means necessary, he believes, as fish could have easily “made a shift to move up and down in the water” without such a strikingly engineered device. He offers similar observations on the nest-building birds engage in. In these instances, God’s ingenuity exceeds the obvious and the necessary, creating structures and parts for animals that are “farre more perfect, then will meerly serve for their bare existence and continuance in the world.” The world is filled not just with intelligent design but with highly intelligent and deeply inventive design. While other solutions would have been possible, the ones that God chose often represent “the most exquisite pitch of Reason that the wit of Man can conceive of.”105 Despite More’s firm sense that we inhabit the best of all possible worlds, one of his most effective counters to atheist necessity is raising the possibility that our world could have looked different. Even though reason and intelligence always maintain their influence, some of the structures we are familiar with are contingent. The proof of a divine creation is clearest, in fact, in those creations that actively exceed the necessary, the simple, the straightforwardly

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functional (here More differs from Leibniz, who stressed “the simplicity of the ways of God”).106 And to demonstrate such divine excess and invention, More imagines other solutions and raises different worlds and ways of being. The question Leibniz considers superfluous—why is the world not differently ordered?—is central to More’s defense of divine order. The crucial difference to Clarke and Bentley, of course, is that these alternatives are always used to demonstrate the excellence of the actual world. Still, even in More’s best of all possible worlds, the argument against atheism has to resist the taint of natural necessity and therefore prompts the imagination of other modes and kinds of being.107 Perhaps it is not entirely surprising, then, that in the years following the publication of Antidote, as Marjorie Nicolson noted a long time ago, More’s embrace of variety intensifies.108 More’s path thus adds to our sense that even Neoplatonist thinkers were increasingly willing to concede variety’s irreducibility. Meanwhile, an important irony has emerged, the first of several. The defense of established religion by Bentley, Clarke, and More leads to the cultivation of counterfactuals that, even as they seek to affirm the divine origins of the world’s structures, defamiliarize, relativize, or destabilize the determinate appearances of the world. Such “atheist” writers as Spinoza, John Toland, and Charles Blount diminish divine power by constraining it through mundane principles and by dispersing it among the things of the world. In this way, they not only harden the hold of the manifest structures of the world. They consign to a largely decorative purpose the imagination of alternate orders, of realms and beings beyond the presently existing, beyond our reach or comprehension. Anti-atheist writers undermine the hold of the manifest and build bridges between imagination and reality. They find glory in God’s arbitrary creativity and thus make the imagination of different worlds and beings part of their construction of a reality that cannot be reduced to the manifest—to what can be seen, touched, tasted. In the 1690s, an infinitely complex world jointly constituted by material and spiritual forces is readily embraced by those apologists who identify necessity as the central threat posed by atheism. The arguments of a Clarke or Bentley for a radically infinite variety were echoed by contemporary scientists, many of whom had begun to doubt our ability to use essences as a key to natural order. Because it tethered fundamental instability to relative stability, voluntarism provided a fairly secure arena in which defenders of the established faith could play up the arbitrariness and contingency of creation against its alleged necessity. The imagina-

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tion of counterfactual scenarios made such arbitrariness and contingency palpable. Established religion benefited. William Whiston’s A New Theory of the Earth (1696) underscores the imaginative leeway science and religion could exercise under voluntarist auspices. A Newtonian who complained about “loose Deists and pretended Socinians,” Whiston sought to reconcile biblical truth with the latest scientific discoveries.109 A New Theory features many of the motifs we have already encountered: an emphasis on the preliminary and changeable present constitution of the world, a (vehement) critique of anthropocentrism, the assertion of a plurality of worlds with different physical origins and different schemes of providence.110 In addition to all this, we get a detailed scientific reconstruction of the state of the earth before the fall. Whiston wants to make scientific sense of Genesis and feels compelled to imagine—following the precepts of Newtonian physics—a state of the earth when it did not possess a diurnal revolution. Such revolution, he hypothesizes, was introduced after the fall by means of a collision with a divinely guided meteor. Whiston’s dramatic sense of possibility shines in this scientific reconstruction of different planetary motion. It is visible as well in the methodological lesson he draws from this reconstruction. It is “very unsafe,” he notes in a skeptical vein, to argue “from one State or its Circumstances to another; and very unjust to conclude things unaccountable or absurd in one, only because they are strange and unknown to the other State.” Reduction is rejected: the study of our present world cannot yield insights into other worlds. “An exact Consideration and Allowance for the Diversity of things,” Whiston suggests, is the method that allowed him to postulate two distinct states of planet earth that correspond to the story of genesis.111 Respect for the possibility of fundamental difference paves the way to discovery. While they defended established religion, however, such thinkers as Whiston and Clarke were not free from the taint of heresy. Some years after he gave the Boyle lectures, for example, Clarke expressed anti-trinitarian views and caused a lengthy public controversy. Whiston had adopted similar views, most likely as a result of conversations with Clarke and Newton. Because their “ontological individualism made the notion of a common essence of the three persons [of the trinity] inconceivable,” Michael Gillespie observes, “most nominalists [or voluntarists] became either Tritheists or Arians (or some variation thereof, for example, Socinians or Unitarians).”112 The moderate enlightenment vigorously attacked the radical enlightenment, but it also harbored heterodox views. Here is a second irony. The voluntarist defense of established

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religion not only developed utopian strains, it could also nourish doubts about religious dogma. Yet another irony emerges when we turn to the political associations of the arguments against atheism I have examined in this chapter. One measure scholars have used to decipher the political content of theology and science in this period is the analogy between God’s position vis-à-vis nature and the ruler’s position vis-à-vis the people.113 Considered from this perspective, More’s and Leibniz’s rational, deliberative, and non-interventionist God contrasts with Bentley’s, Clarke’s, and Whiston’s finally willful, arbitrary, and continually involved God. Based on this contrast alone, one would have to surmise that More’s and Leibniz’s politics are further removed from absolutist tendencies than Bentley’s, Clarke’s, or Whiston’s. But once we add the other ingredients of these two theological orientations, this political interpretation of God’s position is no longer so compelling. For all their allowances for variety, More’s and Leibniz’s worlds are in the end recuperative structures in which difference always turns out to be an expression of divine reason and is comprehensible to man. Nothing is radically alien, nothing is consigned to irredeemable imperfection. The meaning of the whole can always rescue local flaws or deformities as ultimately productive contributions. Bentley’s, Clarke’s, and Whiston’s worlds are not recuperative. They include the possibility of defects, gaps, incomprehensible stuff. And they are not centered in man, who does not recognize himself in the world as given.114 Presided over by a divine sovereign whose will is finally unbound by principle or precedent, the voluntarist theology invoked by these writers is open, not closed. It does not invite us to examine the particular with the expectation that we could find its place in some more general structure or category. Rather, voluntarism asks us to pay attention to the particular as particular, without expecting a place or larger entity it might belong to. Such places or entities are beyond human reach. The only things attention to the par ticular may teach us are some of the potentially endless qualities and interactions that characterize it as it enters different circumstances. Any observation of regularities or laws is always open to amendment and change. The manifest order of things, what we can see and touch, is thus not the final horizon of human knowledge or possibility. If some things might be different in More’s world, in this one every thing could be different, including gravity or reason. Bentley’s, Clarke’s, and Whiston’s worlds possess an absolute ruler, but their structure is not binding and open to change. More’s and Leibniz’s

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worlds do not have an absolute ruler, but their structure tends toward closure: no part seems to escape structure’s grasp, and that’s because the whole has meaning for us. The political irony of voluntarism, then, could be described as follows: under pressure to defend established belief against atheism, Bentley, Clarke, and others dramatize God’s sovereignty by showing that nothing is natural, eternal, or necessary. But in denying that universal standards, essences, and hierarchical structures inhere in nature, in letting contingency, arbitrariness, and even imperfection into the world, they undercut or relativize the ability of the manifest to provide a binding context for human life. God’s most fundamental relationship to the world is that of a willful sovereign, but the world is for that reason not comprehensible and thus open to possibility. What is knowable about the world, on the other hand, is always preliminary and incomplete. The possibility of transcending the manifest structures of the world is thus written into voluntarist theology. This raises a second political question. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have emphasized the politically empowering immanence of Spinoza’s philosophy: for them, the assumption that there is no transcendence, that we are all in the same world governed by the same laws and forces, all necessarily interconnected, is politically enabling because it abolishes the need to engage realms and forces that are ontologically different from ours.115 Seen from the perspective of such immanence, the belief in a transcendent, willful God dilutes our ability to believe in the effectiveness of our agency in this world because that agency is not independent from a higher, enabling realm and thus not fully vested in the here and now. A related observation could be made about the assumption of human limits and the imagination of different worlds and modes of being. On the one hand, voluntarist and skeptical modes of thought give us extensive license to consider and imagine difference. On the other hand, they seem to discourage transformative action in this world when they tell us that we cannot grasp its ultimate unities, structures, and laws. Similarly, while our will is free on one level (Clarke emphasizes this), on another our actions take place within a divinely imposed framework of moral accountability. We are independent agents who have genuine freedom to make genuine choices, but we are acting in a moral realm that is governed by the account settling that will happen, ultimately, on the day of final judgment. These observations indicate what some might call a liberal acceptance of limits, effected by a mediation between the natural and supernatural, will and law, autonomy and determination that pulls us away from Spinoza’s radical monism.

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And yet the voluntarist theology of a Whiston, Bentley, or Clarke also constructs a God whose difference from the world is so marked that we lose our place. The metaphysical gap between divine and human spheres gives us a structural independence. Without innate ideas or any a priori knowledge, we realize that we exist in the midst of a crowd of particulars that disorient us with their incomprehensible difference, contingency, and arbitrariness. Voluntarism puts us in a place where relations and identities cannot be fixed, where particulars resist our desire to map them. Similarity is difficult to secure. Difference seems to have no limit. Of course, we must not forget what Clarke occasionally likes to background: difference, contingency, and arbitrariness are not absolute qualities in voluntarist theology. They are mediated qualities whose bewildering fumes can always be tamed by the filter of relative necessity, relative stability. A mediated world like this is made up of semi-independent layers. Even as you exploit such semi-independence and contemplate one layer at a time, you can still trust the connection of the layers. This is how Bentley and Clarke can use both critical and constructive counterfactuals, can insist on an arbitrary creation at one time and seek comfort in God’s settled constitution at another. Such shifts look like compromise and inconsistency from the perspective of Spinoza’s philosophy. To me, they look like the dialectical forms by which the moderate enlightenment, as it resists atheist necessity, expands our sense of contingency, of possibility and transformation. Despite all this, the counterfactual imagination may still seem like the ally of a metaphysics that directs us away from the concerns of this world, occupies us with places and things that do not exist, and underlines the weakness of our intellect. Yet such a divide between imagination and reality is precisely what voluntarism resists. A bit of historical perspective might be helpful. Funkenstein explains that “counterfactual states in the Middle Ages. . . . were never conceived as commensurable to any of the factual states from which they were extrapolated.” This changes in the seventeenth century, he argues, when someone like Galileo begins to treat “the limiting case, even where it did not describe reality [as] the constitutive element in its explanation.”116 If counterfactuals in the Middle Ages were meant to create contrast between the imagined and the real, in the seventeenth century the imagined helped construct the real even when it did not describe it. As Nicholas Hudson and David Sepkoski have argued, under voluntarist auspices our signs do not represent the world but construct it.117 They help make the world we inhabit.

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I began this chapter by noting how the rapidly increasing number and variety of species in late seventeenth-century scientific culture raised questions about the borders between the fabulous and the real, romance and science. In the increasingly constructive use of counterfactuals, we can see a related trend. The relationship between the factual and the counterfactual is no longer confined to affirming things as they are by way of contrast. Voluntarism makes the counterfactual collaborate with the factual, constructing being. To illustrate the constructive use of counterfactuals, Funkenstein uses the example of Galileo’s calculation of the imagined free fall of a body in a vacuum.118 I would like to give the example of Locke’s chapter on identity in the Essay, a chapter dense with constructive counterfactuals. Here we meet, among others, not Socrates but the man who possessed the soul of Socrates; the cobbler who receives the soul of a prince; the little finger, which, upon being severed from the hand, takes the consciousness of the man with it; the man who is two persons; the man who though born of different women at different times is nonetheless the same man; and the man who is governed by “two distinct incommunicable consciousnesses,” one of which is in charge during the day, the other at night.119 All of these counterfactuals serve Locke to argue that personal identity does not consist in the sameness of a material or immaterial substance but in the shifting contours of consciousness. They serve a constructive purpose. The expansion of possibility beyond the observable and the probable provides the “limiting case of reality” that helps reveal the truth of Locke’s argument about identity.120 Still self-conscious about using these imaginative experiments, Locke concedes at the end of his chapter that he has “made some Suppositions that will look strange to some Readers.” But he also insists that these suppositions are legitimate tools to help us understand what our limited intellect cannot know other wise, “the Nature of that thinking thing, that is in us, and that we look on as our selves.”121 In this sense, Locke’s imagination of different modes of being is neither critical, fantastical, nor misleading—it is engaged in the cognition of that which cannot be directly observed. The counterfactual is not some separate realm of pure speculation or critical opposition. It constructs the real, helping Locke advance an anti-essentialist account of identity.122 I wish to go a bit further and argue that the increasingly constructive role imaginative experiments play in seventeenth-century culture links them to what we might call “real counterfactuals,” a phrase I am encouraged to use by Locke’s witty deployment of the true story of the speaking parrot who

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guards chickens.123 I have mentioned Locke’s and Tyson’s interest in ambiguous species— species that are neither here nor there and linger in the cracks of the established order. It seems to me that Tyson’s hog-fish and Locke’s rat-cat (which he insists on having seen himself) are metaphysical figures in the sense that they are mysterious objects that raise fundamental questions about natural order. They are of interest not because their analysis lets us place them somewhere in a category or relational structure but because they resist such placement and, in so doing, raise questions about the borders and relations between beings. They are counterfactuals to the extent that they do not fit the order that holds biological facts together in seventeenth-century culture. I would like to end by suggesting that the notably rapid expansion of kinds, the growing questions about essences, the speculation about different modes of being, and the constructive use of counterfactuals are linked. They come together not only for such alleged Socinians and materialists as Locke but for those who vigorously defended the established faith. Religious and scientific leaders used voluntarist beliefs to strengthen the differences and the ties between limit and possibility, real and imagined, natural and supernatural, physical and metaphysical. Layers these categories still form, but layers that depend on each other. We have to thank, to a considerable extent, the fear of atheism and the disorder of kinds. That fear and that disorder, my next chapter will show, helped shape a distinctive aesthetic of infinite variety around the voluntarist belief in an arbitrary and imperfect world.

Chapter 3

Energy and Structure Remaking the Given in Blackmore and Pope

The voluntarist arguments against atheist necessity we have encountered so far relied on three linked beliefs: that order does not inhere in nature; that the divine will is sovereign and arbitrarily creates an infinite variety that is imperfect; and that human beings do not possess innate ideas, are excluded from divine knowledge, and are thrown into a contingent world of puzzling particulars. These beliefs aided the alliance of established religion and new science, as we have seen, but they were also useful to thinkers suspected of heterodox thought, as I will show in the next chapter. The present chapter offers a concrete example of how these beliefs helped shaped a distinctive aesthetic program. I focus on a writer who was passionately opposed to heterodox thought: the doctor, poet, and prominent Whig Richard Blackmore. Blackmore’s philosophical poem Creation (1712) shows how anti-atheist argument can nurture a transcendent aesthetic that turns on the decomposition of kinds and the superiority of the will. Like Richard Bentley (whose contribution to the debate about ancients and moderns he praised) and Samuel Clarke, Blackmore resists atheist arguments about the eternity or necessity of the world by adopting strategies of defamiliarization that seek to render the world’s manifest structures arbitrary and contingent.1 Creation is full of counterfactuals, for instance. Blackmore imagines different planetary speeds, different planetary positions, a different magnetic force, and a world without wind, among other scenarios.2 He uses counterfactuals critically—the way Henry More did, to show the harmony of our world— and he uses them constructively, to bring home an arbitrary and contingent world. These diverging tendencies are often occasioned by the

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different arguments Blackmore opposes, but they are just as often held together by a voluntarist theology that links God’s absolute and ordained power.3 Blackmore likes formulations in which these dimensions appear together. Thus, he speaks of God as “a prudent arbitrary cause” who acts according to “his Wisdom and free Principle of Activity.”4 What can easily seem like confusion or even contradiction (prudent and arbitrary?) reflects the covenantal aspect of voluntarism described by Francis Oakley.5 Using these and other strategies, Creation at once refutes atheist arguments and engages in worldmaking, a term Blackmore uses to describe the aim of such philosophers as Epicurus, whom he seeks to beat at their own game.6 Equally characteristic of Blackmore’s voluntarism is the denial that nature is an autonomous, self-governing realm. For Blackmore—as for Newton, Bentley, Whiston, and Clarke—the difference between God’s act of creation and His continued preservation of the world is not sharp. God’s preservation of the world, Blackmore notes, is nothing but a “prolong’d Creation” because it is “a constant communication of Power from [God,] this exhaustless Source of Energy and Motion.” “Should he no longer Will its Continuance, but suspend his preserving Influence,” Blackmore warns, “the whole Creation would immediately dissolve and disappear.”7 Nature cannot sustain itself, and God unceasingly acts on it as an otherworldly force. This has the effect that the natural and the supernatural, the material and the spiritual, the physical and the metaphysical can neither merge nor separate. They are always substantially different and tied together through continuous action. The idea of a prolonged creation thus helps neutralize the atheist threat on two fronts: it prevents the conflation of God with nature and it resists the idea of God as a detached observer. Reassessments of Blackmore’s writings and their place in literary history have been undertaken (notably by David Womersley), but Blackmore’s reputation still has not recovered from the ridicule showered on him by John Dryden, Tom Brown, John Gay, and Alexander Pope.8 The assumptions about literary value these writers shared rendered Blackmore risible and help explain the marginal place he occupies on the literary maps of the early eighteenth century. Yet Blackmore has more to offer than bathos and pious reformation, more than lines that turn to the rhythm of coach wheels, as Dryden jeered. His work is important because it allows us to reconstruct an aesthetic that self-consciously seeks to depart from the dominant literary practices of the restoration by shaping the sublime into a mode that chimes with empiricism, religious reform, and Whig politics. As Womersley points out, it is against

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this program that Pope directed An Essay on Criticism (1711), an aesthetic treatise that sought to revive “the critical judgments and principles of an earlier generation of Tory writers, notably Roscommon, Buckingham, Dryden and Atterbury.”9 Pope reacts to an ascendant Whig aesthetic that has received insufficient attention by literary historians in part because Pope and his allies were possessed of deeper literary talents than Blackmore and some of his Whig colleagues. But that Blackmore was not as gifted a poet as Pope does not mean that his aesthetic program was inferior. Nor does it mean that these two poets respond to the disorder of kinds in radically different ways. On the contrary, both realize that the order of kinds is not grounded in nature, and both use this realization to reimagine the given, as we shall see when I turn to Pope’s An Essay on Man (1733–1734) toward the end of this chapter. If we tried to define Blackmore’s place in literary history more positively, we should probably place his work next to the Kit-Cat Club’s. This group of cultural and political leaders sought to turn the revolution of 1688 into a watershed from which a distinctly Whiggish national culture could flow.10 Blackmore’s writings contributed to this cause with such epics as the pro-Williamite Prince Arthur (1695) and the anti-Jacobite Eliza (1705), but also with his journalistic writings, which sought to extend the anti-factional program developed by the Tatler (1709–1711) and the Spectator (1711–1712, 1714).11 In The Kit-cats (1708), Blackmore saluted the club’s agenda as an attempt to refine “British Heads” through the arts.12 In A Satyr against Wit (1700), he appealed to such Whig grandees as Baron Somers, the Duke of Dorset, and Baron Halifax to save the nation from false wit.13 Unlike Somers and Dorset, however, Blackmore was not a member of the Kit-Cat Club and did not profit from its patronage network (though his friend and collaborator John Hughes did, as did Bentley and Clarke).14 Blackmore did not depend on such support. A follower of Thomas Sydenham’s empiricist approach to medicine, he was a successful physician and served both King William and Queen Anne. Those who wished to create a distinctly Whiggish post-revolutionary culture found an important resource in the revival of the sublime, which became popular in the second half of the seventeenth century, after Boileau translated Longinus into French in 1674.15 In England, interest in Longinus was especially keen in Whig circles, which were attracted, in part, by the link Longinus suggested between a sublime aesthetic and political freedom. Milton’s poetry was seen to embody this link, and Blackmore thought of Milton’s works as a model for a Christian sublime.16 Other Whiggish writers agreed. Leonard Welsted’s 1712 translation of Longinus’s treatise on the sublime, for

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example, canonized Milton as a major representative of the political and aesthetic values that Longinus had joined.17 John Dennis was the most important advocate for a Christian renovation of poetry through the sublime. He, too, presented Milton’s Paradise Lost as its model.18 Dennis and Blackmore were initially at loggerheads after Dennis produced a lengthy critique of Prince Arthur, but they eventually came to terms.19 Dennis was mainly interested in the sublime’s psychological effects. He stressed the arousal of powerful feelings and associated “Vigour” and “Force” with sublime writing, notoriously comparing its effects to a “pleasing Rape upon the very Soul of the Reader.”20 Blackmore is very much drawn to the irresistible, overwhelming force of sublime writing. The “Power of Poetry,” he believed, is “to penetrate the inmost Recesses of the Mind, to touch every Spring that moves the Heart, to agitate the Soul with any sort of Affection, and transform it into any Shape or Posture it thinks fit.”21 Yet Blackmore far more clearly appreciates, as we shall see, the ontological implications of an aesthetic vested in the transgression of borders and the transformation of souls. It is easy to acknowledge the sublime potential of a willful, arbitrary God and a weak humanity unable to grasp the nature of things, but the deeper connections between Blackmore’s voluntarism and his aesthetic are harder to discern. The two biographies we have of Blackmore do not mention his religious beliefs, nor does the Dictionary of National Biography.22 In The Religious Sublime (1972), David B. Morris recognizes Blackmore as a central figure, dismisses his poetry as “inept,” and does not say anything about his theology.23 Yet it is the way Blackmore levers his religious beliefs against atheism that allows us to reconstruct an aesthetic that, because it seeks to cross borders and undo fixed identities, rhymes with Blackmore’s Whiggism as much as with the sublime and the empiricist doubt about essences and innate ideas. That such an aesthetic comes from a conservative moralist and defender of the established faith should no longer be surprising.24 As we saw in the previous chapter, the defense of mainstream religion in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries often went hand in hand with skeptical, anti-essentialist, and empiricist attitudes that stressed the gulf between the divine and the human, literalized infinite variety, denaturalized order, and increased ontological and epistemological uncertainty. Broadly speaking, this is also Blackmore’s outlook. I will begin my discussion with Blackmore’s belief in natural and moral mutability, which he highlights to criticize the atheist argument for necessity. This belief springs from the voluntarist insistence on the freedom and power

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of the will. Hans Blumenberg and Ulrich Langer have spelled out some of the consequences this insistence has for the relationship between artist and world.25 As Blumenberg explains a development that he and Langer trace back to the Renaissance, voluntarist thinkers were increasingly willing to compare human and divine creativity. This eventually made it possible for the artist to compete with the manifest structures of the world. Because voluntarism views nature as the finally arbitrary expression of an omnipotent divine will, the imitation of nature can cease to be the artist’s primary obligation. There is no compelling reason why nature could not be different than it is, and that is why the way is free—at least in principle—for the artist to create works that exceed, improve, or contradict the natural.26 Creation, I argue, celebrates this possibility.

II In book 5 of Creation, Blackmore discusses atheist arguments for the eternity and necessity of the world, two issues he tends to conflate because they both raise the specter of immutability—of a world whose rules, modes, and beings are fixed and can never change. He associates these arguments with such world-makers as Aristotle and Spinoza.27 The first stage of Blackmore’s push against them, as he relates in the argument of book 5, shows the “Mutability, and the Variety of Forms rising and disappearing in the several Parts of Nature.”28 If we contemplate what actually unfolds in the world, Blackmore observes, the opposite of fixity and necessity is evident: But see, in all corporeal Nature’s Scene, What Changes, what Diversities have been? Matter not long the same Appearance makes, But shifts her old, and a new Figure takes. If now she lyes in Winter’s rigid Arms Dishonour’d, and despoiled of all her Charms, Soft vernal Airs will loose th’unkind Embrace, And genial Dews renew her wither’d Face. Like fabled Nymphs transform’d she’s now a Tree, Now weeps into a Flood, and streaming seeks the Sea. She’s now a gaudy Fly, before a Worm, Below a Vapour, and above a Storm.

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This Ouze was late a Monster of the Main, That Turf a Lowing Grazer of the Plain, A Lion this did o’er the Forest reign. Regard that fair, that branching Laurel Plant, Behold that lovely blushing Amarant; One William’s broken Frame might have assum’d And one from bright Maria’s Dust have bloom’d. These shifting Scenes, these quick Rotations show Things from Necessity could never flow, But must to Mind and Choice precarious Being owe. (217–219) The patrons of this passage are Ovid, whose Metamorphoses is directly invoked, and Lucretius, who in book 1 of De Rerum Natura had argued that “Nature restores / One thing from the stuff of another,” and who is a frequent interlocutor in Blackmore’s poem.29 Blackmore’s argument against necessity begins by tracking the various transformations of matter. He relies on personified matter to drive the initial action. It is matter that “shifts” her old and “takes” new forms, “weeps” into a flood, and “seeks” the sea. The middle section moves us rapidly across different spheres of being. Within four lines, matter appears as tree, tears, flood, sea, fly, worm, vapor, storm. This drama of transformation is accentuated by repeated reductions of temporal and spatial distance: then/now, below/above are briskly crossed thresholds of transformation. They barely pose an obstacle to matter’s movements. Within two lines, we charge chiastically from air (fly) to earth (worm), from ground (vapor) to sky (storm), and from animal to plant (cow/grass). These movements want to make us realize that differences of kind are finally not secured by separate essences: the same matter, differently arranged, makes water, fly, worm, grass, fish, lion. Matter makes forms. As we read, the drama of transformation intensifies. Initially we see more modest transitions involving proximate kinds (from fly to worm or vapor to wind). But the changes escalate subsequently with the transformation of solid into liquid and animal into plant. As we contemplate the sea monster dissolve into ooze and the sheep and lion melt into grass, the transformations become more dramatic. This spectacle of decomposition peaks when Blackmore imagines that the top of the human hierarchy joins the vegetal realm. The deceased parts of King William and Queen Mary, he suggests, may well have incorporated into plants. Amarant and Laurel are appropriate forms for royal matter, but the conceit is still daring. While Blackmore’s lines begin

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with the hopeful note of spring’s renovating force, we subsequently move to moderate transformations across proximate spheres of being but end up with more drastic decompositions that underscore Blackmore’s anti-essentialist bent by showing that the differences enshrined in both social and natural forms are insubstantial. Even kings and queens turn into plants. Still, no single lesson about mutability, it would seem, is imparted here. Mutability can go all kinds of ways. The depiction of a free, boundless, and transformative traffic across forms is the passage’s main weapon against atheist necessity and eternity. Having dramatized mutability in this way, Blackmore wants to conclude his excursion into shifting matter. Against the pagan poets he alludes to, he wishes to draw a Christian lesson from his mutable scene. That lesson is entrusted to a single couplet: “Things from Necessity could never flow, / But must to Mind and Choice precarious Being owe.” At first blush, the couplet seems to invoke the creation of the world by a willful God who chooses to endow being with a precariousness that opens it up to various transformations. But it actually reaches further. Let’s recall that Blackmore likened God’s preservation of the world to a prolonged creation. When he depicts the once reigning lion turned to grass or suggests that William and Mary may have entered plant life, Blackmore moralizes. He hints at the continuously active, willful God he believed in, a God who does not simply leave things to nature’s unsupervised movements but who guides matter to assume some forms rather than others. The hint is confirmed in one of his essays, where Blackmore connects man’s “precarious and supported Existence” to the fact that God is “the continu’d Cause of his Being, and his Conservator.”30 Precarious existence is here not caused by creation but by God’s continuous preservation. “Since the Author is a free and arbitrary Agent,” Blackmore writes about divine agency in another essay, “the Duration and Futurity of Being must absolutely rely on his Pleasure.”31 These statements indicate that Blackmore hopes to present all these scenes of transformation as the wondrous manifestation of a continued creation by which God guides routine and not-so-routine actions of matter. Such an argument forcefully contradicts eternity and necessity. The idea of a continued creation tethers the ability of matter to constitute different forms to spiritual supervision. A voluntarist God thus helps translate pagan metamorphosis into Christian mutability. In this way, Blackmore echoes Gassendi’s, Walter Charleton’s, or Robert Boyle’s use of voluntarism to baptize the movements of Epicurean matter.

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Blackmore’s attack on natural necessity in book 5 of Creation expands when he turns to a voluntarist strategy we have already encountered in Clarke’s Boyle lecture, the imagination of different species. Here, Blackmore asks the “Fatalist”: And might not other Animals arise Of diff’rent Figure, and of diff’rent Size? In the wide Womb of Possibility Lye many Things, which ne’er may actual be: And more Productions of a various Kind Will cause no Contradiction in the Mind. ’Tis possible the Things in Nature found, Might diff’rent Forms and diff’rent Parts have own’d. The Boar might wear a Trunk, the Wolf a Horn, The Peacock’s Train the Bitterns might adorn. Strange Tusks might in the Horse’s Mouth have grown, And Lions might have spots, and Leopards none. (220–221) The point of this exercise in the counterfactual imagination is to show that the identity of species and their relationships to each other are arbitrary. The physical features of different animals do not constitute a natural order shaped by divine wisdom. Their structures are not necessary but freely made up. A different natural order constituted by different kinds and relationships would have been just as easily possible for an omnipotent divine will. Blackmore’s counterfactual flight thus hopes to make plausible the idea of “an Independent, Wise and Conscious Cause, / Who freely acts by Arbitrary Laws” (124). But by stimulating the imagination of different species and the idea of an arbitrary natural order, Blackmore also, like other voluntarists, gives up ground to atheist argument. This is the argument—Blackmore associates it with Lucretius (117)— that the creation of the world is due to chance. In book 3 of Creation, Blackmore queries: “For how from Chance can constant Order spring?” (117). He then imagines what a world created by chance might look like: The Forest Oak might bear the blushing Rose, And fragrant Mirtles thrive in Russian Snows. The fair Pomgranate might adorn the Pine, The Grape the Bramble, and the Sloe the Vine.

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Fish from the Plains, Birds from the Floods might Rise, And lowing Herds break from the Starry Skies. (118) These increasingly surreal lines indicate that Blackmore switches from God’s absolute to God’s ordained power as he toggles from an argument against necessity to an argument against chance. Imagining an arbitrary, contingent natural order assists the campaign against atheist necessity because it shows divine power and freedom. But the divine covenant (“constant Order”) has to move to the foreground when Blackmore rebuts the claim that a fortuitous concourse of atoms creates the world. Counterfactual species, in other words, serve a constructive function when God’s absolute power needs demonstration. They serve a critical role when God’s obligation to a settled course of nature needs highlighting. Blackmore thus uses the same poetic tool—the imaginative recombination of the parts that make up different natural things—when he imagines a world of chance and a world created by a willful deity. The similarity of poetic means indicates that a willful creation resembles an accidental one. On the question of creation, the pagan Lucretius and the Christian Blackmore only disagree about the source of arbitrariness. Ralph Cudworth’s and Leibniz’s critique of voluntarist theology comes to mind: a willful creator can seem like chance in divine garb.32

III Blackmore’s appreciation of “Mutability, and the Variety of Forms rising and disappearing in the several Parts of Nature” not only is visible in his attempt to rebut arguments about nature’s necessity. It also informs his attack on moral necessity, the idea that human action is not free but determined by forces beyond the individual’s control.33 Blackmore associates this idea with Hobbes, whose voluntarism allowed only God’s will to be absolutely free. The idea of man’s free will, Hobbes insisted, was of Catholic origin and had to be rejected as false.34 “All Events and Actions have their necessary Causes,” he observed, and “the Will of God makes the Necessity of all things.”35 Against such arguments for necessity, Blackmore asserted the freedom of the human will, which he considered God’s most noble and perilous gift to man. The analogy of divine and human wills, we shall see, allows Blackmore to think about human creativity in relationship to the divine act of creation.

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His declaration, at the start of Creation, that he wishes to “sing the Wonders of creating Art” (4) signifies in two directions, as a statement on God’s artful creation and on human artistry. Both reach their highest level through the exercise of a free will. Blackmore sets the power of the human will against the weakness of human cognition. I have already mentioned his fascination with Edward Tyson’s dissection of a chimpanzee and his wonder about the in-between species that “suspend the Mind’s Determination.” “The Limits and Boundaries of . . . Species seem left unsettled by Nature, to perplex the Curious, and to humble the proud Philosopher,” he had written on that occasion.36 Such suspension seems appropriate for human beings whose home planet is surrounded by “numberless Stars and beautiful Constellations, each of which is probably a World far exceeding ours in Amplitude and Lustre.”37 It seems appropriate, too, because our minds are “unable to penetrate the secret Nature or Essence of Matter” and must judge particulars by imperfect senses.38 God’s wisdom and omnipotence are so vast, indeed, that the human mind, in search of “Motion’s Cause and hidden Springs,” only “trembling stands, and does in Wonder gaze, / Lost in the wide Inextricable Maze” (74). Not surprisingly, Blackmore roundly dismisses the notion that God imprints ideas on human minds, asserting that the concept of innate ideas “is the meer Product of Invention and may be easily disproved.”39 If order does not inhere in nature, human beings likewise are not the inevitable carriers of divine knowledge or knowledge of the divine. They are free. Blackmore echoes the critique of anthropocentrism that often accompanies voluntarist argument, but this critique goes hand in hand with the freedom of the human will. The reach of human cognition is short, but the powers of the will are profound. The human mind possesses a “Godlike Liberty” (337), he emphasizes: it is “sov’raign,” “arbitrary” (304), “free,” “unforc’d,” and “unnecessitated” (340). Like God, we are “Conscious Agent[s]” (41) and therefore have the “Power of electing an End, and chusing Means to attain that End” (309).40 So captured is Blackmore by the liberty of the will that he attributes to it the God-like ability to “change Nature’s Course, and [dispense] with her Laws” (340). When we decide to stop breathing or eating, Blackmore argues, we suspend natural laws and reveal our privileged station: “Can the wild Beast his Instinct disobey, / And from his Jaws release the Captive prey? / Or hungry Herds on verdant Pastures lye / Mindless to eat, and resolute to die?” (340). But because nothing in the human mind is innate and the will is sovereign, we do not naturally incline toward moral action. “Evil Propensions

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are so complicated and rooted in the Constitution of Men,” Blackmore worries, “that Multitudes are hurry’d on by the irregular Biass on their Wills to criminal Practices, in Contempt of the Dictates of Reason and in Defiance of . . . Divine Laws.”41 The power of our will to form “Habits and Dispositions” is strong, and the very quality that echoes the divine is absolutely free to misdirect and deform us.42 In typical voluntarist fashion, Blackmore argues that a free will can only be restrained by external force. Order does not reside in things themselves. It has to be imposed on them. Only the “Authoritative Obligation” issued by religion and law can check “the unlimited Power, which all Men must have over all their Actions.”43 “Where no Command or Prohibition restrains our Liberty,” Blackmore insists, “Vertue and Vice, Piety and Irreligion are empty Words and mean nothing.”44 Moral sense is not natural. “As to what some Writers suggest, about intrinsick Vertue and Honesty arising from the Nature of Things,” Blackmore confesses that “I must look on their Position as extravagant and absurd.”45 It is his belief in the naturally unlimited sovereignty of the human will that explains why Blackmore was so alarmed by what he saw as the moral degeneracy and disbelief of his age—so very alarmed, to tell the whole truth, that he advocated capital punishment for atheists.46 Without religious laws, without the belief in rewards and punishments, human beings could abuse their God-given liberty to elevate any practice arbitrarily into settled habit and legitimate custom. Order has no natural foothold and has to be imposed from the outside as a command or law. Though Blackmore’s belief in the freedom of the will prompts him to reject what he calls Hobbes’s “voluntary Necessity,” these two voluntarists agree that order is an external imposition.47 Law, to Blackmore as to Hobbes, is the command of a superior to an inferior.48 In one of his humorous pieces, Blackmore shows just how fertile the human will is. He amuses himself with man’s sovereign ability to form an infinite variety of characters. Marveling at the “Diversity in the Dispositions and Manners of Mankind” and the “various good and bad Qualities” that make up individuals, he is astonished by the infinite variety of those “Tribes of Men, that are destitute of good Sense and Judgment.”49 The “peculiar Oddnesses and specific Caprices” seem here endless.50 “ ’Tis extremely difficult to trace essential Differences among regular Beings,” Blackmore sighs, “but ’tis much more so to settle the Boundaries that divide one Species from another among these anomalous Productions.”51 He explains: “the peculiar Properties and curious Particularities, which by a wonderful Fertility, produce

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subaltern Orders, are innumerable; for Error and Deviation is infinite; and no Mind is endow’d with sufficient Sagacity to penetrate the minutest Recesses of Nature, unravel the odd Complications of disagreeing Principles, and tell where one Species ends, and a new one begins.”52 But while the infinite diversity of willful individuals exceeds our comprehension, it proves a rich literary resource. The superiority of British comedy, Blackmore notes, is indebted to the “greater Variety of Originals, or more surprizing, ridiculous and whimsical Characters” that can be found in Britain as compared to other countries.53 Blackmore was probably not a great friend of comedy, yet the link between artistic value and species-defying variety he grins at here is characteristic of his aesthetic. Blackmore’s observations on moral variety are, of course, broadly critical. He underscores this when he associates the infinite variety of British humors with the excessive proliferation of sects, philosophical and religious, in the second half of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth.54 Still, his display of such variety cannot be separated from his campaign against moral necessity. Blackmore rejects natural and moral necessity on similar grounds: if the one denies the free will of the creator, the other denies the free will of man. He credits human and divine wills with a liberty that issues in irreducible complexity. God’s creation perplexes the human mind with its unreachable essences and arbitrary forms, and so does the infinite variety of moral species created by willful man. Liberty and irreducible complexity are related. When Blackmore admires the “wonderful fertility” of the human will in creating moral characters that escape the logic of kinds, he is only half ironic. Such fertility is a central value in Blackmore’s voluntarist aesthetic. It belongs to a cluster of favored terms—including energy, force, and vigor— that are often employed to describe nature and liberty in a manner that indicates the comparative weakness of structure and law. This can be seen, for example, when Blackmore addresses the relation between God and world more broadly. “The Force and Vigor inherent in all the Ranks of Being in the Universe owe their Original to the same Cause,” Blackmore explains, and the “original Cause must enjoy in a transcendent Manner, and a more eminent Degree, all the Energy and Strength of every Thing he brought into Being.”55 “With what wonderful Energy has the Creator endow’d a small vegetable Seed,” he waxes, “that it should shoot up its lofty Head, spread about its Branches, and produce by its fruitful Activity new Seeds like it self, which can still propagate the Species, and multiply themselves into numberless Plants.”56 The emphasis on force, vigor, and en-

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ergy is characteristic. In Blackmore’s voluntarism, God’s relationship to the world does not find its primary expression in the structures He has created. The kinds and ranks of being may exist, but they are a secondary manifestation of divine agency, an expression merely of God’s ordained power. The primary aspect of God’s continuous creation is, instead, the endowment of beings with fertile energy. This is the fundamental bond between God and his creation: not the relative place different creatures occupy on the ladder of being but the communication of energy and vigor. Blackmore’s association of liberty with force and vigor is instructively developed in a description of vegetable growth he offers in Prince Arthur (1695): And how the Soul of Plants, in Prison held, And bound with sluggish Fetters lies conceal’d, Till with the Spring’s warm Beams almost releast From the dull weight, with which it lay opprest, Its Vigour spreads, and makes the teeming Earth Heave up, and labor with the sprouting Birth: The active Spirit freedom seeks in vain, It only works and twists a stronger Chain. Urging its Prison’s Sides to break away, It makes that wider, where ’tis forc’d to stay. Till having formed its living House, it rears Its Head, and in a tender Plant appears.57 Blackmore depicts the form of the plant as emerging through a struggle for liberty, a wrestling match between the spirit and the matter that confines it, prison-like. Vigor, force, and a God-given desire for liberty are the productive agents—not material necessity or the peaceful growth of a form that already slumbered in the gentle folds of the seed. Order is not inherent. Form and order emerge instead out of the fortunate failure of a more explosive assertion of liberty. The energy of the seed is primary and strains beyond surrounding circumstances. The “living House,” however, emerges only once the struggle for freedom yields to external restraints. The need to restrain liberty is critical, and the extent of human liberty is directly proportional to the rigor of Blackmore’s insistence on law: the shriller the demand for law, the more dramatic the idea of liberty. And it can be dramatic: “Blest Liberty! ’tis thy distinguish’d Pow’r / To heighten Humane Nature, and secure / A noble Stock, which, as thy Force prevails, / In Vigour

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thrives, and as it lessens, fails.”58 This almost republican celebration of liberty is simply the other side of Blackmore’s insistence that order is sustainable only through laws that operate by external imposition and command, with clear rewards and punishments. Such depictions of liberty and restraint, such emphasis on force and vigor, allow us to see how qualified Blackmore’s frequent celebrations of the “Order, Harmony, and Beauty” of nature are.59 For Blackmore celebrates only the lawful course that God imposed on nature. His idol is the energy he praises when he ties “blest Liberty” to force and vigor. However much prone to abuse, however much the object of satire, the energy and fertility of the human will—its power to transcend physical circumstance and law— are finally God’s most vital gifts to humans. The fact of moral plasticity, so vividly on display among freedom-loving Britons, results from God’s most precious endowment. God is not responsible for “moral Deformity,” as Blackmore is quick to note, but He has given us the means to create it, in infinite variety, through a will whose force is stronger than any other mental faculty.60

IV When Blackmore suggests that native comedy is superior because it can draw on the infinity of error that allows British moral character to elude the logic of kinds, he hints at the aesthetic value that deformity has for him. This aesthetic value is pegged to the ontological status of imperfection, an important issue in Blackmore’s debate with the atheists. As he reminds us several times, atheists often point their finger at nature’s flaws and believe that they have evidence suggesting that the world was not made by an all-wise, all-powerful creator. Responding to such challenges, Blackmore is certainly prepared to argue that imperfections, when considered rightly, serve a purpose. He does so—repeatedly and at some length—in Creation.61 Yet the redemption of defects by the harmony of the whole remains a secondary resource for Blackmore. Considerations of structural totality, of how parts and whole fit together, of how every thing balances out in the end, are not his most potent counter to the atheist take on natural imperfection. Contrary to More and Leibniz, Blackmore does not believe that ours is the best possible world. He does not see defects as elements in God’s plan for a harmonious whole. They do not result from deep calculation or emerge as the unavoidable by-product of a divine formula such as Leibniz’s: the best

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possible world is the one that is “the simplest in hypotheses and the richest in phenomena.”62 Nor can we consistently blame our limited senses: defects are not always explainable as the artifacts of flawed human perception. Because Blackmore distinguishes between absolute and ordained power, defects can be primary and spring from the will without previsions of purpose and function in a larger whole. When we shift our perspective from the deformed part to the well-formed whole, we cannot always turn defects into witnesses for the perfection of God’s design. Some defects are irredeemable. In Blackmore’s less optimistic physico-theology, nature suggests a well-formed whole, but it is neither perfect nor comprehensible. Imperfection is a real feature of our world. Our wonder about the harmony, beauty, and order of the world does not coalesce into a reliable feeling of being at home in the world. It often reminds us instead of our limits and imperfections, of the ways in which we do not belong, a sentiment that springs from Blackmore’s intense vision of our fallen status. Let me explain this in more detail with an image of a decomposing planet from Prince Arthur. This image dramatizes the finality of mankind’s exile from divine knowledge. More importantly, it shows Blackmore’s inclination to accept imperfections— even poetic imperfections—that are not part of a plan and not redeemable by the order of the whole. Planetary decomposition serves Blackmore as a simile for the transformation of the soul after the fall of man. While still ensconced in paradise, Adam occupies a world in which he can see divine order embodied in the forms he contemplates. He “view’d his great Creator’s glorious Face / Clearly reflected from fair Nature’s Glass; / On her bright Form he saw, th’Impressions shine, / Of Wisdom Infinite, and Pow’r Divine.”63 After the fall, however, the soul is driven from its center, “Stands so askaunt, and so remote from Heav’n, / ’Tis scarcely warm’d by its weak, Oblique Ray, / And has at best but a cold, darksome Day.”64 This is when Blackmore inserts a decomposing planet as the sublime conceit for this transformation: As when a Planet, once all fair and bright, Sickens, and shines with pale and faded Light; By some fierce Storm bred in its Bowels rent, As Clouds are by the Thunder in ’em pent. The mighty Orb disjoynted cracks, and all The broken Parts in Noisy Ruin fall. The hideous, Burning Hull does floating lie,

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And with the wondrous Wreck affrights the Sky. Sometimes it blazes with a dismal Light, And now grown dim, seems lost and drown’d in Night. Then sinking does the Starry Sky forsake, Contented some inferior Seat to take. Where Heav’n new moulds the Heap, and from th’Abyss, Calls forth perhaps, a Moon or Earth, like this.65 This drama of a sick, falling star makes plain that the elevated cognition possessed by the soul in paradise is gone. Our participation in divine knowledge is decisively ruptured by the will’s assertion over God’s law. The damage of the fall is permanent, and any dreams of even a partial recovery of the edenic state of perception seem futile. Gloomily, Blackmore presents the decomposition of the planet, and thus of man’s soul, as irreversible. The disordered heap that remains prompts an uncertain creation of new form. To such practitioners of a skeptical sublime as Dryden or Pope, Blackmore’s simile would certainly illustrate the boundless freedom of the sublime poet, but it would also serve as an instance of bathetic failure or at least of poetic boldness breaking decorum.66 Too strained, too controversial is the comparison between human soul and planetary matter, too incoherent seems the suggestion offered in a secondary simile that the planet’s innards crack like clouds rent by thunder. One could pile on. Not only is the relationship between tenor and vehicle strained, but Blackmore’s vehicle seems to lead a largely independent life that does not illuminate the tenor much. Nor does the vehicle lead us anywhere on its separate path. Blackmore presents the results of the fall of man in terms of a natural decomposition that does not possess a clear end point. Decomposition is certain, but once that is accomplished God is open to various possibilities: from the rubble of the soul’s star, He “calls forth perhaps, a Moon or Earth, like this.” Or perhaps not—it is unclear what is going to happen. Blackmore seems to have no clear plan for his simile and is content with the independent, inconclusive life of his vehicle. If one looks carefully, then, Blackmore’s lines not only have decomposition as their content but seem to enact it in the drift of vehicle from tenor into inconclusive possibility. Why is Blackmore willing to permit such drift? Why is he willing to let such poetic imperfection stand? One answer to these questions might be developed with the help of Blanford Parker’s account of poetics in this period. Parker argues that the

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growth of satire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries broadly aligned with the new science and its emphasis on observable, quotidian detail. Together, these developments helped sponsor “a poetics of contiguity and accretion qualitatively different from a poetics of analogy and conceit,” which Parker sees as characteristic of earlier periods of poetic production.67 Perhaps with similes like the dying planet in mind, Parker sorts Blackmore with the disappearing poetic culture of analogy and conceit. What he has to say about Abraham Cowley might be applied to Blackmore’s planetary simile: Cowley’s poetry, Parker observes, indicates that “the conceit, once the ground for elaborate spiritual analogy, had hardened into mere decoration.”68 The imperfections of Blackmore’s simile, then, would be attributable to the decline of conceit and analogy, the fact that their heyday is, by the early eighteenth century, long gone and replaced by a more secular poetics associated with empiricism and new science. But this line of argument ignores that a distinctive theology shapes Blackmore’s poetics, a theology that was, moreover, involved with the self-authorization of the new science, as we have seen. Thus, when Parker suggests that Creation is a “distinctly secular form of cosmological verse,” I have to disagree.69 Blackmore’s voluntarism suggests a positive reason for the inconclusive drift of his planetary conceit. This is perhaps most immediately visible when the concluding line of Blackmore’s simile invokes the willful freedom of God’s actions. Even as it expresses a mild sense of hope that, perhaps, bodies like the earth or the moon could be created from planetary rubble, the line underscores a freedom of choice unconstrained by previous plans or concerns for the whole. Worlds like ours are what humans may wish for, but for a willful creator worlds unlike ours are equally possible. Such an unrestrained, willful freedom of choice informs Blackmore’s poetic practice and his aesthetic more generally. We will see shortly how Blackmore analogizes human and divine creativity, but we can already surmise that a voluntarist poetics prioritizes the author’s will over considerations of law, structure, and precedent. That means increased poetic risk, violation of rules and decorum, and acceptance of imperfection. Blackmore emphasizes the willful nature of divine actions and echoes this emphasis in the lines he composes: divine and human authors do not seem restrained by a careful plan or regard for the whole. The planetary simile seems arbitrary and, without an essential semantic tie to keep it together, drifts apart. The link between the tenor and the vehicle unravels, but because such unraveling involves the coming apart of soul (or form) and

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matter, additional meanings emerge. The fate of Blackmore’s simile indicates that form cannot keep its hold on matter, whose openness to new possibility, new configurations reasserts itself fairly quickly. In the poetics that this passage intimates, order (here in the form of analogy) is a temporary and imperfect imposition by a willful author with limited accountability to his own creation. That spiritual analogy fails, in other words, is not so much a symptom of a declining poetic tradition than the result of a voluntarist approach to creation that emphasizes will over structure.70 The basic content of Blackmore’s simile—the possibility that a planet may die—is itself an interesting datum. It links Blackmore to the Newtonians, who tended to view nature’s order as preliminary, imposed, and imperfect, as requiring upkeep and repair by the divine being.71 The same view of nature is prominently featured in Blackmore’s counterfactual argument against Aristotle’s belief in the eternal existence of the world. Blackmore argues that the sun cannot be eternal because its resources are limited. If it were eternal, Then by eternal, infinite Expence, By unrecruited Waste, and Spoils immense, By certain Fate to slow Destruction doom’d, His glorious Stock long since had been consum’d. Of Light unthrifty, and profuse of Day, The ruin’d Globe had spent his later Ray: Disperst in Beams eternally display’d, Had lost in Ether roam’d, and loose in Atomes stray’d. (127) God’s creation, the sun, still exists because it has not been around forever. Wastage and decomposition are natural aspects of the sun’s activities and gnaw at its substance. That is the way God created the sun, whose imperfections imply its dependence on the process of continued creation. In Blackmore’s ontology, such imperfections are likely to be valuable, I suggest, because they escape the recuperative logic of ultimate coherence according to which every deformed, dysfunctional, alien part is always redeemed by the goodness and harmony of the familiar whole. Put positively, we might say that the presence of imperfections points to the superiority of the will over structure and law, to an energy and vigor that is ultimately free of considerations of just design. Let me try to substantiate these possibilities.

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The importance of imperfection as an indicator of free and arbitrary creativity becomes explicit in the following lines, which address the issue of imperfection in terms of degrees of perfection: An Independent, Wise and Conscious Cause, Who freely acts by Arbitrary Laws, Who at Connexion, and at Order aims, Creatures distinguish’d in Perfection frames. Unconscious Causes only still impart Their utmost Skill, their utmost Pow’r exert. Those, which can freely chuse, discern, and know, In acting can degrees of Vigour show, And more or less of Art or Care bestow. If all Perfection were in all Things shown, All Beauty, all Variety were gone. (124) The final couplet might tempt us to conclude that these lines instruct us to redeem imperfect parts by considering the beauty of the whole. Yet Blackmore’s lines turn instead on a tension between action and structure that blocks such a redemptive course. Blackmore indicates this tension by suggesting that God’s vigor, freedom, and arbitrariness have an uneasy relationship to connection and order. God’s “aim” is connection and order, but the creative act is uneven. It exhibits different degrees of vigor and care. These variations in creative energy and attention are responsible for “Creatures distinguish’d in Perfection.” The perfections and imperfections we find in the world, in other words, do not result from God’s plans for the harmonious variety of the whole but from the variability of his actions. If his actions were uniform, Blackmore makes clear, God would be an unconscious, not a conscious, cause. Imperfection is thus not a calculated or necessary aspect of a beautiful whole; it is not the result of any external restraint God is under. It is the outcome of free, arbitrary action, whose fluctuations produce variations that are not seemingly but literally infinite because they result from an omnipotent actor who is not governed by the idea of a coherent whole. Blackmore directly analogizes human and divine creation when he first owns the defects of this world as evidence of arbitrary creation. After rehearsing Lucretius’s argument about the imperfections of the world in fifty detailed lines, Blackmore begins his rebuttal not by opposing but by accepting

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Lucretius’s premise. He declares himself “undismay’d” by his “Intrepid Foe” and accepts his idea: let us “suppose Defects in this Terrestrial Seat, / That Nature is not, as you urge, Compleat: / That a Divine and Wise Artificer / Might greater Wonders of his Art confer; / And might with Ease on Man, and Man’s Abode, / More Bounty, more Perfection have bestowed” (122). Such suppositions firm into acceptance in Blackmore’s next lines: If in this lower World he has not shown His utmost Skill, say, has he therefore none? We in Productions Arbitrary see Marks of Perfection different in degree. Tho’ Masters now more Skill, now less impart, Yet are not all their Works, the Works of Art? Do Poets still sublimer Subjects sing, Still stretch to Heav’n a bold aspiring Wing, Nor e’er descend to Flocks, and lab’ring Swains, Frequent the Floods, or range the humble Plains? (122–123) Different degrees of perfection are again not reabsorbed by the idea of a whole, a concordia discors, a chain of being, or a literary order. For Blackmore, the “Diversity of Things” is “Unconfin’d” (199). Diversity is not a principle that precedes and guides creation but springs, instead, immediately from the act of creation itself, which is marked by the occasional deployment of different levels of skill and a free mode of production. Like the poets, God cannot constantly inhabit the epic mode. Blackmore’s last two lines, in fact, suggest that God painted this lower world primarily in the more muted colors of pastoral and georgic. These less perfect kinds, Blackmore claims, do not owe their existence to some objective logic by which a certain subject matter can only sort with a certain form. Rather, Blackmore imagines literary and natural kinds as the outcome of the varying energy and skills entailed by free acts of creation. If the analogy between human and divine creation relies on humanity’s share in such divine attributes as free will and consciousness, it extends to the fact that divine and human energies vary and can produce imperfect kinds. Human and divine acts of creation are not bound by the order of kinds: their variability creates this order. The aesthetic value of imperfection is thus tied to the rejection of the structural whole as the ultimate reference point that establishes value for the parts according to ideas of harmony, balance, or coherence. The contempla-

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tion of the whole not only may be beyond human reach; it also does not direct us toward the highest manifestation of God’s power. Blackmore invites us to consider that the whole in works of art is not the best measure of an artist’s excellence. Such excellence may be more reliably measured by those moments in which artistic energy is especially intense, in certain parts. He underscores this point in Prince Arthur when he explains that the creation of man required a combination of fundamentally different substances—spirit and matter—that could only be effected by an exceptionally focused creative act.72 In this way, the quality of the part (here, humankind) matters more than the imperfect whole. Blackmore’s musings on imperfection echo some tendencies of Longinus’s treatise on the sublime, which values smaller units of composition, accepts the imperfections caused by high aspirations, and regards energy more highly than formal order.73 In this way, Blackmore differentiates himself from Dennis, who is less assertive about the value of imperfection, despite his advocacy of Longinus. Dennis’s tentative regard for imperfection has to do with his strong instincts for a certain kind of order, which can be seen in his denial that anything irregular can ever be natural. “Whatever God created, he designed it Regular,” Dennis states as flatly as Leibniz. All irregularities are only “appearing” and “seeming Irregularities.”74 Considerations of the larger natural whole eliminate such appearances, and the same logic applies “in the Creation of the accomplish’d Poem.” In such a poem, “some Things may at first Sight be seemingly against Reason,” Dennis explains, “which yet, at the Bottom, are perfectly regular, because they are indispensably necessary to the admirable Conduct of a great and just Design.”75 Considered rightly, the irregular moment is the symptom of a capacious regularity. It is a necessary aspect of the whole. Blackmore believes that such a conversion of irregularity into regularity is available in a limited way at a lower ontological level, the level of God’s ordained powers. At the highest level of creation, imperfect parts can be unnecessary, alien, and unfitted to the whole. This does not necessarily detract from their value. The irredeemable difference of such parts, indeed, points to the power of the creative act, its arbitrariness, its freedom from considerations of “just Design.” We see here, not for the last time, the remarkable access that voluntarist beliefs are able to gain to the sublime. Because Blackmore did not heed considerations of just design, Dennis was critical of Prince Arthur’s protagonist. Blackmore’s Arthur violated the decorum by which an epic hero can display only those qualities that become his status. Blackmore’s repeated renditions of Arthur as fearful, confused,

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and wavering are unacceptable to Dennis because such qualities do not fit the heroic kind. For this reason and others, Blackmore’s Arthur offends “against the Unity of Character in the Hero.”76 Dennis is right. But Blackmore may not have aimed at unity in his hero. His ontology certainly does not accept the coherence of kinds and their hierarchical arrangement as an ultimately binding horizon. In the preface to A Paraphrase on the Book of Job (1700), Blackmore rebels against the heroic canon established by The Iliad and The Aeneid and contends, with a nod to the different epic standard set by The Odyssey, that the protagonist of a heroic poem may be passive.77 “Whatever others assert,” Blackmore warms to his defection, “in my Judgment the Hero of the Poem ought not to be drawn without some Defects.”78 Virtue and Vice ought to be shown “mingled,” blended as authors “find them really existing in Mankind.”79 It is the “mixture of Imperfection,” he notes, that invites us to imitate the heroic model, an invitation that would not be issued by “a perfect Idea of Vertue and Excellency.”80 In Prince Arthur, such theoretical statements are embodied in a passage that turns inward after Arthur has delivered a confident speech to his tired troops: Success and Triumph will our Arms attend, And these rough ways lead to a glorious End. With Pleasure we hereafter shall relate These suff’rings, that will greater Joys create. He said, and all his anxious Cares supprest, And kept conceal’d his trouble in his Breast. With Looks compos’d, ’twixt pleasure and despair, Grave but serene, he bids them all repair Their strength, exhausted with much toil and care.81 It is through the suspension between despair and pleasure, gravity and serenity, the tension between exhortation and exhaustion, that Blackmore seeks to draw a more complex portrait and engage the reader. While Dennis argues that such a portrait violates the conventions of the heroic kind, it aligns with Longinus’s praise of the “contrary Motions or Impulses” he saw realized in Sappho’s famous lines on the effects of love.82 His departure from the standard Dennis asserts prompts Blackmore to reinforce his acceptance of defects and imperfection. Toward the end of his

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preface to A Paraphrase on the Book of Job, Blackmore addresses the relativity of beauty and points out that such nations as China believe that there “is great Beauty in the neglect of what we call Order and Regularity.” “What we censure as careless, wild and extravagant,” he points out, “strikes them with more Admiration, and gives them greater Pleasure, than all our elaborate and orderly Contrivances.” Recommending a “due regard for the Wisdom and Judgment of other Nations,” Blackmore seeks his freedom from literary order and aesthetic canons under the banner of relativity and skepticism, a banner that goes up easily in a cosmology that views the earth as a “despicable Spot” when compared to other planets.83

V When Creation begins to render the forms of human creativity in more detail, it becomes clear which artistic temper Blackmore prefers: one with enough vigor to decompose (and recompose) the borders and identities that seem to structure our world. The most divine effects of human artistry reveal such borders and identities as arbitrary and dissolve their seemingly natural limits. These effects depend on the will’s superior energy, which can depart from the task of imitating or idealizing nature to transfigure the manifest order, transform one thing into others. Blackmore’s attraction to such a transformative aesthetic explains why he—reservations notwithstanding—values Ovid and Lucretius and why he likes to deal in poetic charms that show the instability of essences and species. Blackmore’s account of human creativity comes in the final book of Creation, in a section that celebrates the abilities of the human mind. In twelve lines, Blackmore jogs through navigation, war, and politics, then slows down and represents oratory in sixteen lines. He begins to settle on a theme that he will trace, in an ascending line, through music, painting, and sculpture, until he reaches an unexpected summit: wood carving. This theme is the transformative energy of art and of artists. The eloquence of oratory, Blackmore argues, effects the “resistless” invasion of the human heart. Oratory’s “force” can control and excite appetite, can “bind,” “charm,” “melt,” and “sooth” us (332–333). Music is similarly forceful. It “extort[s] the Rapture, and delights the Ear” by “manag’d Impulse on the suff’ring Air” (334). In both cases, aesthetic effects are associated with the

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forceful overcoming of the borders between subject and object, even with the subjection of the self to effects that escape its control. But in achieving these effects, music relies on human creativity in a more complicated way than eloquence does. Music, Blackmore notes, increases its powers because it relies on musical instruments that are themselves the result of a remarkable transformation. Human invention “gave to breathing Tubes a Pow’r unknown, / To speak with Accents not their own” (333). This observation introduces a second aspect of the transformative powers of human art. In Blackmore’s couplet, musical instruments are a remarkable example of human artfulness because they transcend the materials from which they are made. Take the brass that makes the trumpet. Blackmore argues that, as a trumpet, brass no longer behaves in a recognizable fashion because it has been given powers it did not have before. Human invention transcends material limits and can endow one kind with qualities that belong to another. Blackmore’s next stop in his tour of the arts is painting, a human art that, for him, is close to divine creation. The painter’s pencil is guided by “celestial Reason” and vies directly with nature. While this pencil produces a “false Life,” it is also a life that can be indistinguishable from and even exceed real life, a theme that Blackmore had also explored in a series of ekphrastic poems he published in 1703.84 In Creation, he praises the art of painting for its transcendent ability to present us with “pictur’d Souls and colour’d Passions,” to make “Figures speak” without words, and to deliver feigned faces that show truer distress, woe, shame, and confusion than real ones (334). The transformative powers of the skilled painter endow his materials with a life that does not belong to them and changes the inanimate to the animate, life to heightened life, falsehood to truth. The powers of art reach an even more elevated station in sculpture. Invoking Michelangelo, Blackmore begins by stressing the superiority of his stony limbs over those animated by blood. He then sharpens his point. Praising Michelangelo, he writes: “He to the Rock can vital Instincts give, / Which thus transform’d can rage, rejoice or grieve” (335). Just as the instrument maker’s art made brass speak in a language not its own, Michelangelo’s art, in an even more dramatic transformation, inspires stones with human passion, makes them communicate in tones that belong to another species. “The silent Hypocrites such Pow’r exert,” Blackmore is pleased to fret, “That Passions, which they feel not, they bestow, / Afright us with their Fear, and melt us with their Woe” (335). The unfeeling, cold stone melts us, frightens us, and gives us something it does not possess. The metamorphosis of stone into flesh, of cold

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into warm, of inanimate into animate— our awareness of such difference and our obliviousness to it—together produce the most powerful because bordercrossing aesthetic effect. Blackmore has now reached the final stop in his tour. He presents an artist whose unique works reveal the structures of the world as arbitrary and make us see the plasticity of being: the master wood carver Grinling Gibbons. There are a number of reasons for this surprising choice. It matters, for instance, that the consummate practitioner of Blackmore’s voluntarist aesthetic was born and raised in Holland. Gibbons emigrated to England in his late teens and, after gaining the patronage of Charles II and James I, was employed by William III. Blackmore’s attachment to the Glorious Revolution and its Dutch facilitator William is well known. He must have appreciated that Gibbons brought these political associations into his poem. And these associations go further than the new political realities of 1688. They extend to the Dutch political economy, which had begun to fascinate English writers first as a threat and then as a model around the middle of the seventeenth century. Blackmore celebrates the achievement of the Dutch republic in 1711 in his poem The Nature of Man. He emphasizes the well-established association of Dutch political liberty with Dutch invention and industry. It is such liberty, he suggests, that can help us understand the Dutch transformation of water into land as well as their ability to project themselves outward, from a narrow and crowded native territory onto a global economic stage. If the Dutch turn water into land, what the land cannot provide, they seek through water: “Forc’d by the narrow Limits of their Land, / Th’industrious People leave their native Strand, / And on the Products of the Billows live, / While what the Soil denies, they make the Ocean give.” The Dutch “O’erspread the Seas, import the Arts and Growth / The various Pride of every distant Soil.” For Blackmore, who believes that Holland is “rival’d only by Britannia’s Isle,” Dutch success depends on making water and land assume each other’s function.85 It depends on the Dutch will to push past the natu ral limits of their native environment. In this way, Gibbons’s presence in the poem references not only the Anglo-Dutch alignment but a political economy that succeeds by transgressing and transforming natural limits. In Blackmore’s description of Gibbons’s art, the emphasis on moving past the native turns out to be important as well. Blackmore approaches Gibbons’s work with words that we can now recognize as central to his voluntarist aesthetic:

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Admire the Carver’s fertile Energy, With ravish’d Eyes his happy Off-spring see. What beauteous Figures by th’unrival’d Art Of British Gibbons from the Cedar start? He makes that Tree unnative Charms assume, Usurp gay Honours, and another’s Bloom. The various Fruits, which different Climates bear, And all the Pride the Fields and Gardens wear: While from unjuicy Limbs without a Root New Buds devis’d, and leafy Branches shoot. (336) Gibbons’s fertile energy is generative. His works of art are more than the result of talent and toil; they spring to life, ravishing our senses. Blackmore measures Gibbons’s creative power by the distance that separates the identity of his materials from the finished work. Cedar is the kind of wood Gibbons uses, but the more thoroughly he leaves behind its original identity, the more powerful the finished work of art is. From the assumption of “unnative Charms,” the usurpation of strange honors and blooms, the bearing of fruits from different regions of the world, to the generation of fresh organic life from sapless, rootless limbs: Blackmore shows how the most powerful and captivating art transfigures apparent order. Undoing the identity of the cedar and of wood as thoroughly as possible, Gibbons unleashes a variety that transcends the limits of nature and allows us to glimpse the plasticity of being. Blackmore imagines cedar here almost as protean as the divinely directed, shape-shifting matter he depicts in book 5 of Creation.86 Animated by “the Carver’s fertile Energy,” cedar is ready to assume almost any form. What cedar is or what belongs to it is irrelevant. The value of Gibbons’s art lies, instead, in its ability to dissolve the limits of kind, to make his materials appropriate kinds and lives that belong to others and combine things that do not belong together. Always, it is the dissolution of borders and restrictive groupings, the demonstration of their irrelevance, that lays the foundation of such value. The more thoroughly and the more strikingly the artist’s energy realizes such dissolutions, the more life the work gains. To make the cedar leave its nature and to reveal its capacious malleability is to exercise a liberty, a will, an energy that echoes the divine. Gibbons shows us that the borders that compose our world are arbitrary and contingent. Their decomposition is enabling because it reveals that the world as we ordinarily see it is the ultimate

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horizon neither of being nor of invention. It reveals that the most powerful artist is the one who is not confined to mimesis but strives instead to transfigure and remake the world. Blackmore’s choice of wood carving is helpful in this respect, too. Because it evades the distinction between craft and art, wood carving allows us to see art as a construction that competes with nature, which no longer can be said to guide the artist. The artist’s willful liberty is thus demonstrated by his work’s ability to decompose apparent and construct alternate orders. His tour of the arts over, Blackmore returns to the broader theme that occupies him in this, the final book of Creation: the liberty of the human mind. In lines that directly follow his celebration of Gibbons’s art, he extols the freedom of the will, which he praises as a “Self-moving Spring” that has “Power to Chuse, / These Methods to reject, and those to use” (336). These lines also reflect on Gibbons. They help us see another reason why wood carving is such a compelling example of Blackmore’s aesthetic vision. As a less established art that ranked below painting and sculpture, wood carving more strikingly illustrates the power of the artist’s will to choose themes, materials, and methods freely, uninfluenced by classical precedent or established hierarchy. Later in the eighteenth century, Horace Walpole would still characterize Gibbons as an “original genius, a citizen of nature” who rejected models and created freely as a true “inventor.”87 Gibbons’s inventive freedom from models adds to the contrast between energy and structure that occupies Blackmore more generally. Such energy allows the human mind to unmake and remake structures and kinds, an ability Blackmore himself had exhibited in Creation’s many counterfactual scenes. Blackmore presents an aesthetic that finds the highest value in forms of art that cross the borders between established states, positions, and identities, including animate and inanimate, observer and observed, and different kinds. When they reveal the arbitrariness of such borders, works of art partake of the divine perspective, which views them as relative and contractual— not essential to being but arbitrarily imposed on it. For Blackmore, works of art that decompose and recompose apparent order reveal the plasticity of being. Because they demonstrate the will’s ability to transcend given structures, they echo divine freedom. While the willful freedom of the creator can result in imperfections—parts that do not fit the whole or matter that finds no compelling form—they do not need to be redeemed and have independent aesthetic value. Without the voluntarist analogy between divine and human

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wills such an aesthetic would not be possible. Without the belief that order is arbitrary and imposed, Blackmore could not have developed his vision of Gibbons’s art.

VI At the end of the last chapter, I considered the differences between the transcendent and immanent ontologies I had been discussing in such thinkers as Clarke and Leibniz. Let me recall some of these differences, in deliberately broad strokes. Because they insist on an omnipotent God and believe that order does not inhere in nature, transcendent ontologies sharply limit the powers of human cognition and endorse the cognitive and theological uses of imagining alternate modes of being. Immanent ontologies, by contrast, recognize divine wisdom in the structures of the world. They elevate human comprehension while they limit the utility of imagining alternate worlds and beings. At their most extreme, they equate the actual with the possible. The mutability and arbitrariness that feature prominently in transcendent ontologies are therefore absent in immanent ones. I recall these theological orientations here because they help us understand Pope’s poetic strategies as he responds to—and takes advantage of—the disorder of kinds. Pope’s Essay on Man, my main focus in this section, has recently been unmoored from its association with rationalism, intellectualism, the chain of being, and the Platonic tradition more generally. Such scholars as James Force, Fred Parker, Tom Jones, and Courtney Weiss Smith have done much to open up Pope’s poem to a wider philosophical scope that is more appropriate to its skeptical and empiricist dispositions.88 An Essay on Man, indeed, shares the anti-essentialist tenor of Creation. It hopes to move beyond the order of kinds. Like Blackmore, Pope rejects social and natural hierarchies as keys to a true understanding of the world. No genuine value attaches to such hierarchies, which An Essay on Man exposes as arbitrary impositions. Pope’s dismissal— rivaling Daniel Defoe’s—of bloodline and social station as genuine indicators of worth makes this very clear, as does his idealizing portrait of the moral community humans and animals share in a vegetarian state of nature.89 Social and biological kinds, along with the essences that supposedly determine their identities, are revealed as the constructs of human pride and reason. In An Essay on Man, hierarchy and essential difference do not determine the order of being.

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To reveal this truth, Pope can go further than Blackmore. He contends, for example, that humans and animals, reason and instinct do not belong to different camps. They are close neighbors. In the state of nature, reason still wisely imitated instinct (3:169–170) and “Man walked with beast, joint tenant of the shade” (3:152). Even matter and form— a pair whose hierarchical relation was religiously and morally sensitive because it mirrored the link between natural and supernatural spheres— are reconfigured by Pope’s wish to show that subordination does not determine the order of being: See dying vegetables life sustain, See life dissolving vegetate again: All forms that perish other forms supply, (By turns we catch the vital breath, and die) Like bubbles on the sea of Matter born, They rise, they break, and to that sea return. (3:15–20) Pope’s remarkable suggestion that not only form but life itself is a fragile bubble whose birth and burst depends on a matter possessed of “various life” (3:13) is a high point in his attempt to unsettle established hierarchies. The idea that matter shapes form suits the anti-essentialist content of Pope’s poem, but without a God who guides matter, this idea brings Pope close to the materialist philosophies associated with such writers as William Coward, Charles Blount, and John Toland. Pope’s willingness to entertain this idea differentiates him from Blackmore, who had tied mutability to God’s continued creation and thus strengthened the distinction and relation between spirit and matter. An Essay on Man instructs us to view the world without the assistance of hierarchies and essential distinctions. Yet the more fluid scene that emerges once we follow this advice turns out to be a finely articulated order. Pope sees the ontological and epistemological uncertainty of his age as an opportunity, but he responds to it not by asserting that all order is ultimately imposed, arbitrary, and contingent, as the voluntarists had. Rather, underneath the arbitrary hierarchies and essences that humans have imposed in the course of civilization, Pope’s poem discerns a true, enduring order. An Essay on Man uses uncertainty to orient humans toward the rediscovery of an interdependent, interactive world that, once recognized and roused, can counteract difference and disunion, essences and hierarchies. Let’s have a closer look.

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Pope often reminds us that we cannot trust our always incomplete view of reality and invites us to seek wider prospects. Knowing, for example, that we “are safe in the hand of one disposing Pow’r,” we ought to be able to trust that “all Chance” is really providential “Direction,” even though this remains invisible to us (1:287–290). Such invitations to seek more inclusive views become louder when Pope makes more direct arguments for the identity or coalition of starkly different things. Mobilizing the simultaneous rotation of planets around their own axis and the sun as a simile, Pope claims that selflove really is the same as our concern for others: in rotating around ourselves, we always rotate around others (3:313–316). (Unlike Blackmore’s, Pope’s planetary vehicle brilliantly illuminates his tenor.) Interested in revealing deprivation as plenitude, he points to complex causality: considered carefully, “the joy, the peace, the glory of Mankind” is “build on wants, and on defects of mind” (2:247–248). Longer temporal sequences can achieve similar neutralizations of opposites: “What War could ravish, Commerce could bestow, / And he return’d a friend, who came a foe” (3:205–206). Finally, Pope devises concretely collaborative scenarios that reveal how opposites or a range of contending forces, through their conflicts and differences, work toward the same benign end. Thus he tells us that we should not see reason as good and self-love as bad. We should realize instead that these qualities, even as they work their separate ends, also work together to “move or govern all” (2:56). The same is true of the motley crew of passions that roils us. Though they are “born to fight,” the passions’ mixture softens them so that they can unite in God’s work (2:111–112). Pope hears the same tune in the political world, where “jarring int’rests of themselves create / Th’according music of a well-mix’d State” (3:293–294). Even as mixture is noisy, it leads to melioration, harmony, unity. And while we should not see reason as good and self-love as bad, pleasure, like ambition, can be both good and bad (2:91– 92, 2:201–202). Pope most often links these opposite qualities and values by provoking us to consider the more extended, detailed, or complex causalities that connect them. Qualities and values do not exist in isolation—they are constantly modulated and even transmuted into their opposites by the complex processes that they are involved in. Although Pope thus argues that no single action is by itself good or bad and nothing that exists is in itself perfect or imperfect, he does not reach these conclusions from a voluntarist perspective. Values for Pope are relative not because they derive from arbitrarily imposed structures and laws but, more immediately, because they emerge from the

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complex interactive tapestry in which life weaves itself, and in which even distant phenomena are causally connected or akin, often in ways that are perplexing to human beings. To animate this extensive and transformative causal network and thus to reveal the profound interactions of seeming opposites is a central poetic goal of An Essay on Man. This goal is assisted by Pope’s elaboration of an ontology that includes and relates every thing: Nothing is foreign: Parts relate to whole; One all-extending, all-preserving Soul Connects each being, greatest with the least; Made Beast in aid of Man, and Man of Beast; All serv’d, all serving! nothing stands alone; The chain holds on, and where it ends, unknown. (3:21–26) Nothing is foreign and nothing stands alone: not part from whole, not matter from form, not love of self from love of others. Pope’s deeply connected and collaborative world seeks to dissolve the difference between high and low, man and animal, in a mutual ser vice that is prompted, in the final analysis, by the divine spirit. Even God does not stand apart from the world but is diffused in it. By connecting every thing, He undercuts the separations imposed by false social and natural essences. The interlinking of each with each is so wide that distinctions, even as they persist, can be revealed as functionally secondary. What ultimately guarantees the order of the world is not the dominance of man over animal, rich over poor, but their divinely arranged interdependence. Pope thinks about this interdependence as something that is pulled or pulls itself toward a center in which division and hierarchy evaporate. “Beast, Man, or Angel, Servant, Lord, or King,” he suggests, are in the end so interdependent that they “draw to one point and . . . one centre” (3:301–302). Even matter is caught up in this movement: “See Matter next, with various life endu’d, / Press to one centre still, the gen’ral Good” (3:13–14). The center is the utopian point of fully realized interdependence and familiarity where we would be able to see divinely prompted relational action transmute difference into sameness, inequality into equality, conflict into collaboration, evil into good. Such transmutations, of course, are not directed by an interventionist God.90 They are rather the outcome of the extensive causal chain that God’s connective soul maintains.

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Pope’s God is in nature, the ultimate guarantor of an endless chain of concrete interactions between different beings in which nothing is not functional in some way (though he is far less anthropocentric than More, Pope’s ontology shares his recuperative bent).91 If God is everywhere, He is also nowhere because He is always tied to the particular, to the concrete relationship between myriad things. For More, it was a given that God expresses himself through the order of kinds—that he is most concerned with universals and least with particulars. An Essay on Man isn’t so sure. Given its view of the supreme being, Pope’s poem unsurprisingly comes close to a Deist or Stoic conflation of God and world. Such a conflation suits a poem whose procedures are tailored to demonstrating a divinely warranted relationality that inheres in nature: All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body, Nature is, and God the soul; That, chang’d thro’ all, and yet in all the same, Great in the earth, as in th’aethereal frame, Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees, Lives thro’ all life, extends thro’ all extent, Spreads undivided, operates unspent, Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part, As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart; As full, as perfect, in vile Man that mourns, As the rapt Seraph that adores and burns; To him no high, no low, no great, no small; He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all. (1:267–280) Pope’s conflation of God and world in these lines rejects the voluntarist God who is not only hovering above the world but whose operation is uneven and unpredictable, whose artistic energy wanes and waxes in a continuous creation. By contrast, Pope presents a God who is equally present everywhere, who “spreads undivided” and “operates unspent.” God’s activity—filling, bounding, connecting, equaling—leaves nothing alone, nothing foreign, nothing imperfect. This is also the aim of Pope’s poem. Such activity, in fact, illuminates a broader aspect of Pope’s poetics. It is well known that Pope has an affinity for schemes, is drawn to figures of speech more than figurative language. He

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delights in using such schemes as zeugma, chiasmus, and anaphora to connect and align different things, rearrange sequence, and deflate hierarchy. This habit is prominently on display, for example, in The Rape of the Lock (1712–1714), a poem whose ambition to elevate a lock of hair gains a dimension in light of the equal perfection that Pope’s ontology attributes to “heart [and] hair,” high and low, great and small.92 In The Rape of the Lock, a woman “stain[s] her Honour or her new Brocade.”93 In An Essay on Man, the cosmos contemplated from the divine perspective reveals “A hero perish, or a sparrow fall, / Atoms or systems into ruin hurl’d, / And now a bubble burst, and now a world” (1:88–90). The zeugma that serves to expose a lack of distinction in The Rape of the Lock becomes in An Essay on Man the means to capture the equalizing perspective of the divine being. Because it takes the same form, the exposure of false indistinction in the earlier poem resembles the poetic attempt in the later one to reflect the divine indifference to human scales. In both poems zeugma secures a range and energy for Pope’s profoundly interdependent world that could not be achieved by metaphor or simile. The extreme difference of category and scale represented by honor/brocade, atom/system, bubble/world could not be successfully joined by these tropes (how is the bubble a world or like a world, how honor a brocade or like one?). Pope’s divinely inspired activity of connecting and equaling gains significant strength when An Essay on Man cultivates schemes that realize the proximity, interdependence, and familiarity of even the most drastically different entities. The poetic procedures of Creation and An Essay on Man are similar up to a point. Emerging from a period of epistemological and ontological uncertainty, both poems seek to reveal hierarchies and orders of kinds as arbitrary. Both use strategies of decomposition. Yet for Pope decomposition is not the starting point of construction. Rather, his decompositions are produced by the extensive causalities he implies and suggests to reveal the patterns of a divinely warranted universal relationality. Pope’s goal is not the construction of an alternate order but the reconstruction of an original order that persists. The undertaking is restorative: it seeks to decompose the artificial schemes of human civilization by returning us to the “gen’ral ORDER” that “since the whole began, / Is kept in Nature, and is kept in Man” (1:171–172). After the debilitating ascent of reason and pride, Pope notes, the “Poet or Patriot, rose but to restore / The Faith and Moral, Nature gave before” (4:285–286). This historical trajectory of an increasing distortion of natural standards by arbitrary human projection is also delineated in An Essay on Criticism. It may not

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be easy to discover this natural, non-contingent aesthetic order, Pope suggests there, but nature’s “just standard . . . is still the same.”94 It can be traced and restored. By contrast, Blackmore seeks to show that all order is ultimately arbitrary. While Pope’s poetics of filling, bounding, connecting, equaling claims to reveal a structure that already exists, Blackmore’s of dissolving borders and identities denies structure ontological priority and awards it instead to energy and will. If Pope wants us to get to work in the world because it includes all we need for happiness, Blackmore wants us to realize that happiness in this world is sharply limited by the irredeemable gaps, imperfections, and decay that mar being. As a result, Blackmore’s aesthetic is open to the construction of other worlds and modes of being and has a natural affinity to the counterfactual imagination. This, too, is different in Pope. Given his investment in a true, natural order, Pope is suitably short when he takes up the counterfactual conceit of microscopic vision: “The bliss of Man (could Pride that blessing find) / Is not to act or think beyond mankind; / No pow’rs of body or of soul to share, / But what his nature and his state can bear. / Why has not Man a microscopic eye? / For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly” (1:189–194). While Pope is more inventive when he describes a heightened sense of smell or touch, his reluctance to enter the counterfactual scenario of microscopic sight in a more detailed manner springs from a wish to illustrate the binding character of divine order, its naturalness, even if that means highlighting insurmountable species barriers. In An Essay on Man, counterfactuals are overwhelmingly critical, tied to the defense of natural order. The poem does not celebrate the imagination of modes and kinds of being that go beyond the manifest and the actual. While Pope beautifully captures the perceptual world of insects—“The spider’s touch, how exquisitely fine! / Feels at each thread, and lives along the line” (1:217–218)—he devotes himself to already existing modes of being. The restraint Pope places on the counterfactual imagination owes something to his admiration for the minute fittedness of each being to its purpose and circumstance (it is this admiration that leads to the excursion into the spider’s life). To all beings, Pope writes, nature has “the proper organs, proper pow’rs assign’d; / Each seeming want compensated of course, / Here with degrees of swiftness, there of force; / All in exact proportion to the state; / Nothing to add, and nothing to abate” (1:180–184). In the realization of the fit between organs, powers, and purpose lies true happiness. The imagination’s flight toward new modes or kinds of being, distant places or futures,

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conquest or transformation, has no true use. Counterfactuals do not touch the realities of human life. They can reveal no new truth, religious or scientific. Instead, Pope’s poem counsels that human energy is best directed toward the study of the concerns of this world. It recommends the practical cultivation of appropriate relations to what is given to us and what surrounds us. The cardinal fault for Pope is the desire to “quit your sphere” (1:124), dedication to it a sign of virtue. “If to be perfect in a certain sphere, / What matter, soon or late, or here or there” (1:73–74). The hope for a different, better place, the impatience over slow change—these sentiments distract from the pursuit of happiness in the here and now. That pursuit is most likely to succeed when we aspire to know and develop our abilities and complete the fit between them and the situation we find ourselves in. Value lies in perfecting the available relationships within our sphere, not imagining new ones or aspiring to different ones. Entertaining for a moment the possibility of hand or foot aspiring to be head, Pope considers it “absurd for any part to claim / To be another, in this gen’ral frame” (1:263–264). The questions Leibniz considered pointless (Why are things the way they are? Why aren’t they different?) are also dismissed by Pope, who exhorts his reader to submit to the order of the fit.95 Pope’s reasons differ from Leibniz’s, of course. If the latter considered ours to be the best of all possible worlds because it was built on the principle of sufficient reason, Pope’s critique of our complaints about the way things are rests on the more empiricist observation that all beings seem to be fitted to their purpose. It is from this repeated observation that Pope arrives at the idea of a comprehensive relationality, the extensive landscape of collaboration and interdependence between all beings. Such meaningful interdependence is not a deducible truth but an observable, physical truth that allows us to glimpse, fleetingly, a metaphysical frame. It is in this regard, too, that the Deist overtones in Pope’s poem make sense. Pope’s emphasis on the fittedness of each being to its purpose, his insistence that human beings can see the world only and exclusively through “their own System” (argument of the first epistle), leads to the moral conclusion that “the bliss of Man . . . is not to act or think beyond mankind” (1:189–190). This stance is not far removed from John Toland, who made controversial use of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) to divorce the pursuit of a moral life from those things that lie beyond the pale of our faculties. Since essences, for example, are out of our cognitive reach, Toland argued that their knowledge is not needed for our

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lives. Because Christian mysteries are out of our reach, they play no role in moral conduct. While I cannot see a direct statement on Christian mysteries in Pope’s poem, there are stabs against institutional religion and priests—the crafty inventors, in Toland’s lexicon, of mysteries.96 These stabs make sense in a poem drawn to idealizing a divinely animated nature, to insisting that our access to God is through nature, and even to tolerating the natural religion of the “poor Indian” (1:99). An Essay on Man thus sounds a rather different religious note than the more partisan An Essay on Criticism, which twenty years earlier had condemned the Socinian demystifications that were allowed to tread the public square after William III had ascended the throne.97 “For Modes of Faith,” Pope now declares in a quite different vein, “let graceless zealots fight; / His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right” (3:305–306). An Essay on Man directs us toward peace and collaboration in the here and now. While different species are fitted into their spheres, the poem reminds us that there is no essential difference between humans and animals and that natural and social hierarchies are superficial impositions. It seeks to persuade us that true order exists in the way the equipment each being is given fits the situation each finds itself in. If we cultivate this fit, the poem suggests, we begin a relational circle that gently ripples outward and establishes a sense of being at home and at peace in the world. Nothing will or can seem foreign, fundamentally different, or radically unequal— every thing is embraced, close by, and familiar, even that which seemed distant and strange. The poem displaces hierarchical structure through a relational structure that begins in the immediate surroundings of each singular being but gradually builds outward and ultimately comprehends all being. The door thus opens to a happiness (life’s purpose) that is qualitatively the same across all ranks and species. Being is unified independently of hierarchy.98 If humans are not at home in the world, that is not an existential condition (as it is for Blackmore) but a historical one that can be changed by heeding divine nature’s call for a unifying relationality.

VII In Blackmore’s world, energy and structure, freedom and law, will and reason, exist in profound and irreconcilable tension. Blackmore stresses the need for structure, law, and reason but clearly recognizes that these resources can

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only impose ultimately weak external restraints on superior forces. That’s a good thing in the end. For all the poor use that humankind has made of them, energy, freedom, and will are also able to reveal the nonbinding character of worldly structures and move us toward a transcendent perspective from which all order (including nature) can be recognized as imperfect, arbitrary, and contingent. Such recognition encourages modes of invention and construction that do not depend on existing models and authorizes the imagination of different modes of being. Sublime works of art find here their spiritual and political function. For Blackmore, the difference between freedom and law is stark, yet the superiority of the former is to be expected. The revolution of 1688 was, in his mind, precisely such an assertion of the freedom of the will against political structures that were turning oppressive. In this way, the voluntarist and the Whig meet the practitioner of the sublime. The difference in Blackmore’s ontology between structural and transcendent powers is absent in Pope’s. An Essay on Man depicts a world of immanence. It is a place where nothing is alien, where every thing belongs together, where even instinct and reason complement each other and do not define human freedom against the involuntary life of animals. Pope’s poem does not appeal to possible worlds, to perfections that remain unrealized or unavailable on earth. Imperfections are man-made, and all that is required for our happiness is already here. That is why Pope’s sublime is restrained, as James Noggle has emphasized.99 We can observe such restraint in An Essay on Criticism when it seeks to tame invention and deformity. After presenting nature as the eternal guide of art in the opening of his poem, Pope turns to artistic inventions that seem to steer novel routes. He returns them quickly to nature’s haven. Pope concedes that, on some occasions, the rules we possess fail to serve our artistic course. If in such cases the artist’s “lucky LICENCE” steps in and realizes the aim, such license becomes a rule. Pope’s assertion of the freedom of literary invention defines it as an experimental function that discovers laws and settles rules.100 Similarly, what strikes us as error in literary works turns out, in the best of them, to be strategy.101 Contemplated from due distance, deformity “reconciles to Form and Grace,” and the whole rather than the part should always be the final consideration in our judgment of a work of art.102 “No single Parts” should “unequally surprise.”103 Accordingly, the praise of Longinus Pope offers is brief and a little equivocal. Pope describes him as “an ardent Judge” who is “Zealous” and “gives Sentence” “with Warmth”: not quite the balanced and just critic Pope recommends elsewhere in his poem.104 The

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imperfections that Longinus or Blackmore accepts because they originate in intense artistic energy have not much standing in a poem that seeks to reconcile invention and rule. Though he confesses to be wary of such generalizations, Noggle has sought to contrast the basic tendencies of the Tory and the Whig sublime. He suggests that the sublime of such Tory satirists as Pope and Swift turns on a “depiction of the mind’s failure to grasp the absolute object.”105 Such an object is nonetheless needed, he adds: it enables the failure, which unsettles the subject and confirms authority. The absolute object always remains out of reach. In the Tory vision, then, there is no traffic between structural and transcendent powers, only a reminder that these powers exist and that the bridge between them can never be crossed. By contrast, Noggle points out, “the Whig aesthetic tradition typically describes an exceptional feeling, or nonrational intuition, a sensation that excess affords us— a medium through which a higher level of grounding or authority appears, incomprehensible yet finally reassuring and fundamentally constitutive of a particular, enforceable social order.”106 While I agree with Noggle when he characterizes the sublime in a Swift or Pope as the refusal of a transcendence that the Whig tradition courts, I do not believe that Blackmore’s voluntarist aesthetic reassures the self about its place in a particular, enforceable social order. Nor is there much in voluntarism that is fundamentally constitutive. Such sentiments are more characteristic of a Dennis or Shaftesbury (whom Noggle associates with the Whig sublime) who believes that order inheres in nature. The voluntarist Whigs I examine—Bentley, Clarke, Blackmore, Locke, Defoe—proceed on the opposite assumption, and their use of the sublime tends to undo or exceed apparent order, opening up the constructive potential of counterfactuals and of imagining alternate modes of being. Voluntarist assumptions, indeed, cut across Tory and Whig divides. They open up constructive possibilities even in Swift’s skeptical sublime, as we shall see. Pope’s own refusal of transcendence, meanwhile, does not lead him to abandon the quest for a better world. After all, Pope’s poem draws a utopian vision of a more equal, more collaborative order. In fact, Pope’s anti-essentialism can be more radical than that of Blackmore, who separates humans from animals by invoking the will and who secures the difference (and relation) of spirit and matter through the idea of a continued creation. Pope is happy to risk these differences. This is one of the affordances of an immanent ontology, which, on the other hand, does not find much use for the imagination

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of nonexistent kinds and modes of being. That remains the preserve of transcendent ontologies that assert the priority of will and energy. Even as it is built up from the ground, from every being’s relational circle, structure remains ontologically primary in Pope’s poem. If incomprehension is inescapable in Blackmore’s world, comprehension is possible in Pope’s. Nothing is outside, nothing isolated. Every thing is included and all we need is already here. We just have to look closely and carefully. The world is intelligible.

Chapter 4

Embarrassed Invention Stillingfleet, Locke, and the Style of Voluntarism

The most powerful, influential, and—at least initially— controversial statement of voluntarist thought in the late seventeenth century was John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Locke’s Essay significantly amplified the sense of a disorder of kinds when it argued that the established distinctions and rankings of different beings were human inventions. While Locke agreed that the Christianized atomism promoted by his friend Robert Boyle was the most probable explanation for the phenomena we can perceive, he insisted that we have no idea what the actual constitution of natural things is. Whether there were any essential differences in nature was an open question. All human beings could do, Locke believed, was to observe and reflect on particular things and the properties they display. It was clear that this could be a potentially endless task, and all the more so because Locke believed that the qualities of things depended more on the bodies that surrounded them than on what they contained.1 The theological foundation of this empiricist program is the gap between weak humans and an infinitely powerful creator. This gap is the metaphysical hinge of Locke’s philosophy. “He that will consider the Infinite Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of the Creator of all Things,” Locke explained in the Essay, “will find reason to think, it was not all laid out upon so inconsiderable, mean, and impotent a Creature, as he will find Man to be.” God did not reflect his excellence in creation; humans are “one of the lowest of all intellectual beings.”2 This belief is the foundation for Locke’s assertion that the nature of things is uncertain, that we do not have innate ideas or a priori

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knowledge, and that we are therefore bound to the drudgery of accumulating particular observations. The world was not made for our comprehension. Relief from such drudgery could come in the form of wonder about the incomprehensible ways in which the things of the world operate. “Though the familiar use of Things about us, take off our Wonder,” Locke observed, “there is not so contemptible a Plant or Animal, that does not confound the most inlarged Understanding.”3 Our wonder about how the things of this world work may dull over time, but its cause endures. It lies in the omnipotence of the divine creator, whose maker’s knowledge of even the simplest beings we cannot access. Whenever we shake off our familiarity, we can be confounded by a leaf of grass and returned to a sense of the gulf between our mediocre capacities and divine creation. Because it removes the true nature of things from our grasp and suspends, amid potentially endless particulars, our desire to identify, name, and class, Locke’s empiricism resisted closure, expanded wonder, and authorized the counterfactual imagination.4 While Locke’s religious thinking was eclectic and evolved almost continually, his empiricism owed an unmistakable debt to voluntarist theology.5 Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, was highly critical of voluntarism.6 He was especially interested in the moral consequences of the assertion that principles of order did not inhere in nature or were inaccessible to humans. In a letter, he characterized the moral philosophy of his former tutor Locke as follows: “Virtue, according to Mr. LOCKE, has no other Measure, Law, or Rule, than Fashion and Custom: Morality, Justice, Equity, depend only on Law and Will: And GOD indeed is a perfect Free Agent in his Sense; that is, free to any Thing, that is however Ill: For if he wills it, it will be made Good; Virtue may be Vice, and Vice Virtue in its Turn, if he pleases. And thus neither Right nor Wrong, Virtue nor Vice are any thing in themselves; nor is there any Trace or Idea of them naturally imprinted on Human Minds.”7 Shaftesbury’s comments suggest that a theist argument that denies inherent, natural order (here in the form of God’s imprint on human minds) is bound to elevate the divine will above any objectively existing principle or standard. Therefore, it is God’s will alone that can make anything good or bad. “Nothing in nature,” as J. B. Schneewind characterized Locke’s thought, can “set a moral limit to God’s will.”8 Locke believed that the “true ground of morality” was to be found neither in nature nor in the infinitely various practices of different societies. That ground “can only be the Will and Law of a God, who sees Men in the dark, has in his Hands

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Rewards and Punishments, and Power enough to call to account the Proudest Offender.”9 Shaftesbury dramatizes Locke’s position, but he correctly associates him with voluntarism, as did others at the time.10 Shaftesbury communicated his thoughts in private correspondence, but Locke’s philosophy received a far more public challenge from Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester. While Stillingfleet had become “the leading theologian and apologist of the Church of England” in the 1690s, Locke was increasingly suspected of religious heterodoxy if not outright atheism.11 Peter Browne, William Sherlock, Thomas Burnet, and Stillingfleet were among those who argued that Locke’s philosophy did not accommodate religious belief, which required more than the evidence of the five senses and our reflections on such evidence.12 But it was Stillingfleet who became the most prominent challenger of Locke’s thought in the years following the Glorious Revolution. Stillingfleet’s brand of latitudinarianism rejected the idea that the nature of things was out of reach for humans. Influenced early by Henry More, he belonged to the “Anglican platonizing tradition” and defended established church dogma by invoking a world in which order inheres and whose contemplation allows us to recognize our place in creation.13 He helped select Richard Bentley for the Boyle lectures, but Stillingfleet’s defense of the established faith against Locke’s thinking did not invoke irreducible variety and incomprehension. This argument belonged instead to the religiously suspect Locke. In Chapter 2, I focused on the alliance between new science and established religion. In this one, I discuss how a defender of the church attacks an exponent of the new science. The public debate between Locke and Stillingfleet lasted from 1697 to 1699. Its immediate occasion was the mystery of the trinity. The trinity had long played a central role in Christians’ attempt to define their faith against others. Elaborating this doctrine became important in the eleventh century, when Christian philosophers and churchmen sought to assert their faith against Islamic and Jewish competitors. The trinity became a major point of differentiation. As Stephen Gaukroger has reminded us, the philosophical attempt to make sense of the trinity in the Middle Ages involved securing the simultaneous sameness and difference of the three persons of the trinity— the father, the son, and the holy ghost—an undertaking that mobilized the conceptual world Plato and Aristotle had raised around such ideas as species, universals, and essences.14 While the details of this attempt need not detain us here, it is worth recalling that the debate about the trinity had become so heated that William III issued an injunction in 1696 that explicitly forbade

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the use of “all new terms” in the debate.15 Stillingfleet saw Locke as an offender of this sort: someone who undermined established belief by using new terms. He believed that Locke’s critique of essences and kinds challenged the mystery of the trinity, a doctrine that not only was central to the definition of Christian faith but helped safeguard the spiritual authority of the Anglican Church. The debate between Locke and Stillingfleet deepens our understanding of the cultural effects metaphysical questions had in this period. As we shall see, the debate is a surprisingly rich archive for gauging the social, political, and stylistic extensions of metaphysics. It is especially instructive for understanding how a philosophical disagreement about essences and about form and matter can shape the invention of distinctive styles of writing, one broadly voluntarist, the other broadly Neoplatonic. Such understanding is assisted by Locke’s highly self-conscious participation in the debate. There are several reasons for his self-consciousness. One is his (real and pretended) inability to understand exactly how An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is involved in the debate about the trinity. Another is his lively sense of the social decorum that he should observe with someone as powerful and distinguished as Stillingfleet (even as he is convinced that Stillingfleet is no match intellectually). A third source of self-consciousness is Locke’s relative inexperience as an author whose ideas are being transmitted and tested publicly, in the medium of print, in an environment that only recently had removed all licensing restraints from the printing press. A related unrestraint can be found in the proliferation of new print products, to which the Locke-Stillingfleet debate contributed. It unfolded in what Jonathan Swift considered the commercially most popular form, the letter. Swift’s critique of this form turns on its attractiveness for writers who cannot “contain” themselves and who fill supposed letters with such inappropriate contents as “long Schemes in Philosophy” and “Laborious Dissertations in Criticism and Philosophy.”16 Given its prominence, the exchange between Locke and Stillingfleet may well have been on Swift’s mind when he penned this critique. His comments are perceptive. As we shall see, the questions of how forms accommodate matter and what happens when authors cannot contain themselves also preoccupy our antagonists, who prove unusually interested in meditating on their different ways of writing and how they are affected by print culture. Locke’s embarrassed invention, as we shall see, responds to a fall into matter that the form of the letter accommodates but that also leaves the author adrift in the sea of his own preoccupations. Not only

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Locke’s medium but his mode of composition belong to the modern authorship that Swift exposed and imitated in A Tale of a Tub (1704). Locke became involved in the debate with Stillingfleet after his friend John Toland had made controversial use of the Essay’s argument that we do not know the essences of things, but only some of their properties and qualities.17 In Christianity Not Mysterious (published in 1695, just after the Licensing Act had lapsed), Toland adopts the basic empiricist stance of Locke’s Essay. He placed strong limits on human understanding and secured the ontological foundations of these limits by arguing that God has fitted us to our limited purposes during our lives on earth. Toland amplifies such fitness until it delegitimizes mystery. God fitted the human species so closely to life on earth, he explains, that we can only perceive things insofar as “they are useful and necessary for us.” Using sight as an example, he suggests that we may not be able to see “any thing as it is in it self, but [only] as it bears some relation to us. What is too minute, as it escapes our Sight, so it can neither harm or benefit us.”18 By so pushing to the extreme the fit between our biological makeup and our moral purpose, Toland excludes from God’s plan for humans those things that they cannot perceive. We are not constituted to see “any thing as it is in it self,” and for that reason essences will forever elude us. And if essences are not useful or necessary, neither are mysteries. We cannot see them, and they thus have no function in our divinely ordained lives. As Toland argues at the end of his book, mysteries like the trinity do not come from God but from priests and kings interested in manipulating the common people, a stance that resonates with Locke’s own growing anti-clericalism.19 Christianity Not Mysterious was condemned as heretical by the Irish Commons, who ordered it burned by the public hangman and sought the arrest of its author. It provoked numerous responses and rebuttals. Stillingfleet’s response became the vehicle by which Locke found himself drawn into a public controversy about the trinity. Locke protested that the question of the relationship between father, son, and holy ghost did not concern his philosophy. Yet he could not leave it alone either. Stillingfleet had read Toland’s book and seen the help Toland derived from Locke’s argument about essences. In 1697, toward the end of a long life, Stillingfleet published A Discourse in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity to set matters straight. He argued that essences are “real” and “unchangeable”: “they do not depend on the Ideas of Men, but on the Will of the Creator, who hath made several sorts of Beings.”20 Stillingfleet felt that questioning the reality of essences or plac-

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ing them out of reach caused trouble for a rational account of the trinity (which he was interested in protecting), because such an account had to explain the trinity as the combination of three distinct persons in one divine essence. Once you contested the reality of essences, he believed, a rational explanation of the trinity was out of reach. As my comments about Locke’s self-consciousness have intimated, the tussle with Stillingfleet was about more than the problem of essences or the status of the trinity. While it began as an intellectual disagreement, the debate found additional fuel in social issues. We can see this in a letter Locke wrote to his friend William Molyneux on February 22, 1697. Molyneux was an experimental philosopher and constitutional writer who formed a close friendship with Locke in the early 1690s. He will not play much of a role in this chapter, but I am obliged to mention that he was interested in literature. He was particularly fond of Richard Blackmore, whose first two poems, Prince Arthur (1695) and King Arthur (1697), prompted him to comment to Locke that “all our English Poets (except Milton) have been meer Ballad-makers in Comparison to him.”21 Molyneux and Locke may, indeed, have played a role in persuading Blackmore to write Creation (1712). Molyneux asked Locke on May 27, 1697, to press Blackmore to write “a Natural History of the Great and Admirable Phaenomena of the Universe,” a poem he expected to “afford sublime Thoughts.”22 Locke was happy to oblige, but responded that his admiration for Blackmore had more to do with his empiricist approach to medicine, which Locke thought Blackmore had laid out admirably in his preface to King Arthur. Locke and Blackmore, in fact, shared this approach to medicine. They owed much to their acquaintance with Thomas Sydenham, one of the most impor tant modernizers of traditional medical practice in the seventeenth century and a deeply committed anti-royalist who acted with bravery in several battles during the Civil War.23 But let me turn from these attractions to the main drama. In the letter of February 22, Locke replies to Molyneux’s suggestion that he take on Stillingfleet because he was “a Man of Great Name” and therefore demanded a response.24 He tells Molyneux that, despite his distaste for public controversy, he has already drafted an answer to Stillingfleet. He sharpens the motivation for his involvement in this way: “I cannot allow any one’s great name a right to use me ill.” Locke overcomes his reluctance to enter the ring of public controversy because he needs to protest the right of great names to offer ill usage to those who lack such authority. This ill usage, Locke hints, has to do with the “slye design” of Stillingfleet’s critique.25 Stillingfleet’s high

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rank and learned reputation and the way these forces support a sly design against the Essay prompt Locke to make his first move. The combative tenor of Locke’s debate with Stillingfleet was underlined three months later. On May 15, Molyneux gives Locke news about some initial impressions his first reply had made on other readers. Molyneux reports that one reader (a bishop) wrote him that he felt Locke had “fairly laid the Great Bishop on his Back.” Another reader (a bishop as well) told Molyneux that, though Locke’s “Words were as Smooth as Oyl, yet cut they like a twoedged sword.”26 Molyneux writes again on July 20 to tell Locke about Stillingfleet, who has by now responded to Locke’s initial reply. Molyneux is incensed by Stillingfleet’s attempt to associate Locke’s philosophy with Socianism and calls it an “invidious Insinuation” that deserves the “name of Malice.”27 Class resentment, sly designs, malicious tactics: Locke’s voluminous responses to Stillingfleet were composed in circumstances that smoldered with some real heat. As if to confirm our habits of separating being from knowing, this heat has not figured much in accounts of the controversy. Maurice Cranston notes the “hurried composition” of Locke’s initial response but thinks that “Locke made his points effectively.”28 Locke’s third response “showed signs of impatience,” but Locke “had no difficulty in showing that Stillingfleet’s argument was vitiated by misuse of language.”29 John Yolton describes Locke’s responses to Stillingfleet as straightforward and rational. They are “free from personal animosity: [Locke] tries to meet the challenges and to explain his position.” Locke’s most recent biographer, Roger Woolhouse, reflects a similar view. Though he recognizes some of the heat of the controversy, he patiently discusses the disagreements between the two, occasionally contrasting Locke’s clarity with Stillingfleet’s obscurity.30 Locke scholars have readily attended to the matter, but rarely to the manner, of the debate. This is unfortunate in part because Locke becomes quite interested in the manner of the debate—in how social position, temperament, and metaphysics jointly shape different ways of writing. Locke’s self-consciousness makes his three responses to Stillingfleet richly symptomatic. They are obsessive and highly recursive, and display plenty of irritation. They reveal an impatient, inexperienced, proud author who, despite his resentment of class privilege, initially submits to the yoke of social and generic propriety. His first letter, Locke explains at a later stage, “might have passed for a submissive complaint.”31 As the debate wears on, Locke is searching for relief from such submission. His resources are limited, but he eventu-

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ally finds a kind of half-irony, occasional sarcasm, and a fastidiousness that quickly turns prolix. Locke is embarrassed by such relief because it looks like he loses his grip on composition. He does not like how the personal, social, and generic dimensions of a public controversy about philosophy turn him into a writer who can’t help himself. Already at the end of his first response, Locke remarks: “Upon a review of these papers, I can hardly forbear wondering at myself what I have been doing in them; since I scarce find upon what ground this controversy with me stands, or whence it rose, or whither it tends” (94). Locke describes himself as a writer who does not quite know what he has gotten into or what he is doing. At this stage of the debate, this characterization is more strategic than substantive, but it anticipates what will happen later on. To find more substantive relief from his embarrassment, Locke begins to motivate his compositional disarray by linking stylistic to social and philosophical differences. I am stating this too symmetrically, but what Locke tries to do over the five hundred pages it takes him to reckon with Stillingfleet’s one hundred is to make us recognize that the latter’s social and rhetorical forms correspond to a philosophical argument that asserts the reality, knowability, and unchangeability of species, essences, and forms. At the same time, Locke suggests that the increasingly shapeless writing he produces reflects his class position and belongs to an argument that denies, if not quite the reality, then at least the knowability and unchangeability of species, essences, and forms. It belongs to a view of the world, in other words, in which order does not inhere in nature. Locke claims his writing as an expression of the freedom of the will to shape modes of composition independently of established forms. In these ways and others, Locke seeks to redeem his defects and shortcomings— even his embarrassing prolixity—as a voluntarist style. He suffers decomposition first and then seeks to make something of it.

II Locke indicates the social meanings of philosophical difference when he coats himself and Stillingfleet with liberal sprinklings of irony. Throughout his three responses, Locke repeatedly stages the controversy as a conflict between characters from different spheres of life. The debate takes place, in Locke’s script, between a commoner bound to narrow pursuits and a nobleman of expansive views: whereas Locke casts himself as shortsighted, mean,

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low, ignorant, and slow, he presents Stillingfleet as farsighted, noble, elevated, learned, and swift.32 Such characterization supports and subverts the social difference that irks Locke. Locke can sound fairly convincing in his assumed role as a lowly questioner of elevated verities. He makes effective use of this stance in the debate with Stillingfleet and in his Essay.33 Yet at the same time, the terms that Locke uses to describe his two characters form such a neat contrast that we are invited to squint at an ironic inversion of high and low, of the differences that separate Stillingfleet and Locke. Locke does not want us to do more than squint. He does not desire a full inversion. His irony remains circumscribed by what he wishes to hold onto as genuine personal and social differences. His project of redeeming the excesses of his style, as we shall see, requires these differences. The need for them becomes clear in the apology that he appends to his first response. Locke writes: “If I have any where omitted any thing of moment in your lordship’s discourse concerning my notions, or any where mistaken your lordship’s sense in what I have taken notice of, I beg your lordship’s pardon; with this assurance, that it was not willfully done. And if any where, in the warm pursuit of an argument, over-attention to the matter should have made me let slip any form of expression, in the least circumstance not carrying with it the utmost marks of that respect that I acknowledge due, and shall always pay to your lordship’s person and known great learning, I disown it; and desire your lordship to look on it as not coming from my intention, but inadvertency” (94). We are still in the submissive phase of Locke’s exchange with Stillingfleet. The subject of this apology is decorum, the worry that Locke may not have used the proper forms that belong to a controversy with someone as distinguished and elevated as Stillingfleet. Locke’s worry is that his manner of expression does not suit the social situation of debating the Bishop of Worcester, member of the House of Lords. Locke explains that he may well have been so absorbed by the “matter” under discussion that he neglected the “form” that should govern exchanges with a superior. The apology comes on the heels of a paragraph in which Locke acknowledges that Stillingfleet has “a quicker sight and larger views than I have” (94). He thus builds on a theme that had already been aired in the first response (28) but is more fully developed in subsequent replies: the theme of the lowly, mean, shortsighted commoner who cannot follow Stillingfleet’s “nobler flights” (139). Meanness and shortsightedness, Locke hints, predispose him to being absorbed by matter. Such overattention suggests a compulsive earthbounded-ness— a lack of freedom and independence, a compromising need

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to work the material realm, to engage with what is at hand, coarse, ordinary, soiled. Locke’s shortsightedness is not simply personal. It symbolizes a specific class difference: because the commoner is compelled to tend to his immediate needs, he is not always able to observe the proprieties and forms that the nobleman has leisure for. Locke’s apology thus turns on the confession that his social position renders him a little helpless, a little accident-prone. For this reason, he can hope that his unfortunate, compulsive absorption will not have to sue long for pardon from the sovereign mercy of the nobleman. With these suggestions about the controversialists’ relationship to matter and form, Locke straightens and broadens his ironic social portrait. Locke’s character and Stillingfleet’s begin to open up to affiliations that extend from an ironically rendered personal and social difference to moral, epistemological, and ultimately metaphysical motifs. We will see shortly how Locke and Stillingfleet develop these motifs, but I should identify one epistemological theme right away. Stillingfleet’s association with farsightedness harmonizes with his insistence on the knowability of species and essences—on the reality of a simpler and purer realm behind surface particulars. Associating Stillingfleet with forms and farsightedness made sense because of his debts to Platonizing Anglicans. A major representative of this tradition is More, whom Stillingfleet met in 1653 when he started attending St. John’s College, Cambridge. Although he sought some distance from More’s insistence on the theological usefulness of Platonism, Stillingfleet’s epistemology continued to be colored by Platonic assumptions.34 These assumptions can be viewed in fairly strong hues in More’s writings. In 1662, Stillingfleet had recommended part 2 of More’s Antidote against Atheism (1653) because readers could there find a persuasive argument for the divine origins of a beautiful and orderly universe.35 More had argued that the “exquisite contrivance” of natural things, which goes far beyond the requirements of “bare existence and continuance in the world,” is irrefutable evidence of a divine origin of the world.36 In Chapter 2, I discussed the fish bladder, which for More shows an intricacy and elegance of design that exceeds the simple need to move up and down in water. Such intricate design is evidence of divine agency. We can see such design, but what is more important to More is that we can understand its excellence. Such understanding indicates the spiritual cast of our minds. It is only humankind that can recognize and reflect on its kinship with divine nature. More expresses this beautifully in a passage that meditates on our relationship to plants. He writes that “there is that Curiosity of forme and beauty

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in the more noble kind of Plants bearing such a sutableness and harmony with the more refined sense and sagacity of the Soul of Man, that he cannot chose (his Intellectual Touch being so sweetly gratifide by what it deprehends in such like Objects), but acknowledge that some hidden Cause much a kin to his own nature, that is intellectuall, is the contriver & perfecter of these so pleasant spectacles in the world.”37 The visual perception of form and beauty is transformed into something intellectual and spiritual. It is transformed into a scene of recognition in which man connects the more elaborate contrivance of noble plants to his own and God’s spiritual perfection. No such recognition, as we have seen, is available in voluntarism. Voluntarist thinkers did not believe that God imprinted his perfections on nature or on our minds. For them, the world we find ourselves in is unfamiliar and incomprehensible. Not surprisingly, More is also a strong advocate of innate ideas. In 1653, he rejects the notion that Locke would make central to his philosophy, that the soul of man is “Abrasa Tabula, a Table book in which nothing is writ.” Thinkers who contend that the “soul has no Knowledge nor Notion, but what is in a Passive way impressed or delineated upon her from the objects of Sense,” More contends, fail to realize that there is a distinction “between extrinsecall occasions and the adequate or principal causes of things.” “Outward objects,” he notes, “are rather the reminders then the first begetters or implanters” of knowledge. The “Mind of man being jogg’d and awakened by the impulses of outward objects is stirred up into a more fulle and clear conception of what was but imperfectly hinted to her from externall occasions.”38 What More explains here is a model of knowledge that works by recollection and comprehension, by letting particulars find their place in a larger, preexistent order of which we have at least intuitive knowledge. Because the soul has “a more full and exquisite knowledge of things in her self, then the Matter can lay open before her,” her most characteristic operation is to place, classify, and subordinate external perceptions within the larger compass of knowledge that she received from God.39 Locke’s tabula rasa leaves man ignorant and thus dependent on external sense impressions whose ideas he laboriously has to compare and connect. By contrast, More’s inscribed tablet gives man a cognitive architecture that receives, recognizes, and places perceived phenomena. Cognition does not depend on sense impressions; it draws on the mind’s innate sense of forms and relationships to include and sort particular impressions in a preexistent and divinely guaranteed structure. More’s views inform Stillingfleet’s critique of Locke, and they play an important role in Locke’s analysis of Stillingfleet’s style, as we shall see soon.

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Locke’s association with shortsightedness and matter, meanwhile, chimes with his assertion that we do not partake of divine knowledge and are bound to the immediate qualities of things. Shortsightedness thus resonates even beyond the personal and the social and includes the human—the “poor and weak understandings” (184) that God has given us. Locke’s self-deprecating low persona suits his epistemology. Similarly, Locke’s personal (and socially regrettable) tendency of overattending to matter aligns with what many commentators criticized as the lowly sensualism of Locke’s philosophy, which roots our most noble and sublime ideas in the most immediately perceivable qualities of things.40 In Locke’s statements, a very particular and obsessive mode of attention to writing is allied to a kind of materialism. We can begin to see, then, how Locke figures philosophical differences through personal, social, and human qualities. Locke was very annoyed when Stillingfleet picked up on his preoccupation with matter and his neglect of proper form. In his answer to Locke’s second letter, Stillingfleet writes: I was not a little surpriz’d at the length of your Second Letter, considering the shortness of the Answer contained in it: But it put me in mind of the Springs of Modena mention’d by Ramazzini, which rise up with such a plenty of Water upon opening a Passage, that the Undertaker is afraid of being overwhelm’d by it. I see how dangerous it is to give occasion to a Person of such a fruitful Invention to write; for Letters become Books, and small Books will soon rise to great Volumes, if no way be found to give a Check to such an Ebullition of Thoughts, as some Men find within themselves. I was apt to think the best way were, to let Nature spend it self; and although those who write out of their own Thoughts do it with as much Ease and Pleasure as a Spider spins his Web; yet the World soon grows weary of Controversies, especially when they are about Personal Matters.41 Stillingfleet extends Locke’s own admission that he is easily absorbed by matter and forgetful about form to Locke’s mental production of shapeless, personal matter (by which he means Locke’s grievances over the allegedly unfair means Stillingfleet had used to drag the Essay into a controversy over the trinity). Stillingfleet charges that Locke’s second response overflows with personal matter to such an extent that it drowns the social and generic form

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that his text is supposed to assume: that of a letter fitted to the occasion of providing an answer to a superior. Locke’s thinking is so fruitful and inventive that a minor opening such as Stillingfleet’s thirty-six-page answer is all it takes to prompt a cascade of words that overwhelms every thing. The irrepressible flow of matter rising up in Locke’s mind spills over generic boundaries: letters metamorphose into books and small books swell to large volumes. It is no longer form that organizes matter but matter that uncontrollably creates its own unshapely forms. Stillingfleet calls such frightening productivity an “Ebullition of Thoughts,” an apt metaphor that associates Locke’s mental productivity with the bubbling agitation of liquids and invokes figurative meanings that associate ebullition with sexual or civil disorder. In this context, the twice-used term “rise” calls up the rebellion of matter against the restraints of social and political form. For Stillingfleet, Locke’s disregard for proper form is a direct result of his overattention to personal matter. Locke’s obsessive particularity and rebellious self-absorption make him oblivious to the vehicles that are used to communicate in a hierarchical society. Locke’s ebullition disregards social and generic differences. It defies form. Stillingfleet’s comments on the ebullitions of Modena hit their target firmly in the center, as is clear from Locke’s repeated reference to them.42 The Modena comparison rankled because it caught Locke in the midst of his embarrassment—his discursive incontinence. And yet, remarkably, Stillingfleet’s astute diagnosis did not stop Locke from producing his third and longest, most obsessive and repetitive response. Locke still calls it a “Reply” to Stillingfleet’s letter, but it weighs in at three hundred pages and thus exceeds in length each of his first two responses by over two hundred pages. What better proof that Stillingfleet’s diagnosis of ebullition and formless excess is accurate, especially since Locke returns, at greater length than before, to a discussion of what Stillingfleet had branded as the personal matter of Locke’s grievances over the means by which his Essay was drawn into the controversy?43 The extent to which Locke lives up to Stillingfleet’s diagnosis in his third response indicates that he has decided to own Stillingfleet’s critique.44 Locke knew that Stillingfleet’s charge of formlessness was not unfounded (hence his irritation about the Modena comparison). His own “want of understanding,” he notes with self-deprecating irony, “against my will multiplies the words of my answer” (300). In response to the real dilemma that lurks behind such irony, Locke strengthens the connections between his philosophical differences and the personal, social, and generic aspects of his debate with Stilling-

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fleet. He gradually comes to acknowledge his decomposing flow as an effective weapon. To understand this process, we first need a description of how Locke construes the social behavior of his opponent’s writing.

III Stillingfleet’s colorful diagnosis of his writing contributes to Locke’s growing interest in Stillingfleet’s forms—his “manner of quoting” (211), his “manner of excerpting” (80), his “way of writing” and “arguing” (124, 471, 493), and (of course) the “manner of [the Essay] being brought” (196) into a controversy that Locke claims, with little success, not to be concerned in (I assume that these ways and manners are what is “slye” about Stillingfleet’s design). Locke’s first and most persistent complaint about the ways in which he is pulled into a controversy over the trinity concerns Stillingfleet’s manner of quotation and inclusion. Locke charges that Stillingfleet “thought fit to jumble my book with other people’s opinions after a new way, never used by any other writer that I ever heard of” (226). This supposedly new way involves, at its most basic, the “join[ing] something that is mine with something that is not mine” (47). Damagingly, Stillingfleet obscures the lines of the jointure. It is never clear, Locke contends, where one author’s property begins and the other’s ends.45 One effect of such obscuring is that “I was so every-where joined with others, under the comprehensive words they and them, though my book alone were every-where quoted, that the world would be apt to think, I was the person who argued against the Trinity” (211). Locke refers to a tendency in Stillingfleet’s writing that agitates him to no end: the use of plural pronouns to refer to the “gentlemen of this new way of reasoning” (106).46 Locke feels helpless and angry about such comprehension. Stillingfleet’s “comprehensive words” make it impossible to establish a clear title of ownership. They undermine Locke’s ability to mark the extent to which he is answerable, responsible, or concerned: “I am forced to beg your lordship to let me know, who those persons are whom your lordship, joining with me, entitles with me to these words of my book; or to whom your lordship joining me, entitles me by these words of mine to what they have published, that I may see how far I am answerable for them” (55).47 Locke wishes to escape from being “so placed in such an association with others, that will hinder me from knowing what is my particular guilt and share in the accusation” (126). Stillingfleet’s comprehension swallows Locke’s particularity.

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Locke realizes that the disempowerment he experiences is indebted to print culture. Stillingfleet uses print to deploy quotations and pronouns and thus create the public impression that Locke, Toland, and the Unitarians belong to the same species, the “gentlemen of this new way of reasoning.” Locke wishes that the conflict with Stillingfleet could be settled in a court of law, but he realizes that “in controversies in print, wherein an appeal is made to the judgment of mankind, the strict rules of proceeding in justice, are not always thought necessary to be observed; and the sentence of those who are appealed to, being never formally pronounced, a cause can never be dismissed as long as the prosecutor is pleased to continue or renew his charge” (127). In the court of print, the prosecutor can proceed differently. Simply by dint of durable record and repetition, he can keep false charges alive endlessly. This is Locke’s frustration. It is one of the reasons, I believe, for his flight into ever-expanding quantity. In print culture, continuity and repetition alone keep charges and countercharges alive. By the time he sits down to write his third response to Stillingfleet, Locke seems to have realized that there is no way to settle the dispute. If you choose to repeat something in print, this something will stay alive. It cannot be put down and finished. Locke has accepted this lesson when he writes his lengthiest reply to Stillingfleet. The boundless prolixity and repetitiveness of this third reply is at least in part attributable to the rules of controversy in print culture, in the public sphere. “Renewing and enlarging,” as Stillingfleet describes it at one point, are crucial strategies in such a battle.48 Locke articulates the class privilege of Stillingfleet’s “comprehensive ways of expressing” (300) most clearly when he analyzes Stillingfleet’s use of particles in sentences. This includes those particles by which Locke feels himself “comprehended” (45) among the gentlemen of the new way of reasoning, namely “such slight words as them and those” (211). Stillingfleet’s loose and arbitrary way with such particles had already come under Locke’s microscope before his third response, and Stillingfleet had then protested that he suffered “a hard Fate” under such a “severe Critick” who, “for the least Ambiguity” in his use of “But, and For, and Them, and It. . . . will fill up Pages in an Answer, and make a Book look considerable for the Bulk of it.”49 “Opening a Passage,” to use the phrase Stillingfleet deploys in his Modena simile, produces an interminable flow. Reacting to this complaint in his third response, Locke turns to sarcasm. He observes that Stillingfleet’s way with particles “is a privilege your lordship

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makes great use of, and therefore have reason to be tender of it, and to cry out against those unmannerly critics, who question it. Upon this consideration, I cannot but look on it as a misfortune to me, that it should fall in my way to displease your lordship, by disturbing you in the quiet, and perhaps antient possession of so convenient a privilege” (212). Locke’s attention to particles is a case of poor manners—of a disregard for proper modes and forms— and disturbs the ancient privilege of his lordship. Such ancient privilege gets recast a little later in what is one of the more biting moments of Locke’s social analysis of style. Unlike himself, Locke charges, Stillingfleet exercises “absolute power” over the placement of the word “they” (253). It is such lordly power, transmitted by print culture, that Locke believes ropes his Essay into the company of Toland and the Unitarians. Locke broadens his social analysis of style when he explains that Stillingfleet’s neglect of particles undercuts “the relation and dependency of the parts of [his] discourse” (218).50 Locke points out that his inconveniences as a critic of Stillingfleet’s prose are “possibly fitter to be endured, than that your lordship, in the run of your learned notions, should be shackled with the ordinary and strict rules of language; and, in the delivery of your sublimer speculations, be tied down to the mean and contemptible rudiments of grammar: though your being above these, and freed from servile observance in the use of trivial particles, whereon the connexion of discourse chiefly depends, cannot but cause great difficulties to the reader. And however it may be an ease to any great man, to find himself above the ordinary rules of writing, he who is bound to follow the connexion, will have his task much increased by it” (257). Locke plays a variation on his social portrait of the two controversialists, now tuned to their relationship to language. Whereas he presents himself as the enduring, servile critic who is shackled and bound by the mean, the contemptible, and the ordinary, Stillingfleet is associated with the sublime, with ease, with being above and free of any such ties. Locke consistently imagines Stillingfleet’s freedom in contrast to his own bound position, a strategy that dramatizes social difference and suggests that the freedom of Locke’s opponent does not exist absolutely and by itself but is always a “freedom from.” Whereas Locke carefully tends to trivial particles and the connections they make, Stillingfleet is swiftly pursuing “learned notions.” Such notions, Locke makes clear elsewhere, derive from “scholastic language, and the less obvious ways of learned writings” (203). They include the concepts that are at the forefront of his philosophical disagreement with

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Stillingfleet: essence, species, substance, and form. Stillingfleet’s habit of deploying these noble concepts lifts him above the lowly task of tending to particles and particulars, which naturally falls to the shortsighted and matterprone Locke. A comprehensive style thus works against the mean particles on which the connectedness of discourse depends. Comprehension and connection are at odds. Locke had devoted a chapter to particles in the Essay, in which he talked of them as a crucial and much-neglected part of grammar.51 Their importance lies not only in the “connexion[s]” they make between ideas but in the way they “shew or intimate some particular action” of the mind, whose “several Postures” in discoursing they delineate.52 Particles are an especially complicated aspect of grammar. They have often “the sense of a whole Sentence contain’d in them” and, to make matters worse, do not exist in sufficient numbers to capture all the mind’s actions.53 For this reason, Locke observes, particles have acquired numerous meanings and functions. The particle “but,” for example, can be readily shown to have five different meanings and functions depending on the way it is used. In fact, Locke continues, “if it were my business to examine it in its full latitude, and consider it in all the places it is to be found,” he would find “a great many other significations.”54 Locke’s complaint about Stillingfleet’s negligent treatment of particles contains the more damaging suggestion that Stillingfleet fails to disclose the actions of his mind, perhaps because it is incapable of detecting subtle differences in the way ideas connect, or because it hopes to make sly suggestions. A remarkable example of Locke’s obsessive concern with Stillingfleet’s lordly treatment of particles can be found in his second reply. It allows us to see how, in response to Stillingfleet’s comprehensive manner, Locke cultivates an attitude of incomprehension. Fueled by social and intellectual resentment, this attitude produces a kind of writing that wants to document and expose, in painstaking detail, the power of a style that relies on strategies of vague inclusion. Locke’s absorption by the mean, the contemptible, and the trivial is forcefully on display in a performance that wants to be composed, but fails. Let me set the scene. The philosophical issue under discussion is the certainty of knowledge, but Locke is, characteristically, more interested in the manner in which Stillingfleet reflects Locke’s relationship with the likes of Toland. Stillingfleet had initially argued that Locke’s epistemology, like Toland’s, relies on clear and distinct ideas for certainty of knowledge. Locke had disputed this and noted that the

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agreement and disagreement of ideas—their connection—was his way of establishing certainty. In his response to Locke, Stillingfleet observes that the agreement or disagreement of ideas cannot produce much certainty unless the compared ideas are clear and distinct, a point Locke makes himself in the Essay.55 Locke’s tie to Toland would thus seem to stand. Then Stillingfleet writes the sentence that keeps Locke busy for five pages: “But finding your self joyned in such Company which you did not desire to be seen in, you rather chose to distinguish your self from them, by denying clear and distinct Ideas to be necessary to Certainty.”56 Locke complains, over and over again, how difficult it is to establish the meaning of this sentence, a difficulty that he claims points to its invidious power. Locke develops five discrete interpretations of Stillingfleet’s sentence and scrutinizes, in particular, Stillingfleet’s use of the particle “rather.” In the following passage, Locke presents interpretations two, three, and four (indicated in square brackets): You say, “I rather chose:” rather! than what, my lord, I beseech you? Your learned way of writing, I find, is every where beyond my capacity; and unless I will guess at your meaning (which is not very safe) beyond what I can certainly understand by your words, I often know not what to answer to. It is certain, you mean here [two], that I preferred “distinguishing myself from them I found myself joined with” to something; but to what, you do not say. If you mean [three] to owning that for my notion of certainty, which is not my notion of certainty, this is true; I did and shall always rather choose to distinguish myself from any of them, than own that for my notion which is not my notion: if you mean [four] that I preferred “my distinguishing myself from them, to my being joined with them;” you make me choose, where there neither is nor can be any choice. For what is wholly out of one’s power, leaves no room for choice. (226) Locke’s excited response to what he will call Stillingfleet’s “incomprehensible way of writing” (229) does not react to an incomprehensible sentence. Stillingfleet’s statement is easily understood. It uses “rather” to express Locke’s preference or choice to distinguish himself from Toland by denying that certainty rests on clear and distinct ideas. Why does Stillingfleet’s “rather” prompt such excited exegesis?

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Locke is eager to criticize Stillingfleet’s particle as failing to operate as an adverb that contrasts alternate courses of action. Locke models such use in his third interpretation of Stillingfleet’s sentence: I “shall always rather choose to distinguish myself from any of them, than own that for my notion which is not my notion” (my emphasis). Locke wishes that Stillingfleet had articulated this meaning more clearly. The ultimate issue and the source of Locke’s excitement is his belief that, here and elsewhere, Stillingfleet has deprived him of the ability to choose. “ ‘I rather chose:’ rather!”: Stillingfleet’s suggestion that Locke can choose to leave the company Stillingfleet has joined him with is the source of Locke’s irritation. After Stillingfleet has associated him slyly and publicly with the likes of Toland, Locke feels he has no way of getting out. “Rather” is upsetting because it calls up an agency that Locke no longer has. This is the core of the meaning he deciphers in the fourth interpretation. Locke may be able to distinguish his positions from the new men of ideas, but after being tied to them in print by Stillingfleet’s comprehensive style, he can no longer untie himself. Locke’s anger over being comprehended prompts him to unleash, rather willfully, his interpretive energy on a pretty straightforward sentence. Stillingfleet would likely have classed this moment as one of those when Locke is overtaken by personal matter and makes himself vulnerable. Locke himself concedes as much when he acknowledges the legitimacy of Stillingfleet’s question whether he really is a “man of so little sense?” (227). Locke has gotten so deep into the controversy that a fairly unassuming, simple sentence becomes an object of intense hermeneutic scrutiny. Protesting that he cannot quite make sense of Stillingfleet’s sentence, Locke concludes that it “discover[s] a secret in your way of dealing with me, [rather] than any thing in me that I am ashamed of” (227). The conclusion sounds false. Locke does seem ashamed of the kind of writing he produces in response to Stillingfleet. His five-page interpretation of a single sentence that turned on the uncertain meaning of a single particle illustrates a real predicament. Locke has made himself vulnerable not only to charges of an obsessive concern with small particles but to the claim that it is disabling to philosophize without the guiding light of essences. Locke struggles to counter Stillingfleet’s sublime, his farsightedness, noble flights, and elevated concepts, but his uninhibited descent into particularity is profoundly bathetic. “It is like you will say here again,” Locke tells Stillingfleet after his remarkable performance, “this is a nice criticism” (226). “I grant, my lord,” he continues, “it is about words and expressions: but since I cannot know your

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meaning but by your words and expressions, if this defect in my understanding very frequently overtake me in your writings to and concerning me, it is troublesome, I confess; but what must I do? Must I play at blind-man’s buff? Catch at what I do not see? Answer to I know not what; to no meaning, i.e. to nothing?” (226–227). Locke’s posture of incomprehension is performative, but it reflects a genuine dilemma. There is despair mixed in with the irony that covers Locke’s admission of his defects. Distress is visible in the philosopher who cannot compose his own writing. I trust it is becoming clear that Locke is creating remarkable links between the personal, social, stylistic, and material aspects of his philosophical disagreement with Stillingfleet. The longer the debate runs, the more it emerges that Locke interprets Stillingfleet’s comprehensive style as the function of a class privilege that finds attractive new opportunities in the public domain of print culture. I also believe that Locke’s sense of his own style has started to come into view. It is a compromised and even embarrassing critical style characterized by an absorption by matter, neglect of form, copiousness, and detailed scrutiny of meanings and relations activated by even the smallest parts of speech. We might call it, in more positive terms, a voluntarist style that accepts incomprehension as part of the human condition, that assumes that order and meaning are not given, are not tied to essences and kinds, but emerge uncertainly and incompletely from the close examination of particular relationships. It is a style that relies on the authorial will, even a certain willfulness, to leave behind established structures and forms. Locke sheds his embarrassment and embraces the powers of his style at one point in his third response to Stillingfleet. He returns to the charges of ebullition and prolixity. But this time, “Ramazzini and his springs of Modena” (203) are grasped as an effective weapon. Locke starts in a conciliatory manner, but he ends combatively: “your lordship need not be afraid of being overwhelmed with the ebullition of my thoughts, nor much trouble yourself to find a way to give a check to it: mere ebullition of thoughts never overwhelms or sinks any one but the author himself; but if it carries truth with it, that I confess has force, and it may be troublesome to those that stand in its way” (203). Locke then quotes and agrees with Stillingfleet’s statement “how dangerous it is, to give occasion to one of such a fruitful invention as I am, to write” (203). Locke’s ebullition, invention, and copiousness are here owned as perhaps even dangerous strategies against lordly privilege, a comprehensive style, and batteries of authoritative concepts.57 Locke seems no longer embarrassed about losing control. He is beginning to present his

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expansive and even willfully particular style as a powerful antidote to Stillingfleet’s social and rhetorical forms.58

IV Stillingfleet’s and Locke’s joint invention of stylistic difference unfolds the social meanings of the relationships between form and matter in Neoplatonic and voluntarist frameworks. Metaphysics leads to style when Stillingfleet and Locke associate their disagreement about form and matter not only with social and philosophical differences but also with different analytic and expository habits. These habits prioritize comprehension in Stillingfleet and incomprehension and connection in Locke. Stillingfleet’s way of writing respects established forms, concepts, and thinkers. It constructs arguments by generous inclusion, classification, and subordination. It wants to recognize patterns and place individuals in groups, drawing clear boundaries around these groups by highlighting shared essential traits. The reduction of difference is an important goal. It might be helpful to associate this kind of writing with what Michael McKeon has described as the “anti-individualist and idealizing tradition of romance,” not least because Stillingfleet’s linguistic manner resonates both philosophically and socially and thus suits the two dimensions of McKeon’s argument.59 By contrast, Locke’s way of writing cultivates what he calls a “freedom of style” (258) that includes everyone’s “liberty to please himself in his terms” (144). It includes the liberty of “invention”—of spinning things out of your own thoughts (136). Locke makes arguments “in train,” as he puts it in his chapter on particles, by closely analyzing the relationships of the parts— even minute parts—that constitute an object, be it a sentence, a letter, or an idea.60 The meaning of such simple particles as “but” and “rather” cannot be defined. They cannot be reduced to an essence, and their meaning—just like that of certain sentences— emerges unsteadily and provisionally from what can easily seem like an infinite number of contexts and possibilities. These different analytic and expository habits also point us to the compositional principles that generate Stillingfleet’s and Locke’s writing. Different modes of enlargement are operative, one driven by comprehension, the other by connection, one seeking to collect particulars in larger pools of resemblance, the other finding its generative impulse in particulars and the infinite variety of their relationships, identities, and functions. Locke’s an-

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noyances with Stillingfleet’s comprehensive style provoke his willfully particular “nice criticism.” This may well be a distinctive achievement that looks forward to the strategies of close reading that literary scholars have done so much to develop in the twentieth century. But inventing a mode of criticism that recognizes irreducibility as a basic hermeneutic condition is painful, not least because Locke and Stillingfleet recognize how their philosophical positions shape their writing. Locke feels the stylistic price he is paying so acutely because his mode of analysis and exposition has been linked to his philosophy, not just by Stillingfleet but also by himself. By the end of the controversy, Locke’s incomprehending manner, his painstakingly particular way of writing, and his seemingly formless length have become stylistic symptoms of his empiricism. When Stillingfleet points to Locke’s “nice criticism” and his “ebullitions,” he suggests that this is what happens to writing when it disregards kinds, essences, forms—it cannot compose itself. That is part of the reason why Locke responds with a mixture of shame and irritation to the decomposition he suffers in writing. The pain Locke felt may have been all the more vivid because his approach to the comprehensive behavior of Stillingfleet’s writing was probably paved by an earlier encounter with his work. That encounter took place in the early 1680s and was prompted by the problem of the diverse religious kinds that had emerged in the 1650s and seemed to threaten national unity. Though initially viewed by dissenters as an ally inside the Church of England, Stillingfleet endorsed “comprehension” in 1680 as a solution to the problem of religious diversity. “Comprehension” had become a prominent term after the restoration to describe various scenarios for including moderate nonconformists in the Church of England.61 Stillingfleet’s argument for comprehension first appeared in his sermon The Mischief of Separation (1680). It met with almost universal rejection by nonconformist writers.62 Locke was familiar with this sermon as well as the book Stillingfleet published to defend it. In the early 1680s, he wrote a lengthy response to Stillingfleet’s argument for comprehension. He criticized Stillingfleet for characterizing episcopacy as the true primitive form of church government, but expressed considerable sympathy for comprehension as a remedy for religious and national disunion.63 Stillingfleet’s sermon employs imagery that may well have suggested the ways in which Locke characterized his great opponent in the trinity debate after he had changed his mind about comprehension. Twice in his sermon Stillingfleet figures the virtues of religious comprehension (“a Rule which limits and determines the manner of practice”) in

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contrast to the dangers of toleration (“a Rule of Charity and mutual forbearance, with a liberty of different practice”) by invoking the socially weighted distinction between far- and shortsightedness that Locke would use so effectively against him sixteen years later.64 About religious factions, Stillingfleet observes that “those who are engaged below in the Valley, fighting in small parties,” fail to “espie the hazard they are in,” hazard that only “their Commanders in chief” can spot from the “higher ground” they occupy. The “Wisdom and Conduct of Governours,” he continues in the same vein, “is quite another thing from the Zeal and Courage of inferior Persons. . . . Those who stand upon higher Ground and see further than they can do, must be allowed a better capacity of judging what makes for the safety of the whole, than they can have.”65 Toleration, in other words, is that which the shortsighted, zealous, and socially inferior prefer. Small parties are the only thing they can see. Comprehension is the mode that the farsighted and socially superior advocate. Liberty of practice is dangerous for the whole. As John Marshall has shown, unlike Stillingfleet, who argued for comprehension as late as 1689, Locke gradually changed his mind.66 Already in the early 1660s, Marshall suggests, Locke had become more insistent on the right to individual moral inquiry. When Locke wrote his first letter on toleration in 1685, comprehension no longer played a role.67 Incomprehension— toleration—had moved to the fore. Locke argued that because final knowledge of true religion is inaccessible to weak human beings, they have to make do with beliefs and faiths and cannot reach singular truth.68 William Popple, an acquaintance of Locke’s and the translator of his A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), praised Locke’s letter for setting “Absolute Liberty, Just and True Liberty, Equal and Impartial Liberty” against “Acts of Comprehensions.”69 Locke’s diagnosis of Stillingfleet’s comprehensive style during the trinity debate is indebted to the contrast between an incorporation of religious differences and the free association of such differences. Here, too, comprehension clearly contrasts with connection: Stillingfleet does not trust the equal and free relations between multiple bodies as an organizing principle of civil society. Locke does by 1685, when his letter on toleration draws analogies between the free and equal relations persons have to each other in civil society, the relations different churches have in civil society, and the relations different nations have on the global stage.70 The “diversity of Opinions” produced by such different groupings, Locke believes, is not the cause of “all the Bustles and Wars” that have happened on behalf of religion—the “refusal of

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Toleration” is.71 While he rejects the toleration of Catholics, Locke emphasizes that no “sort of Professors” “ought to be excluded from the Civil Rights of the Commonwealth”: “Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Arminians, Quakers [and] neither Pagan, nor Mahumetan, nor Jew.”72 Disagreeing in 1689 with his friend Philipp van Limborch, who favored comprehension, Locke argued that ecclesiastical peace would prove elusive “unless the establishment of equal liberty for all provides a bond of mutual charity by which we all may be brought together into one body.”73 Difference, in other words, relates.

V In conclusion, I would like to expand on the voluntarist assertion of a liberty of invention. This assertion collided painfully, as we have seen, with the realities of social class and print culture in Locke’s debate with Stillingfleet. But Locke practiced such liberty nonetheless, and this frequently caused controversy. One of the more remarkable instances of this was Locke’s suggestion— criticized by Stillingfleet and many others—that matter, if properly composed by God, may think. I would like to spend some time with this suggestion. It helps underscore that we need to revise our understanding of empiricism. The suggestion appears in a section of the Essay devoted to the extent of human knowledge. It grows out of a basic point Locke makes about these limits, that “the extent of our knowledge comes not only short of the reality of Things, but even of the extent of our own Ideas.” For example, we have the “Ideas of Matter and Thinking, but possibly shall never know, whether any mere material Being thinks, or no; it being impossible for us, by the contemplation of our own Ideas, without revelation, to discover, whether Omnipotency has not given to some Systems of Matter fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think, or else joined and fixed to Matter so disposed, a thinking immaterial Substance.” Because the nature of thinking is “remote from our Comprehension,” we cannot exclude the possibility that an omnipotent God may have given the power to think or perceive to certain stones or plants. “The present Circumstances of our Beings and Constitutions” force us to be content with “Faith and Probability.”74 Thus, there can be no contradiction in assuming that God may have endowed mere matter with perception and thought. The liberty of invention Locke displays in this counterfactual conceit provoked extensive debate.75 It was threatening to Stillingfleet because it

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impaired our ability to prove, from the idea of thinking, that a “Spiritual Substance” exists within us.76 If matter can think, thinking is no longer a spiritual property of the soul, as had long been assumed. Because it confounds spirit and matter, Locke’s counterfactual questions the immateriality of the soul, which has to exist independently of matter to ensure the divine origins of humankind, the possibility of a final day of judgment and of resurrection, the authority of the church, and the moral order of society.77 Locke defends his counterfactual by arguing that denying its validity is tantamount to setting limits to God’s power.78 Unlike More’s, Stillingfleet’s, and Shaftesbury’s, Locke’s theology turns on the distance between human and divine spheres, on the unbridgeable gulf between mediocrity and omnipotence. It is this gulf that authorizes the counterfactual imagination of possible modes and kinds of being and makes it the instrument by which we can not only discover the limits of our knowledge but pave the way for discoveries that lie beyond these limits. The voluntarist emphasis on an omnipotent God and a human being that is cut off from divine knowledge allows counterfactuals to become constructive tools that give cognitive standing to even as provocative an idea as thinking matter. The irony here is pointed, since it is the very assumption of an omnipotent deity free to will whatever is not contradictory that allows Locke to posit the possibility that matter may think, thus undercutting a distinction dear to defenders of Anglican orthodoxy. The idea of an omnipotent spiritual being makes the collapse of spirit’s difference from matter possible. Locke’s conceit displays the same expansive logic of possibility that allowed medieval voluntarists to speculate that God could have sent a donkey instead of his son as the redeemer of mankind.79 From a perspective that views order as inherent and decipherable, as my discussion of Leibniz showed, counterfactuals easily seem suspicious. Stillingfleet’s anger over Locke’s conceit was probably driven not just by its content but by the constructive form it took, which had no sanction in Neoplatonically inflected theologies. But for Clarke or Blackmore or Locke, counterfactuals are theologically sanctioned inventions that can lead to additional knowledge. They are constructive and open up being beyond what we can observe from our limited station. Locke’s reliance on the invention of counterfactual scenarios (see also Chapter 2) should help us put more thoroughly to rest the reduction of empiricism to the motto “nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses.”80 We should be able to see more clearly the relationship of Locke’s voluntarist empiricism—precisely because it condemns us to particulars and their

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connection—to a sense of possibility and truth that reaches beyond the manifest, beyond the sensory, beyond the merely physical. Such reach is certainly evident in the idea that matter may think since we do not have any sensory knowledge of thought or matter. But it is also true for more concrete counterfactuals, say, a plant that can see. In this case, we are drawing on what we know through our own senses, but our recombination of kinds and properties nonetheless points to metaphysical truths that our senses cannot confirm. Such freedom of invention, indeed, is asserted in the Essay when Locke insists that human beings are free to create ideas and words that do not correspond to anything actually existing.81 “The same liberty Adam had at first to make any complex Ideas of mixed Modes, by no other pattern, but by his own Thoughts,” Locke argues, all men still have.82 This God-given liberty to invent mixed modes is related to the counterfactual liberty Locke defends in his dispute with Stillingfleet. We are free to devise imaginative scenarios that do not correspond to anything that we know exists and that, for this reason, can assist the understanding of realities that lie beyond our perceptual grasp. Such scenarios define knowledge as a realm established not just by perception and reflection but also by imagination. In this way, something is in the mind that was not first in the senses.

Chapter 5

The Constructive Swift Between the Hope and Fear of Decomposition

Of all the writers I have discussed so far, Jonathan Swift reacted most virulently to the disorder of kinds. The emergence of new religious kinds in the seventeenth century was no cause for celebration. For Swift, it was disturbing evidence of the chaos that ensues when the human mind freely indulges its appetite for invention. Samuel Parker’s fear of a commonwealth “overrun with numberless divisions and subdivisions of sects” was also Swift’s.1 He believed that, if left unchecked, “the rising and spreading of new Sects” will have no end and “a Nation may possibly have an Hundred different Sects with their Leaders.”2 Infinite variety was a genuine possibility, and it was a profound threat to national unity. Annoyed by those who were weaving fond analogies between natural and religious variety, Swift snapped that God was not as “delighted with the Variety of Faith and Worship, as he is with the Varieties of Nature.”3 He accepted toleration only as an unfortunate historical necessity. Swift had a similar diagnosis of political life. Here, too, new kinds had sprung up. The parties of Whig and Tory, for example, had emerged in the 1680s. Swift was a keen chronicler of the extensive cultural changes that these quickly entrenched divisions had wrought. “The insignificant Brood of Followers in a Party,” he observed, had inserted party divisions in “every Condition, and Circumstance of Life.”4 “To breed Discord among Friends and Relations” and to fill “all Places with Disturbance and Confusion” were among the regrettable effects of such factionalism.5 In A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome (1701), Swift explained that he had written the book because of the ill effects of “that Variety of Factions, in which we are still so intricately engaged.”6 The

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violence of those factions, he thought, had only increased after the revolution of 1688.7 They, too, undermined unity. These concerns made Swift an interested inquirer into the nature of factions and sects, how they form and how they cohere. In the pages of the Examiner, he posed this broad question: “What Societies of Men are in closest Union among themselves”? He answered: “Those who are engaged in some evil Design, or who labor under one common Misfortune.” After going through some examples of the former (“Troop of Banditti,” “Knots of Highwaymen,” “Tribes of Sharpers”), he turns to the union enjoyed by “FellowSufferers under any Misfortune, whether it be in Reality or Opinion.” One example is “the Papists throughout this Kingdom, [who suffer] under those real Difficulties which are justly put on them.” Another is “the several Schisms of Presbyterians, and other Sects” who suffer, less legitimately, “under that grievous Persecution of the modern kind, called Want of Power.” “The Reason why such Confederacies are kept so sacred and inviolable,” Swift proposes, “is very plain; because in each of those Cases I have mentioned, the whole Body is moved by one common Spirit, in pursuit of one general End, and the Interest of Individuals is not crossed by each other, or by the whole.”8 The individual and the group, the particular and the general are seamlessly aligned. Such excessive unions come about when a single overriding spirit merges diverse parts into one body. In “A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit” (1704), Swift analyzes the problem of excessive union at the level of the individual. When his speaker discusses the transformations caused by sectarian enthusiasm, he ascribes them to an abstraction from matter, an artificially induced bracketing of the senses that effects “a lifting up of the Soul . . . above Matter.” The mechanical induction of an enthusiastic state, in this analysis, depends on interrupting the ties to the material realities of the world normally ensured by sense perception. In the enthusiastic individual, the portals that open us toward the world are partially closed, facilitating spiritual transport “beyond the Sphere of Matter.”9 Political factions depend on a similar distortion of sense perception. Swift explains this when he addresses the effects factions have on their members. Excessive union, he argues, deforms the parts of the whole—on more than one level. “Parties do not only split a Nation,” Swift points out in the Examiner, “but every individual among them, leaving each but half their Strength, and Wit, and Honesty, and good Nature; but one Eye and Ear, for their Sight and Hearing, and equally lopping the rest of the Senses.”10 In this

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way, factions withdraw from unrestrained contact with the community and “compose a Body always in Reserve.”11 These examples illustrate that Swift analyzes the proliferation of new social kinds according to a playbook that was already current, as we saw in Chapter 2, in the seventeenth century. In this book, such new kinds owe their emergence and cohesion to a delusional essentialism that allows form to reduce or depart from matter and thus undercut national union, open exchange, and common interest. The central problem of his culture, Swift believed, was its division by multiple entities built on abstraction, purity, self-enclosure, and falsely essentializing distinctions. New sorts of religion, new political and philosophical tribes threatened the social and political order of the nation. Since at least the 1650s, Swift thought, this had been a growing problem. His vocabulary for such innovative structures was extensive: in addition to species, he used “kind,” “sort,” “knot,” “body,” “set,” “sect,” “party,” “faction,” “tribe,” “class,” “race,” and “denomination.” Marshaling such an array of often synonymously used terms, Swift indicates his concern about a human invention that could arbitrarily devise new entities that wield significant power and increase conflict in society.12 If John Ray or Edward Tyson no longer quite knew how to map seemingly endless biological varieties, Swift saw a related dilemma when he contemplated the proliferation of human-made kinds in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century society. Distinctions multiplied, questioning our ability to maintain or conceive of overall unity. Swift’s reaction to this disorder of kinds resembled that of Hobbes and Pufendorf, whose works he knew.13 Swift looked around himself and saw overwhelming evidence that the world had no inherent capacity for order and goodness. Like these two voluntarists, he concluded that all order had to be imposed from the outside on a mutable scene and the frail, self-loving, and unreasonable individuals that populate it. “The weakness of all human wisdom,” he thought, was obvious.14 In a sermon that defended the doctrine of the trinity he observed that “the Growth of an Animal, of a Plant, or of the smallest Seed, is a Mystery to the wisest among Men.”15 “Reason itself,” he noted in the same sermon, “is true and just.” “But the Reason of every particular Man,” he went on, “is weak and wavering, perpetually swayed and turned by his Interests, his Passions, and his Vices.”16 Love of self is usually stronger than reason. As this picture of humankind intimates, Swift did not believe that God had imprinted his perfections on nature, for us to scrutinize and decipher.

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“Where is even thy Image on our earth?” Swift once wondered out loud.17 To the atheist argument that “Storms and Tempests, unfruitful Seasons, Serpents, Spiders, Flies, and other noxious or troublesome Animals . . . discover an Imperfection in Nature” he responded by conceding that these phenomena were part of God’s plan. The divine creator had left earthly things “in a State of Imperfection” so that humans could “interpos[e] a Remedy by Thought or Labour.”18 Our guide to distinguishing between right and wrong, meanwhile, could not be found in nature or in us, no matter how deep our search. External restraints and incentives had to be applied. Human beings are constituted in such a way, Swift argued, “that we can never pursue any thing heartily but upon hopes of a reward.”19 This reward God had instituted when He “commanded [man] to be obedient to the Laws.” “Fear and Hope,” Swift explained, “are the two greatest natural Motives of all Men’s Actions.” “When Conscience places before us the Hopes of everlasting Happiness, and the Fears of everlasting Misery, as the Reward and Punishment of our good and evil Actions, our Reason can find no way to avoid the Force of such an Argument.”20 God is essentially “a Rewarder” and “a Punisher,” and “Religion is . . . the highest Instance of Self-Love.”21 Such views of law as the command of a superior, such separation of goodness and being, places Swift’s moral philosophy in the company not only of Hobbes’s and Pufendorf’s but also of Locke’s and Blackmore’s. Swift’s belief that order is an arbitrary imposition also shaped his understanding of social institutions. Swift’s defense of the Anglican Church, for instance, did not rest on distinctions of essence and accident. The Anglican Church did not represent the true essence of Protestantism. Just as different forms of government were not innately better or worse, the Anglican Church did not possess the eternal truths of religion. It did not have a natural or inherent right to national leadership. “There is no Manner of Doubt,” Swift confesses in his reply to Matthew Tindal’s The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted (1706), that the government “may abolish Christianity, and set up the Jewish, Mahometan, or Heathen Religion. . . . they may do any Thing within the Compass of human Power.”22 For that reason, the Anglican Church, even though it was currently in possession as national church, needed fighting for—and it was worth fighting for not because it was the true church but because it was the established church that had served Britons well for generations. Similar to Montaigne, whose conservative skepticism influenced him, Swift’s recognition of arbitrary institution explains his fierce embrace of the established church.23

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The fierceness of Swift’s attachment to the established order, his even authoritarian defense of tradition and what he called the “common Forms” have been much commented on.24 What has perplexed many scholars is how Swift’s conservatism can go along with traits seemingly opposite. Daniel Eilon, for example, notes that Swift can seem to place “revolutionary modernism alongside strains of profound conservatism.”25 Seamus Deane describes a long tradition in Swift criticism that has puzzled over the “peculiar emotional intensity” Swift can bring to a table that, at the same time, sets out “the shallowest complacencies of Augustan common sense.”26 From F. R. Leavis (to whom this assessment belongs) Deane passes to Edward Said. He notes that Said similarly considers Swift’s sanity “always under threat from the intensity; an ordinary and extraordinary universe are combined within one vision that can thus appear either commonplace or uniquely uncompromising.”27 To Patrick Reilly, one of the few scholars to recognize Swift’s voluntarist orientation, Swift’s contradictions—“liberty-loving authoritarian, rationalist despairing of reason, despiser and champion of the Irish”— are equally confounding.28 For a book on literary invention, the most interesting contradiction may be Swift’s celebration of authorial freedom. “Swift delighted,” Michael DePorte has reminded us, “in what he once called the ‘Godlike’ power of imagination.”29 Writing to John Gay, Swift insisted that “the world is wider to a Poet than to any other Man.” “For as Poets in their Greek Name are called Creators,” he continued, “so in one circumstance they resemble the great Creator by having an infinity of Space to work in.”30 In A Tale of a Tub, as DePorte also notes, Swift’s speaker boasts about the inexhaustible semantic richness of his writing.31 In the same text, he observes that the “Imagination can build nobler Scenes, and produce more wonderful Revolutions than Fortune or Nature will be at Expence to furnish.”32 The observation is ironic, but the irony is self-protective. Swift’s comments to Gay about the analogy of divine and poetic creation indicate that he is behind his speaker’s embrace of the power of the imagination. Swift believed that he was free to create works that exceeded nature, and A Tale of a Tub (1704) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726) amply testify to such an artistic credo. But how does such creative freedom chime with Swift’s insistence on established forms, his social authoritarianism? For Reilly, there finally is no relationship between Swift’s “authoritarian paternalism” and his “wild outlawry.”33 There is only contradiction. The “search for unity,” he counsels, has to be abandoned.34

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Reilly concedes that no historical context—no philosophical, religious, or political worldview, and no worldly interests— can really account for Swift’s contradictions. Rather, such contradictions are the idiosyncratic manifestations of a complicated and unpredictable human being. Despite his excavation of voluntarism as an important context for understanding Swift’s authoritarianism, Reilly finally throws in his lot with those who have made Swift’s psychology the explanation for all that seems excessive and contradictory in his work.35 Psychology has provided capable models for understanding Swift’s unique strengths, but it has also led us to underestimate the explanatory powers of philosophy.36 I would like to remedy this imbalance, though not at the cost of disregarding psychology. I have emphasized that voluntarism’s double-edged ontology enables a remarkable combination of psychological responses. Because it declares all order arbitrary, it gives equal license to destructive and constructive impulses. Because many voluntarists recognize that the will is radically free, they can feel alarmed and empowered at the same time (just recall Blackmore’s celebration of the arbitrary power of the human will and his call for the capital punishment of atheists). Voluntarists acknowledge the primacy of the disorderly realm of human will, which has no natural inclination to moral and political order and can only be restrained and gradually accustomed to certain forms. As the example of Blackmore showed, the recognition of a human liberty that has no internal compass explains the loudness of the call for the external imposition of law and order. I believe this dynamic also shapes Swift’s outlook. Rather than mobilizing eccentricity, repression, dysfunction, or contradiction in our approach to Swift’s “liberty-loving authoritarian,” I propose that we think about his voluntarism as an orientation to the world in which such a character makes sense. As we have seen throughout these pages, the covenantal tradition of voluntarist thought combines, indeed, an ordinary and an extraordinary universe. His many alarms and destructive moments notwithstanding, Swift also finds relief in the recognition that the will is free and that all order and all essences are finally arbitrary constructions. He is, of course, more worried about the freedom of the will than Blackmore, and this circumstance shapes his strategies of invention. Swift seeks footholds in a regard for occasion and circumstance, in conceits and devices he borrows from other writers, and in the various personae he adopts. Swift’s invention typically relies on externals and works from within the constraints of the given. But since the given is

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imperfect, arbitrary, and does not contain a binding canon of beauty or morality, Swift feels authorized not only to destroy or decompose the given but to let alternate forms of order emerge from it. Swift’s voluntarist outlook provides a reliable prompt to exceed the given, and his writings can indeed “produce more wonderful Revolutions than Fortune or Nature.” By emphasizing that voluntarism features a strong constructivist component, this chapter adds to the work of scholars who have long suspected that more could be said about Swift’s constructive side.37 Three aspects of Swift’s constructivism will be central to my analysis. They are all animated by the voluntarist idea that order does not inhere in things and that human beings are free to construct the world they live in, to invent the structures that shape their lives. Contemplating a world divided by such constructs (the numerous kinds, sects, and parties that bothered him so much), Swift realizes that the work of taking apart is not only feasible and necessary; it can also be reparative. Decomposition can give rise to connections and forms that are constrained under the armor of essential distinctions, hierarchy, pride, and self-absorption. This is the first aspect of Swift’s constructive practice that will interest me. A second aspect of Swift’s writing is more actively involved in construction. This aspect is assisted by the circumstance that, in a world in which all order is finally arbitrary, creating connections across distant and different entities (kinds, qualities, ideas) does not violate sacrosanct hierarchies or essential distinctions. Rather, making such connections, reducing distances and differences, is justified and can be hopeful. It undoes the power of abstractions and suggests a more unified world in which various entities can, once again, be seen to belong to each other. The third aspect of Swift’s constructivism I will discuss has to do with his reliance on externals and surfaces. For voluntarists, there is no ontological difference between the constructed and the natural, the external and the internal (“What is the heart, but a spring?” Hobbes had asked).38 That is one important reason why Swift believes that custom can turn into nature, the imagined into the real, pretense into conviction. In voluntarism, what is external, what exists on the surface possesses an ontological and epistemological authority that cannot be questioned by pointing to deep structures, essences, or private interiorities. Many of Swift’s literary inventions rely on the power of surfaces and externals because, under voluntarist auspices, they are capable of generating new

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modes of being. I begin my discussion of the constructive Swift by analyzing his strategies of decomposition in two poems.

II In “A Description of a City Shower” (1710), a poem highly prized by Swift and his contemporaries, Swift uses an external event to expose a civilization that shapes its identities and activities through abstractions.39 Depicting the progress of a heavy rain shower, the poem explores the restorative potential of decomposition. For some critics, the stormy disintegration of urban order in Swift’s poem symbolizes the divine punishment of a fallen world or the instability of human order. Disintegration, these critics argue, is bad.40 I don’t think that’s the whole truth. The poem’s decomposition, I suggest, contains a grim wish for a less tidy, more immediate community of things. While it ends in a scene of dissolution and mixture, we must not forget that, for Swift, the decomposition of overly unified and differentiated bodies is a good thing. If divine punishment is what the rainstorm enacts on a fallen London, then God also tells Londoners to mind their differences less. A culture that has devised distinctions of kind so exaggerated that communal division takes hold everywhere stands to benefit from the stormy reminder that it is made up of things that belong together.41 Four stages structure Swift’s depiction of the storm: an early stage, when the storm announces its arrival through such symptoms as a toothache, a smelly sink, or a cat’s ceasing to chase her own tail. A second stage has raindrops falling and wind rising, the third witnesses the effects of heavy rainfall, and in the fourth we see the damaging effects of the storm when dung, guts, blood, puppies, sprats, cats, and turnip tops “come tumbling down the flood.”42 The overall movement is a gradually increasing presence and force punctuated by a violent final act, but the poem spends most of its time in the second and third stages (eighteen and twenty-two lines, respectively). It is in these two stages that Swift explores the storm as a force that, by lowering distinctions, opens up communal possibilities. The third stage is the most important one. “Here various kinds by various fortunes led, / Commence acquaintance underneath a shed” (lines 39– 40). These lines capture the content of stage three.43 They look backward, to the various people that have just taken refuge from the rain in shops where

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they pretend to buy things, and they look forward to the approximation Swift will soon stage of different literary kinds. The immediate object of these lines is the triumphant Tories (buoyed by their recent election victory), who are compelled to seek shelter alongside despondent Whigs. These parties now “forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs” (line 42). Such a political gathering is open to a cynical reading, in which it would echo the feigned acts of shopping that precede it. But considering the depth of Swift’s frustration with the delusional essentialisms of factional culture, we might want to linger a bit more over a scene that visualizes something Swift actively supported: a rapprochement between the dominant political camps.44 Saving wigs and evading rain, of course, are not high-minded motivations for moving closer to your political opponent, but in the face of excessively unified kinds “various fortunes” may have to intervene to bridge the divides. Swift appreciated the power of external circumstances and could be dubious of changes of behavior that were motivated by internal conviction. As we will see in more detail soon, he endorsed the idea that low or merely tactical considerations can contribute to the social good. While Swift certainly has a good laugh at politicians in these lines, he also reflects on the conditions under which the self-enclosed and self-absorbed political classes of his age might come closer together. Their gathering under a shed visualizes that greater unity is likely to happen not through a change of heart or reasoned argument but through shifting external circumstances. In this way, Swift’s gathering hints at the power of external and even frivolous forces to make change. The next scene in this stage of the storm is equally engaged with its effects on overly defined kinds. We see “boxed in a chair the beau” (line 43), a social species whose tight-fitting vehicle calls up the elaborate machinery of dress that advertises his kind to the world. The comedy Swift creates around the beau’s anxiety about being confined by violent weather (“he trembles from within” [line 46]) comments on the beau’s tightly wound social type. The resources of strictly defined kinds to stand up to heavy weather, one might say, are weak.45 At the same time, the fact that Swift associates the beau’s boxed-in situation with impatience (line 43) points us in a different direction. Such impatience to escape from enclosure secretly resonates with Swift’s desire to move beyond the confines of kind. Swift’s disruptions of the order of kinds are carried on at a different level in the elaborate simile he wraps around the image of the impatient, frightened beau. Having opened the poem in the georgic manner by instructing

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the reader how to interpret the symptoms of an approaching storm, Swift now draws on the epic tradition, in two ways: by creating an epic simile and by choosing as a vehicle of the simile a scene from an epic poem, the arrival of the wooden horse in front of the gates of Troy in the Aeneid. Swift compares the box and its beau to “the wooden steed / Pregnant with Greeks, impatient to be freed” (lines 47–48). He links the terrifying clatter made by rain spouts on the beau’s coach roof to Laocoon’s spear striking Virgil’s equine engine of war, an act that makes “each imprisoned hero quake[] for fear” (line 52). Swift draws comic effect, then, from the incongruous juxtaposition of the rain-averse socialite to the Greek warriors waiting for battle. Yet Swift’s crafting of the simile weakens incongruity and heightens resemblance. He paints the scene from the Aeneid by borrowing detail from the description of the beau. In Virgil’s epic and in Dryden’s translation of it, no mention is made of an impatience to be freed or of heroes quaking with fear (though Dryden’s Greeks groan).46 These feelings are borrowed from the beau, and Swift thus lowers the heroic at least as much as he elevates the mundane. The sharp differences of literary kinds are blunted, the amusing contrast of the simile reduced.47 Heroic and mock-heroic are moving closer to each other. They gather, of course, under the roof of a poem whose primary formal model is Virgil’s Georgics, a genre that occupies a generic middle ground that can modulate both upward and downward. Even on the level of form, then, the poem creates vicinities and contacts that lower the distinctions that secure the logic of kinds. Enabled by the storm, various kinds come closer to each other. In stage two of the storm, rain and dust also come closer to each other. These two elements retain their separate identities for a while, but their intensifying tussle eventually lets them combine in the coat of the poem’s wandering poet, “where dust cemented by the rain / Erects the nap, and leaves a mingled stain” (line 30).48 The mingled stain on the poet’s coat extends the account of the inconveniences caused by the storm, but it also provides an image that tells us something about Swift’s poetics and his interest in bringing different kinds together. After all, Swift deploys a “mingled strain” that combines various literary kinds in a poetic adventure that seeks to unsettle the boundaries we draw around ourselves and to raise the prospect of greater unity. Such an adventure can be risky and may be messy, but it also holds the promise of new forms born from a mixture of kinds. Swift’s sympathies do not lie with purity, and the impurities he is willing to risk are represented in the effects the storm has on the poet’s coat. The stain on the coat, however, is

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only one of these effects. The other effect is the raising of the nap. Swift may well have chosen this effect to reverse a figurative expression in use at the time. According to this expression, a nap that is worn off or fallen off represents a project or wit that has fallen flat.49 Understood in this way, the raised nap suggests a renewal, the emergence of form from the mixture of water and dust. That Swift chooses the violent energies of a storm to imagine lowered distinctions and increased mixture measures his dismay over the division of kinds, which can be shaken up only by thunderous action. But this circumstance does not mean that destruction is the singular aim of the poem. The fall into indistinction in the final stage of the storm does not implicate the entire poem. It is true, of course, that this concluding flood is caused by the continuous action of a growing storm. But while this is the poem’s unifying subject, I do not think we are asked to judge the entire poem by the outcome of its central action. It is more characteristic of Swift to combine constructive and destructive impulses. As we shall see in more detail soon, Swift enjoys eliciting countermovements out of a main action, purpose, or occasion. He relies on the structures provided by such actions, purposes, or occasions, but he also grasps them as vehicles that he wants to exceed. He does so even in the lines of drastic indistinction we get at the end of “A Description of a City Shower.” For while these lines express Swift’s fear of decomposition, their deployment of plosives and breathless enumeration also suggests a kind of delight.50 The indistinction Swift gives us at the end resides at the extremity of a spectrum on whose other end sit species that reign supreme in sharply defined, separate places. In between these extremes of matter and form—in the middle of his poem and in the middle of the storm— Swift raises collaborative possibilities. He indicates the potential of moving past artificially inflated differences, identities, and coded behaviors. Being out of place in Swift’s poem is a good thing. Even the pretense of the faux shoppers, I would argue, indicates a welcome exit from the absorption with a singular purpose, an escape from the script given us by a particular place into a certain improvisational freedom that suspends established routines. One of the most notable visualizations of self-absorption and the way the storm disrupts it is the opening image of a cat that ceases to chase its own tail as the storm approaches. This is a hopeful moment for Swift. To bury such moments under the avalanche that ends “A Description of a City Shower” is to impose a single-minded view on a poem that seeks to disrupt the coherence of kinds alongside the coherence of the poetic whole. There is fear of collapse in Swift’s poem, but there is also hope. Stench, dirt, and destruction swirl around this hope, yet Swift’s

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invention finds its constructive edge from within such fray, in suggestions of a togetherness that suspends the order of kinds and troubles the idea of aesthetic coherence. A brief glance at a second poem will help firm up this argument about the possibilities that emerge through Swift’s decompositions. “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” (1731) testifies to Swift’s vivid imagination of mutability. It lingers on the materials and contraptions that sustain the appearance of desirability in Corinna, an aged Drury Lane prostitute. The decomposition we witness as Corinna prepares herself for bed is not catastrophic or impersonal. It is gradual, intimate, and deliberate— gently controlled by Corinna, as David Womersley has emphasized.51 But as with “A Description of a City Shower,” decomposition opens up communal possibility. Corinna’s removal of her artificial hair, glass eye, fake eyebrows, false teeth, breast supports, and steel-ribbed bodice is recounted in detail. But while the poem can seem to exploit such display, it also fails to present Corinna’s degraded body as a straightforward indictment of her immorality. Rather, Swift’s morally charged revelation of a wounded and deformed body restores Corinna’s vulnerable humanity as it exposes the violence of a sexual marketplace in which the male desire for forms without disruptions, hollows, or defects determines value. The poem shudders over the vulnerability and malleability of the human body and lays bare how relentless the quest for form can be. But it also makes the revealed matter of Corinna’s body an opening for the sympathetic imagination. That Swift’s is a sympathetic as well as a shuddering portrait of the matter that underlies the prostitute’s form is already suggested in the opening movement of the poem, where we see Corinna gradually remove the props she uses to achieve a gapless form. Swift repeatedly captures the tender attentiveness that characterizes Corinna’s actions. She wipes her glass eye “clean, and lays it by” and pulls her mouse-skin eyebrows off “with care”: first, she “displays ’em / Then in a play-book smoothly lays ’em.”52 The material she uses to make her cheeks seem less hollow is “dexterously” (line 17) drawn out, until finally: “With gentlest touch, she next explores / Her shankers, issues, running sores; / Effects of many a sad disaster, / And then to each applies a plaster” (lines 29–32). Louise Barnett captures the tonal logic of these lines when she emphasizes how “the quiet beginning, with its sympathetic suggestion of skill and care, introduces a repulsive specific list that is in turn dissolved into a general and dignified statement. This line is then deflated by the anticlimactic banality of the repair job.”53 The comedy of these shifts and confrontations, Barnett goes on to argue, is arrested by the emergence of a hapless human

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being. The distance Swift repeatedly creates in the poem is undercut as the poet describes Corinna’s intimate decomposition.54 Swift’s speaker is absorbed by the gradual reemergence of Corinna’s unreserved physical matter. The peeling off of so many deceptive layers and parts teaches a moral lesson, but the closeness it creates between poet and subject paves the way for the speaker’s journey into Corinna’s mind, entered while she is sleeping. In this second movement of the poem, we leave behind the physical description pegged to a continuous narrative sequence that unfolds in a single evening. If the action of Corinna’s decomposition was unified in this manner, the account we now receive of her dreams is not tied to a particular night. Swift imagines various possible dreams and ties them together not by a sequential “then,” “now,” or “next,” as he does in the poem’s opening (lines 9, 11, 29), but by an alternating “or” (lines 40, 43, 45, 47). This choice moves us away from the sequential observation of ordinary actions toward imagination and possibility, which now become central in the speaker’s representation of Corinna. The scenes of suffering and desertion Swift imagines multiply as he presents four possible dreams in rapid succession. While this presentation breaks the strictly chronological order of the first movement, it picks up and develops the desperation Swift had captured early when he noted that, on the par ticu lar evening that we join Corinna, she had “no drunken rake to pick her up, / No cellar where on tick to sup” (lines 5–6). Now, however, we receive a far more extensive collection of Corinna’s fears and disappointments, from the lashes she might receive when incarcerated at Bridewell to the pimp who could trap her, her possible transportation to Jamaica, her desperate attempt to find a suitor surrounded by the “hundred stinks” of “Fleet-Ditch” (lines 47–48), and her confrontations with “watchmen, constables, and duns” (line 52). Most importantly, we hear about Corinna’s emotions—her pains and torment, her faint screams, and her fear. The speaker’s imagination of Corinna’s plight is substantive and detailed. This sympathetic contact is made possible by the close description of Corinna’s decomposition and the return of her body to a more open, vulnerable state. Her false form dismantled, her wounds and deformities revealed, Swift breaks the temporal unity of the action and imagines scenes of suffering and fear whose cumulative effect is pity. It would be a mistake, however, to characterize the movement from Corinna’s undressing to her sleeping as a movement from outside to inside, from surface to depth. Dreams for Swift are not riddles that deserve hermeneutic scrutiny. They are extensions and elaborations of our daily activities, and this is very much Corinna’s case.55

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Though she has laid aside the forms of the prostitute, the life of the prostitute continues to haunt her. Corinna does not escape her public life, yet the temporary release from the surfaces that sustain this life makes our community with her possible. The dream sequence, of course, is not how the poem ends. Just as in “A Description of a City Shower,” Swift finds communal openings in an initial phase of decomposition and then radicalizes it. While Corinna is sleeping, a rat, a cat, a pigeon, and a dog have further degraded and dispersed the parts that allowed Corinna to assume a certain form. What control Corinna had in the early stages of the poem, she now loses. Swift invokes “the anguish, toil, and pain” that she would experience were she to “gath[er] up herself again” (lines 69–70), yet he also declares the poet’s inability to render such a scene of recomposition. The speaker willfully ends the poem on a note of shrill disgust: “Corinna in the morning dizened, / Who sees, will spew; who smells, be poisoned” (lines 71–72). The scattering of Corinna’s parts allows for a momentary gathering, but that gathering cannot be stabilized. It falls apart. These two poems, then, share a paradoxical emotional curve. They stage decompositions as moral critique, end with disintegration and even disgust, and find communal possibilities in between. Pursued to the end, decomposition is terrifying. But it is also the mechanism that disrupts the excessive formal unities that divide Swift’s culture and distort human life. Both poems protest against formal closure, in their contents and in their disruptive endings. Their attention to physicality is bound up with an ontological concern. While they recoil from the extinction of form, they seek temporary relief from isolation and division by crossing the distances between beings, by weakening the difference form makes, even by making room for a “brotherly love” that Swift mourned as the casualty of a culture riven by parties and factions.56 On the way to destruction and disgust, Swift finds occasions for unguarded and inventive contact across seeming divides. The realization that such divides are arbitrary and insubstantial inspires the ultimate vehemence of the destructive course, but it also enables the imagination of communal moments across artificial divisions.

III Swift criticizes the surfaces that Corinna and the beau rely on to establish their kinds, but his critique is founded on the recognition that externals

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possess considerable powers. The poet’s fascinated attention to them in the beginning of “A Beautiful Nymph” and his proclaimed inability to reassemble Corinna at the end dramatize the transformative work they perform. Swift recognizes the problematic transformations that can result from relying on surfaces, but he also realizes that they can work for the good. He believed, after all, that all order, moral or immoral, is externally imposed. Given such convictions, it is not surprising that Swift’s recognition of the work surfaces could do went pretty far. He suggested that they could improve social and moral order, that they avoid epistemological violence, and that they assist the business of invention. In A Project for the Advancement of Religion (1709), Swift explores the improvements surfaces might engender. He adopts the persona of the projector, along with this figure’s characteristic optimism about social engineering, to offer proposals toward the reformation of morals and manners. Such an attempt is for Swift a Christian duty. His adoption of the optimistic projector is ironic (he often lampooned the “Projecting Species,” most famously in A Modest Proposal [1729] and in Gulliver’s journey to Laputa), but the irony in this case is constructive.57 It lets Swift explore the promise of externals for reform. For Swift, irony is not only an instrument to invert, undermine, and expose a statement but a means of connecting. Saying two different or opposite things at once without valorizing one more than the other privileges surface over depth, addition over hierarchy. Such constructive irony can figure an other wise elusive unity.58 Swift’s starting point in A Project for the Advancement of Religion is the power that interest and passion have over human behavior. “There is no Quality so contrary to any Nature, which Men cannot affect, and put on upon Occasion, in order to serve an Interest, or gratify a prevailing Passion,” he observes. “The proudest Man will personate Humility, the morosest learn to flatter, the laziest will be sedulous and active, where he is in pursuit of what he hath much at Heart.” This circumstance is probed for the effects it might have on such personators. It is put to use in Swift’s proposal to improve religious and moral order by making the active practice of Christian faith “a necessary Step to Interest and Favour” in the state.59 While he imagines with some warmth the beneficial effects such a step would have on all of society, Swift’s speaker concedes that it has one serious drawback. It would dramatically increase hypocrisy, an observance of the external forms of piety that would not touch the substance of a person’s disposition.

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But then Swift’s speaker considers more carefully. Even if nineteen out of twenty Christian professors were hypocritical, he eventually argues, considerable gains would be achieved, and these gains would go beyond the mere appearance of greater religious and moral order. In the end, he explains, “a long continued Disguise is too great a Constraint upon human Nature, especially an English Disposition.” “Men would leave off their Vices out of meer Weariness,” he continues, “rather than undergo the Toil and Hazard, and perhaps Expence of practicing them perpetually in private.” He believes that, ultimately, “it is often with Religion as it is with Love; which, by much Dissembling, at last grows real.”60 Swift’s skeptical view of human nature is displayed without irony in this essay, and he uses the persona of the projector as a prosthesis that helps him articulate a positive vision of how pretense can turn into conviction. The ironizing overstatement by which Swift compares love to religion and declares that both sometimes grow up from masquerade is not directed against that possibility. Instead, it introduces a distinction between the projector’s fervent and Swift’s cautious embrace of pretense turning into conviction. Swift’s cautiousness notwithstanding, such transformations are prominent in his thinking. Swift’s voluntarism prompted him to take seriously the possibility that the pretended, the imagined, or the artificial could become solid realities. Often, this was not a comforting prospect. We can glean this, for example, from Swift’s analysis of religious invention in “A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,” which highlights passages from the made-up to the real. Elsewhere, Swift illustrates a similar process with one of his striking similes. To show how “IMAGINARY Evils soon become real ones,” he gives us the man who, “in a melancholy Fancy, seeth something like a Face on the Wall or the Wainscot” and who “by two or three Touches with a leaden Pencil, make[s] it look visible and agreeing with what he fancied.”61 This simile strikingly dramatizes how little it takes to make what is only fancied actual. In a more comic vein, Swift opens a passage from art to nature when he describes the Scythian Longheads, whose unique head shape arose when midwives and nurses began squeezing the heads of babies—until nature bowed and accepted this imposition on her agency: “thus did Custom, from being a second Nature proceed to be a first.”62 Human custom takes on an independent life, becoming natural. In A Project for the Advancement of Religion, a more positive view of such transformative possibility emerges. Swift collaborates with the optimistic

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projector to sketch what might happen if the belief that order does not inhere in nature but is always imposed from the outside were deployed for the social good. The low motives of ambition and interest strike an alliance with external forms and allow them to gain influence over matter. Swift’s own act of dissembling—his personation of a projector—prompts him to season his skepticism with a dose of the projecting spirit. He does not hide behind the projector nor does he expose him, but uses this persona to extend himself and explore the benefits of dissembling. When substantive change is not a prospect, Swift is more at ease to recognize such benefits. He has considerable sympathy for those whose internal beliefs do not correspond to their external actions. “It is possible,” he reminds us, “that a Man may speculatively prefer the Constitution of another Country, or an Utopia of his own, before that of the Nation where he is born and lives; yet from considering the Dangers of Innovation, the Corruptions of Mankind, and the frequent Impossibility of reducing Idea’s to Practice, he may join heartily in preserving the present Order of Things, and be a true Friend to the Government already settled.”63 On this logic, it would be possible to wish secretly for the return of the Stuart king and to be a loyal subject of William III. Swift imagines a similar dynamic when he argues that atheists may play a socially useful role: “A Man may perhaps have little or none of [religion] at Heart; yet if he conceal his Opinions, if he endeavor to make no Proselytes, advance no impious Tenets in Writing or Discourse: If, according to the common Atheistical Notion, he believes Religion to be only a Contrivance of Politicians for keeping the Vulgar in Awe; and that the present Model is better adjusted than any other to so useful an End: Although the Condition of such a Man as to his own future State be very deplorable; yet Providence, which often works Good out of Evil, can make even such a Man an Instrument for contributing towards the Preservation of the Church.”64 That the atheist does not act publicly on his beliefs because he sees the social benefits of a system he other wise despises contributes to the common good. Swift sees such concealment of true belief in the interest of public order as far more virtuous than the sectarian authorization of public action through the claims of private belief.65 Maintaining the surface, keeping the internal conviction from ruffling it, is much better for the common good than licensing depth to shape surface. Swift joins this moral calculus of surfaces to an epistemological one. When his speaker in A Tale of a Tub (1704) addresses the intellectual opera-

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tions that characterize sectarians, he points to an epistemology of depth. He exposes knowledge procedures that revel in “Untwisting or Unwinding,” in “draw[ing] up by Exantlation, or display[ing] by Incision,” in “cutting, and opening, and mangling, and piercing” to reveal the deep structure of the things of this world.66 Such an epistemology hopes to unveil the hidden identity of phenomena by showing how one principle can, after an arduous search, be spotted at last at the bottom of all things. Swift offers a series of ridiculous examples of such principles, including the number three, wind, and coats. The absurd upshot of the reductions these principles perform is a world in which every thing can be every thing, a world in which metaphor becomes universal (“what is that which some call Land, but a fine Coat faced with Green? Or the Sea, but a Wast-coat of Water-Tabby?”).67 Such an epistemology literalizes metaphor, makes its equations rise from real sameness. This worries Swift. Metaphor was often distinguished from simile— among others, by Hobbes— as a dangerous equalizer. Metaphor did not offer an explicit comparison and, instead of publicizing its actions, immediately plunged the reader into a disorienting similarity.68 Swift’s preferred figure, as Denis Donoghue pointed out a while ago, is simile, the explicit juxtaposition of things that holds off from the deep interfusion licensed by metaphor.69 Roger Lund has commented on the “baffling dichotomy between surface and depth that governs much of A Tale of a Tub.”70 I’m not sure how baffling it is. While Swift applies some irony later in A Tale of a Tub to the lover of surfaces, the irony is mild compared to what he directs at those who are devoted to an epistemology of depth.71 Swift’s voluntarist convictions incline him to prioritize externals and surfaces.72 Additional evidence makes this even clearer. Swift repeatedly insists, across different writings, that the exposure of imperfections in science, art, and religion is a sterile pursuit. The “expensive Anatomy” of cutting, mangling, and piercing that goes beyond the artful manipulation of the object is as misguided as the probing examination of ancient authors for defects and as pointless as the analysis of religious doctrines that reveals contradictions.73 Similarly, in finding the causes of political events, Swift notes that we “are sure to be mistaken by searching too deep” when, most likely, more basic motivations drive the business.74 Refinement and depth, indeed, are dangerous for political actors. On the occasion of Lord Bolingbroke’s treason charge, Swift wonders “how it should come to pass that Men of exalted Abilities, when they are called to publick Affairs, are generally drawn into Inconveniences and Misfortunes, which others of Ordinary Talent

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avoid.” One answer Swift gives is “the Practice of some refined Ministers, to act in common Business, out of the common Road.”75 Such neglect of “common Forms” creates distrust and prompts “curious inquisitive heads” to think too deeply about political causes.76 Trust in politics, on the other hand, is created by those political actors who have “some Honesty and a moderate Portion of Understanding [and] are strict Observers of Time, Place, and Method.” “Contempt or Neglect of these Circumstances” is what causes the “superior Genius” to stumble in politics. The deep, irregular scheme devised by men of “exalted Abilities” raises suspicions while the ordinary talent that flatly tends to circumstance succeeds.77 “Wisdom in publick Affairs,” Swift recommends in 1711, lies not in “the forming of Schemes with remote Views; but the making use of such Incidents as happen.”78 For the purposes of this study, Swift’s most intriguing suggestions about the differences between surface and depth come in “Hints towards an Essay on Conversation.” In this essay, Swift sketches a theory of invention that prioritizes surfaces. Swift first portrays poor conversational behavior. He criticizes those talkers who will “discover Abundance of Impatience, and lye upon the Watch until you have done, because they have started something in their own Thoughts which they long to be delivered of.” “Mean Time,” Swift continues, “they are so far from regarding what passes, that their Imaginations are wholely turned upon what they have in Reserve, for fear it should slip out of their Memory; and thus they confine their Invention, which might other wise range over a hundred Things full as good, and that might be much more naturally introduced.”79 Like excessively unified political or religious kinds, the individual’s withdrawal from the larger public produces a body “in Reserve.” Membership in factions “confines invention,” Swift points out elsewhere, because it keeps members from taking in a full range of views and perspectives.80 The same thing happens when you remove yourself from the give-and-take of the conversational flow. Such a removal also characterizes the modern author in A Tale of a Tub. At the end of this text, Swift suggests that the failure of inserting the collected wisdoms of his commonplace book into “common Conversation” made his speaker venture into print, a medium that renders him “absolute Master of the Occasions and Opportunities” to display his talents.81 The failure of Swift’s speaker is his inability to respond to occasions and opportunities as they arise in concrete situations. The abstraction from such situations makes invention a little too free and finally ineffective. Swift, by contrast, conceived of his own writings as most powerful when they closely responded to an occasion.82

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If tending to the occasion is one way to avoid self-absorption and to make sure that invention is fertile, another is the failure to concentrate on just one thing or, to put it positively, the ability to “range over a hundred things.” In the essay on conversation, Swift argues that natural elocution paradoxically springs from “a Barrenness of Invention and of Words, by which Men who have only one Stock of Notions upon every Subject, and one Set of Phrases to express them in . . . swim upon the Superficies, and offer themselves on every Occasion.” By contrast, men of expansive learning are often the “worst Talkers on a sudden” because “they are confounded with Plenty of Matter, Variety of Notions, and of Words, which they cannot readily chuse, but are entangled and perplexed by too great a Choice.”83 The difference, Swift explains in a vivid simile, is a little like people at church, who get out faster when the church is “almost empty, than when a Crowd is at the Door.”84 The crowding of the learned speaker’s brain with diverse matter promises a more fruitful invention. Such inventiveness can be disabling, a circumstance Swift also emphasizes in his description of his own literary labors in “A Panegyrick on the Dean” (1735).85 Though he might complain about such labors, Swift favors the unreserved, responsive, and perplexed speaker over the removed and focused interlocutor, whose conversational insertion depends on a finally even more debilitating failure to be open to a variety of speakers, words, and ideas. Being confounded with matter, being unable to choose the appropriate subject or phrase, not having a detailed plan, failing to maintain internal focus when faced with external variety: these unsettling experiences go along with a probability of high inventiveness. Invention is most potent when speakers are open to the wider circle, attentive to occasion and circumstance, and mindful of what others are saying.86 For Swift, invention is thus an act that starts with the entanglement in the materials and circumstances that surround you. It starts with externals. Invention fails when it disregards those things that lie nearest, when it spins mental webs in ignorance of time, place, and method. Invention fails when long plans or deep reserve gives the speaker a singular purpose.

IV A remarkable scene of invention in Gulliver’s Travels exemplifies these views. I have in mind the moment in Lilliput when Gulliver contrives to turn a handkerchief into an elevated ground for military exercises. Reporting his

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“good fortune to divert the Emperor one Day, after a very extraordinary Manner,” Gulliver explains in detail how he accomplished this goal. He tells us that he ordered “several Sticks of two Foot high” and that “the next Morning six Wood-men arrived with as many Carriages, drawn by eight Horses to each.”87 He then describes how he constructed the device for this extraordinary diversion. I quote at length: I took nine of the Sticks, and fixing them firmly in the Ground in a Quadrangular Figure, two Foot and a half square; I took four other Sticks, and tyed them parallel at each Corner, about two Foot from the Ground; then I fastened my Handkerchief to the nine Sticks that stood erect; and extended it on all Sides, till it was tight as the Top of a Drum; and the four parallel Sticks rising about five Inches higher than the Handkerchief, served as Ledges on each Side. When I had finished my Work, I desired the Emperor to let a Troop of his best Horse, Twenty-four in Number, come and exercise on this Plain. His Majesty approved of the Proposal, and I took them up one by one in my Hands, ready mounted and armed, with the proper Officers to exercise them. As soon as they got into Order, they divided into two Parties, performed mock Skirmishes, discharged blunt Arrows, drew their Swords, fled and pursued, attacked and retired; and in short discovered the best military Discipline I ever beheld. The parallel Sticks secured them and their Horses from falling over the Stage; and the Emperor was so much delighted, that he ordered this Entertainment to be repeated several Days; and once was pleased to be lifted up, and give the Word of Command; and, with great Difficulty, persuaded even the Empress her self to let me hold her in her close Chair, within two Yards of the Stage, from whence she was able to take a full View of the whole Performance. It was my good Fortune that no ill Accident happened in these Entertainments; only once a fiery Horse that belonged to one of the Captains, pawing with his Hoof struck a Hole in my Handkerchief, and his Foot slipping, he overthrew his Rider and himself; but I immediately relieved them both: For covering the Hole with one Hand, I set down the Troop with the other, in the same Manner as I took them up. The Horse that fell was strained in the left Shoulder, but the Rider got no Hurt; and I repaired my Handkerchief as well as I could. (40–41)

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Gulliver is fitted to a world of a dramatically larger size, but this difference does not pose an obstacle here. In this scene, the difference creates new relationships. This is possible because of the imaginative use Gulliver makes of the circumstances he finds himself in. The attention Gulliver devotes to the potential relationships between objects from different worlds allows him to transform his handkerchief into the surface on which the Lilliputian army can conduct military exercises. Rather than “forming schemes with remote use,” Gulliver responds openly and creatively to his immediate surroundings, taking what lies close at hand to create a device for diverting and, to all appearances, equally pleasing interactions. The imaginative combination of the objects from two different cultures allows these cultures to come together peaceably, without suspicion, reserve, or desire for mastery. Delight seems to be the dominant emotion, for the reader and the parties involved. Swift’s depiction of a giant Englishman carefully arranging miniature entertainments for an alien court deliberately counters the violent colonial relations Gulliver criticizes at the end of his travels. It also counters the divisiveness of factional culture. In his sermon on brotherly love, Swift bemoans how this culture has “got the better of the very Genius and Constitution of our People.”88 “Every Man alive among us,” Swift exaggerates, “is encompassed with a Million of Enemies of his own Country among which his oldest Acquaintance and Friends, and Kindred themselves are often of the Number: Neither can People of different Parties mix together without Constraint, Suspicion, and Jealousy, watching every word they speak, for Fear of giving Offence.”89 In the mixture of different parties Swift stages in Gulliver’s diversion, constraint, suspicion, and jealousy are largely absent. Swift’s satiric procedure, meanwhile, seems clear. Size is one crucial aspect of these procedures. The five-by-five-inch area that Gulliver’s handkerchief covers accommodates the military exercises of twenty-four horses and riders, and the distance of a mere two feet aboveground presents acute physical danger to the elite forces of Lilliput. Fully armed soldiers, the king, and the queen are placed on Gulliver’s hand to be lifted up. To such contrasts in size, Swift adds contrasts between qualities. A humble, harmless, and probably dirty handkerchief supports the grand national business of military exercise. The purpose of military exercises, to prepare for the defense and conquest of territory, unfolds not on the ground but in midair and becomes a “Performance” on a “Stage.” But even as the actors only exhibit “mock Skirmishes” and discharge “blunt Arrows,” this is a potentially life-threatening activity. Such contrasts of size and quality sharply relativize military power and deflate

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imperial grandeur. The scene turns on making an army, the most powerful instrument of violent conflict, seem toy-like. Swift ridicules the emperor’s sense of his own importance and smiles at Gulliver’s need to ingratiate himself. Critique and exposure are important effects of the scene. Yet the business of satire is modulated by Swift’s interest in expanding and complicating the scene. The exacting description of Gulliver’s construction, the multiple actors traveling on Gulliver’s hand (from soldiers to king to queen), the addition of the highly particularized accident at the end: these expansions do not add substantially to the satire. In this sense, the handkerchief scene seems to be one of those moments, in Michael Suarez’s phrasing, when “the exuberance of [Swift’s] inventiveness . . . vivifies the satire by means of an excess which serves no clear instrumental purpose.”90 Swift’s devotion to building the scene is impressive, and one might well ask whether satire is being sidelined by an entertaining spectacle. Even “vivifying the satire” isn’t quite able to assimilate Swift’s exuberance, it seems to me. To my eyes, the handkerchief scene looks like Swift is carried past an initial conceit. In imagining, assembling, and expanding the scene, Swift realizes its potential for doing something that cuts against the satiric grain: the construction of communal relations on different terms. Here as elsewhere, Swift invents an initial scenario for a discrete purpose but then discovers purpose as constraint and looks for ways to suggest countermovements. The satiric goal of taking apart is turned toward assembly. Let me explain this in more detail. The idea of different kinds that interact peaceably, without the need to dominate one another, expands considerably in the effect the scene has on opposites. By combining realistic detail and improbable action, Swift manages to approximate a remarkable range of implied and explicit opposites. Even as such approximations assist the critique of empire, they gather additional meanings. The domestic and the national, the private and the public, the grandiose and the humble, the large and the small, the real and the represented, the harmless and the dangerous, the decorative and the useful, work and play: in Swift’s scene, all of these opposites cease to function as alternates. On Gulliver’s handkerchief, nothing is either harmless or dangerous, decorative or useful, real or represented. Instead, the collaboration and shared enjoyment of two differently scaled cultures suspend the value differentials that other wise would organize these opposites. Such suspension from hierarchy now allows them to exist in unqualified juxtaposition: decorative and useful, real and represented.

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What Swift contrives, then, is not only a counterimage to factional discord and colonial violence but, more broadly, a utopian moment of irreduction. The brilliance of the contrivance lies in the way Swift literalizes and visualizes more abstract philosophical operations, one of his more remarkable gifts. The core of this literalization is Gulliver’s use of a surface that is suspended aboveground to gather cultures and opposites. Suspension is what happens to the scrutiny that each side applies to the other. Suspension is what happens to the value differentials that other wise would determine the relationships of opposites. That the action takes place on a surface, meanwhile, dramatizes the fact that hierarchical relationships (where one term is valued more highly than the other) have been displaced by additive, horizontal links between different terms. In this way, Swift evades the epistemological violence of depth by the use of a surface that promotes more open and equal relationships, not only between terms but between cultures. To construct this new way of being together, Gulliver and Swift rely on a process of invention that rejects deep schemes, lets go of reserve, and works with what is at hand. In this way, they defy depth and abstraction and generate a concrete experience that fosters delight. The soldiers in this scene do not participate in such delight, but Swift nonetheless constructs a little utopia of a world that lets go of divisions, reductions, and conflict and enters a state of delicate yet blissful proximity. That this scene manages to do so much is pretty remarkable. What is even more remarkable is that the scene anticipates our wonder. By showing us that the little, the playful, the decorative, and the harmless are not less valuable than their opposites, Swift steers us toward the realization that his scene, while seemingly small and simply diverting, has much more to say. Swift’s little utopia clearly leaves behind the grim voluntarist vision of order as an external imposition of law by a superior. The only command we hear in the scene is mocked and muted by playful cooperation. In suspending the action in midair, Swift signals that his utopia floats above the requirements of order on the ground. But his voluntarist convictions nonetheless shape the scene. The depiction of a state in which the hierarchy of qualities is suspended indicates the arbitrariness of the value differentials we attach to different concepts. These value differentials are themselves impositions on what Swift reveals as the more fluid semantic field that emerges in the peaceful contact between different cultures. Even more important, however, is the extent to which Swift’s scene presents an allegory of invention that features

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the spontaneous combination of materials from different worlds for the construction of a device that figures communal life beyond the divisions, conflicts, and violence of Swift’s culture. In this way, Swift points to the power of surfaces and externals to shape community and suggests that they can create non-reductive unities that do not sacrifice all distinction. His diverting scene allows us to glimpse in miniature what his book as a whole makes more than palpable: the given is not the inescapable limit of our actions, artistic or other wise. It is our necessary starting point, but it can be exceeded in constructions that have no precedent.

V The handkerchief scene strengthens my claim that Swift is drawn to acts of invention that rely on surfaces to create zones of irreduction and indistinction that suggest new communal arrangements. Still, the spectacular nature of this scene may seem a little exceptional. That it is not can be shown in Brobdingnag, where Gulliver’s size disadvantage puts him on the defensive. With fewer opportunities for invention and collaboration with circumstances, Gulliver’s agency is limited and can no longer allegorize the work of the author. Gulliver’s demotion makes him available, in a much more comprehensive manner than previously, as the object of Swift’s satire. Gulliver is, quite simply, more of an object in Brobdingnag. But that does not mean that Swift leaves his interest in surfaces and invention behind. Swift uses Gulliver to expose the violent nature of our resistance to circumstances and the ridiculousness of our reliance on abstractions to define our place in the world. The violence of abstractions is Swift’s great theme in Gulliver’s second journey, which asks its readers to consider their proud membership in human and national kinds as parallel symptoms of the disease of abstraction. Both impede the emergence of a less divided community and less reserved individuals. They stand in the way of invention. But even while he offers a critique of such impediments, Swift is careful to tell us what it is that Gulliver’s reliance on abstraction ignores or denies: communal possibilities that turn not on irreduction but on indistinction. Though the moments of indistinction Swift constructs here are surrounded by violence and conflict, they play an essential role in exposing Gulliver’s delusions and in pointing to what might lie beyond them.

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One of the keys to understanding Swift’s critique of abstraction is his treatment of disgust. Gulliver’s stay in Brobdingnag features many scenes in which Gulliver is disgusted by the outsize evidence of deformed, infested, or plain stinky bodies. His feelings seem visceral enough, yet their display is part of Swift’s critique of abstractions. For what these scenes depict so powerfully is the response of someone who has been displaced from the conceptual and sensory frameworks that different kinds naturalize over time. Suddenly occupying a radically different structural position, Gulliver experiences the world without the filters put in place by long-honed perceptual and mental habits. The same held true in Lilliput, but its diminutive scale made delight a more representative emotion, rendered the circumstances Gulliver found himself in more accessible to his invention. Gulliver’s disgust responds to encountering things that, because of their size, are beyond his control. They elude the structures by which he customarily defines his relationship to other beings. Without relying on such difference of scale, Swift staged a similar drama in the endings of “A Description of a City Shower” and “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed.” The moment of unreserved sympathetic contact with the deformed Corinna, for example, leads to the response of disgust, a rejection of community that reveals the strength of the fortifications the speaker has built up around himself. Disgust is a visceral emotion, yet in Swift it is a symptom of how powerful the abstractions are by which we prop ourselves up and secure our place. Disgust is thus not natural; it is a product of the overly unified kind, of form rejecting its relationship to matter. Swift’s voluntarism moves him to assume that an imperfect, arbitrary nature cannot authorize absolute distinctions between the disgusting and the pleasing, between deformity and form. This assumption shapes the demonstration, especially insistent in Brobdingnag, that these qualities are relative, an effect of size and context rather than substance, of customary difference rather than universal value. Qualities, in other words, do not inhere in things, something that Swift delights to show us in the first two voyages. What is a sharp military weapon to the Lilliputians is but a straw to Gulliver. One of Swift’s great jokes about modern culture illustrates the same truth: modern wit, he explained in A Tale of a Tub, is highly dependent on circumstance. What is funny in CoventGarden may be utterly dull in St. James; what we chuckled about at 3:00 p.m. makes us yawn at 5:00 p.m.91 The point of the joke is that the effects an object has cannot be reduced to its inherent qualities. Those qualities, in fact, are

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ultimately unknowable, buried in the depth of the object’s structure, forever inaccessible to mortals, who can only attend to surfaces and note how the object behaves as it enters different circumstances. In this way, Swift illustrates the metaphysical distinction between primary and secondary qualities that such philosophers as Hobbes, Boyle, and Locke had popularized. Disgust is not in the object. Gulliver’s struggles in Brobdingnag may well be described as preserving the fiction of his inherent qualities against what he construes— often very actively—as the pressure of suddenly shifting circumstances. This happens, for example, in Gulliver’s repeated confrontations with animals in book 2. Although Gulliver pretends they are, these confrontations are not primarily about the preservation of Gulliver’s bodily integrity. In reality, Swift makes clear, they are about defending abstractions— Gulliver’s status as human being and courageous Englishman— against disorienting circumstances. The first animals Gulliver confronts in close quarters are two rats. Recently landed in Brobdingnag, Gulliver sleeps for two hours in his host family’s bedroom when he wakes up because he needs to use the bathroom. At this point, he spies two rats running and “smelling backwards and forwards on the bed” (93). Though there are no signs of hostility, Gulliver construes their actions as an “attack” (93). He draws his sword, rips the belly of one of them and gives the other a serious wound on the back. Noting that one of them still showed signs of life, Gulliver, “with a strong Slash across the Neck . . . thoroughly dispatched it” (93). Gulliver calls this adventure an “Exploit” and, when his host enters the room to see what the noise is about, he proudly displays his “Hanger all bloody, and wiping it on the Lappet of my Coat, returned it to the Scabbard” (93). For Gulliver, this early moment is an opportunity to display himself, in spite of his smallness, as a valorous combatant. For Swift, it is an opportunity to deflate Gulliver’s heroic action by providing different frames through which we can contemplate it. Viewed from the perspective of his host, Gulliver’s action amounts to little more than a demonstration that he is a useful houseguest, adept at removing domestic pests. Framed through Gulliver’s need to visit the bathroom, further deflations occur. After Gulliver ostentatiously wipes his bloody hanger he tells his host that he “was pressed to do more than one Thing, which another could not do for me” (93). The polite and awkwardly particular periphrasis undoes the high posture Gulliver precariously erected around his battle with a rodent. Swift has similar deflationary fun when he pits heroically wielded knives and swords against flies and wasps (109–110), or when Gulliver spots a kite

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swooping down on him and escapes because he had “resolutely drawn my Hanger”—but really only because he had “run under a thick Espalier” (117). In these cases and some others, Gulliver’s presentation of himself as an intrepid Englishman emerges as an ideal that withers in the hilarious mismatch between Gulliver’s means and the absurd threats he faces. A rather more intriguing scene plays out when Gulliver describes his encounter with birds during walks he takes in the garden. The scene opens with this sentence: “I cannot tell whether I were more pleased or mortified to observe in those solitary Walks, that the smaller Birds did not appear to be at all afraid of me; but would hop about within a Yard Distance, looking for Worms, and other Food, with as much Indifference and Security as if no Creature at all were near them” (118). Gulliver finds himself released from the relationship that typically governs humans and birds. He is not a threat. The birds are indifferent to his membership in the human race. The relationship between the two species, however, does not stay indifferent for long. “I remember,” he tells us, “a Thrush had the Confidence to snatch out of my Hand with his Bill, a Piece of Cake that Glumdalclitch had just given me for my Breakfast” (118). Apparently in response, Gulliver tries to catch some of the birds, but “they would boldly turn against me, endeavouring to pick my Fingers, which I durst not venture within their Reach; and then they would hop back unconcerned to hunt for Worms or Snails, as they did before” (118). Such unconcern and confidence is too much for Gulliver, who returns with a cudgel and stuns one of the birds. “Seizing him by the Neck with both my Hands,” Gulliver runs “in Triumph to my Nurse” (118). The bird struggles in Gulliver’s hold—so forcefully that he is ready to let it go. This turn is prevented when one of the servants intervenes and wrings the bird’s neck. “By the Queen’s Command,” Gulliver has the bird for dinner (118). For one brief moment, Swift lets us glimpse the possibility of a different story, a story that would not revert to the assertion of species difference but imagine the possibilities of species indifference. Gulliver “cannot tell whether [he] were more pleased or mortified” by the birds’ indifference, but this initial hesitation over the possible pleasures of indifference is quickly left behind. The invisibility of Gulliver’s membership in the human race fuels his desire to construct an antagonistic relationship. Like the rats, the birds are too confident and too unconcerned by his human difference. The conclusion of the story comments on the violence that strong species distinctions are likely to foster. Swift mocks such violence when Gulliver presents his catch in triumph, not to general or prince but to his nurse and then cannot hold on to it.

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It takes the callous action of a servant to complete the dignity of Gulliver’s species. The ultimate restoration of the hierarchy between humans and animals, however, happens with the ingestion of the slain enemy. Yet this, too, is undercut because the Queen’s order keeps Gulliver from initiating the consumption of the bird. Swift keeps Gulliver’s self-assertions incomplete. His attempts to reduce the world around him to his own terms are thwarted. The possibility of a pleasurable indistinction is glanced at, and the project of forceful distinction mocked. In the next scene of his narrative, Swift nudges the issue of pleasurable indistinction further into the open. It is the notorious episode in which Gulliver finds himself naked among Brobdingnag’s maids of honor. He responds with disgust to their various exposures, which force him to see their coarse and discolored skin up close and smell a range of unwholesome odors. The indistinction Swift explores here is more social than biological as the maids resemble human beings, though of an enormous size. Differences of gender and class are primarily at stake. Gulliver again complains about his status as “a Creature who had no Sort of Consequence” and seems offended by the unceremonious manner with which the maids reveal their naked bodies (119). Yet Swift raises questions about Gulliver’s protests: “They would strip themselves to the Skin,” he has Gulliver report, “and put on their Smocks in my Presence, while I was placed on their Toylet directly before their naked Bodies, which, I am sure, to me was very far from being a tempting Sight, or from giving me any other Motions than those of Horror and Disgust” (119). Gulliver’s assertion of certainty about these bodies’ unattractiveness (I am sure!) is out of place in a scene that invokes the overpowering emotions of horror and disgust. The superfluity of the assertion creates doubts about Gulliver’s sincerity—as does the idea of motion, whose sexual significance Gulliver both raises and denies. Swift goes even further when “the handsomest among these Maids of Honour, a pleasant frolicksome Girl of sixteen,” gives Gulliver a ride on her nipple (119). Gulliver is duly displeased, but Swift lets the reader suspect other feelings. To be stripped of habitual sexual and social identities, to be reduced to a plaything or sex toy, has to be officially upsetting. Unofficially, Gulliver is less sure. Disgust once again testifies to the threat of indistinction, but by suggesting that Gulliver’s disgust may be asserted rather than felt, Swift strengthens his intimation that the experience of indistinction can also be pleasurable. In this underhanded way, Swift extends his exploration of indistinction as a means to move past abstractions, inherent qualities, and strictly defined kinds toward more surprising unions.

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He can imagine alternate communal possibilities much more extensively when Gulliver is a giant, but even when Gulliver is puny, such possibilities form an indispensable foil that helps expose Gulliver’s violent (and amusing) struggles for distinction.

VI In Houyhnhnm-land, Gulliver finds a culture of rational horses that allows him to leave the defensive posture he had assumed in Brobdingnag. Rather than defending abstractions, he begins to recognize them as a defining problem of European civilization. This recognition is promoted by the many conversations he has with his Houyhnhnm master, in which Gulliver seeks to explain European and English culture to a rational horse who belongs to an oral culture in which doubt, disbelief, and lies are unknown. The Houyhnhnm’s is a clearly ordered and unified society that exists in isolation, untouched by the traffic with other nations or cultures, just like Brobdingnag and Lilliput. Since it is also a fairly simple society with few objects and little variety, the vocabulary of the Houyhnhnm language is limited. To communicate, Gulliver has to resort to extensive circumlocutions in order to translate and explain the concepts of European culture. This recourse reveals, in dramatic fashion, the extent to which European civilization is built on abstractions and how busy European minds have been in devising abstract terms to order their societies. Often, such abstractions form in response to behaviors that are immoral or illegal. “Treason . . . Murder, Theft, Poysoning, Robbery, Perjury,” runs an early list describing the transgressions of Gulliver’s ship’s crew, followed by “Forgery, Coining false Money . . . Rapes or Sodomy, . . . flying from their Colours or deserting to the Enemy” (244). Describing the “Nature of the several Crimes,” Gulliver ruefully notes, “took up several Days Conversation” heavily reliant on circumlocution, on “putting of Cases and making Suppositions” (244). What Gulliver experiences here in explaining his own culture is a contrast between abstraction and particularity, between general classes or kinds of behavior and their concrete instances. A similar dynamic occurs when Gulliver explains the art of war, which requires him to produce circumlocutions for “Cannons, Culverins, Muskets, Carabines, Pistols, Bullets, Powder, Swords, Bayonets, Sieges, Retreats, Attacks, Undermines, Countermines, Bombardments, Seafights,” and so on (247). Such

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enumeration of “as many Sorts as came into my Head” (251) also guides Gulliver’s description of the “costly Meats” (251) Europeans consume, and it shapes his talk about such different “Sort[s] of People” (253) as lawyers or doctors. At every turn of his explanations, Gulliver realizes the contrast between the proliferating kinds of European civilization and their scarcity in Houyhnhnm culture. The difference between abstract and concrete highlighted by the need for circumlocution, in fact, resonates with additional contrasts between European and Houyhnhnm culture: contrasts between complexity and simplicity, division and unity, abuse and use, dependence and independence. The most basic of all the differences between the two cultures—the one that produces all the rest—is the contrast between history and structure. What Gulliver’s extensive lists of all the kinds and sorts that populate European societies measure is the work of history. This is a degenerative history of increasing abstraction, division, complexity, and conflict. Civilization means the relentless invention and increased availability of more and more new kinds of things, from criminal actions to weapons, food, and professions. The proliferation and elaboration of these kinds creates societies without unity, lost in a chaos of distinctions and abstractions that no longer serve as means but have become ends. By contrast, Houyhnhnm culture is wholly rational and has, by and large, excluded the forces of history by relying on strong structural divisions. This can be seen, for example, in the hierarchies that govern this society. The most spectacular of these, of course, is the division between Yahoos and Houyhnhnms, which almost literally segregates desire from reason and makes the Yahoos savage creatures with almost no role in the dominant culture. There is no genuine traffic between these two radically different kinds, and Gulliver’s ability to bridge the gap between them presents a fundamental challenge to the structural logic that governs Houyhnhnm society. This logic is crucial to keeping the forces of history at bay. There are clear distinctions, for example, between kinds of horses, whose different colors and capacities keep some of them “always in the Condition of Servants” (256). These horses never aspire “to match out of their own Race, which in that Country would be reckoned monstrous and unnatural” (256). Similarly, “in their Marriages they are exactly careful to chuse such Colours as will not make any disagreeable Mixture in the Breed” (268). Such care keeps “the Race from degenerating” and locks society in a virtuous equilibrium (268–269). Its unity safeguarded in this way, Houyhnhnm society is able to resist history and change. Other factors strengthen this ability. The rational char-

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acter of the Houyhnhnms, for example, makes disagreements unlikely: there are no “Controversies, Wranglings, Disputes” (267). Reason strikes with immediate conviction and it is impossible to deceive, nor are there any desires that would prompt such transgression. The even distribution, low intensity, and limited kinds of emotion greatly enhance the unity of Houyhnhnm society. “Nature,” Gulliver points out, “teaches them to love the whole Species,” and this belief prompts them to treat “a Stranger from the remotest Part . . . equally . . . with the nearest Neighbour” (268). Wherever a Houyhnhnm goes, he “looks upon himself as at home” (268). An even more dramatic reduction of the emotional bias we develop toward those who are close to us can be seen in the way the Houyhnhnms treat their children. Gulliver observes his master “to shew the same Affection to his Neighbour’s Issue that he had for his own” (268). “The married Pair,” meanwhile, “pass their Lives with the same Friendship, and mutual Benevolence that they bear to all others of the same Species” (269). The different intensities and kinds of emotions that Europeans have cultivated for the different groups they belong to—humans, nations, families, lovers, friends, neighbors— are absent. Interest and desire have, for that reason and others, no foothold in Houyhnhnm-land. All affective energy is spent evenly and equally among members of the same species, the cohesion of which is greatly increased as a result. Even death causes neither joy nor grief (274). No wonder that Gulliver observes that “among a People so well united” “few Events of any Moment” happen (273). Even the one event, the one controversy that does occur in Houyhnhnm society, is tamed by its cyclical occurrence. I mean the “old Debate. . . . Whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the Face of the Earth” (271). During a meeting of the Representative Council of the Houyhnhnm nation, the proposal to get rid of the Yahoos is accompanied by an account of their origin, which describes their spontaneous generation from mud. Surely, the proposers suggest, such a disgusting birth, when added to their innumerable offenses and the sheer loathsomeness of the species, authorizes the extermination of the Yahoos. Gulliver’s Houyhnhnm master responds to this idea. He presents a different proposal about how to exterminate the Yahoos and offers a new account of their origins. The Yahoos, he explains, did not spring up from mud but had originally been travelers from another country stranded in Houyhnhnm-land. Their savageness, in this account, does not result from the circumstances attending their generation but from a process of degeneration happening over a long period of time (272). If the first account heard in the assembly made the Yahoos a natural phenomenon, in this second account

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they are the creatures of history, the product of degeneration. The assembly ultimately decides that Gulliver must either join the Yahoos, the species to which he belongs, or leave Houyhnhnm-land. Structural purity is enforced against Gulliver’s unique in-between status, which is finally intolerable to the Houyhnhnm nation. The content of the speech by Gulliver’s master at the Representative Council meeting, Swift emphasizes, was suggested by Gulliver himself. Swift thus signals that Gulliver represents history and change, forces that push against the timeless rigidity of species distinctions in Houyhnhnm-land. Gulliver is the original of the Yahoos, before they degenerated, and he embodies the variability of species not only by being the only Yahoo with a modicum of reason but also by becoming more horse-like as time goes on. Halfway through his stay in Houyhnhnm-land, Gulliver gives up the “Defence of my Species” (263). The “Honour of my own Kind” is no longer “worth managing” in the face of equine superiority (258). Gulliver contracts “such a Love and Veneration for the Inhabitants” (258) that he decides to imitate the Houyhnhnms. His imitative desire goes so far that he changes his “Gait and Gesture” (270) and, when he beholds his reflection, turns away in “Horror and detestation of my self” (278). After his return to England, he cannot stand the smell of his own family. Even his senses have thus been opened up to historical change, a remarkable testament to the powers of the human will. In his fourth journey, Gulliver represents the possibility of willful evolution against involuntary Yahoo devolution. The plasticity that Gulliver’s origin story about the Yahoos and his own transformation reveals threatens the timeless order of the Houyhnhnms. The historical energy Gulliver brings would launch that order into the vicissitudes of historical time and dissolve its cohesion. Whether such entry of structure into historical time is good or bad in Swift’s mind is not easy to say. Many of the traits of Houyhnhnm culture are agreeable to Swift. The absence of interest and dispute, the publicmindedness, the victory over degeneration, and the tendency to privilege the concrete and the useful over the abstract and useless are all positive aspects of Houyhnhnm culture. On this level, Houyhnhnm-land is a genuine utopia. Yet the structural forces that allow the Houyhnhnms to step outside of time and cultivate virtue, health, and stability also create an excessive unity that Swift ultimately rejects. To be sure, he lets Gulliver fantasize, during his visit to the Struldbruggs, about the aesthetic distance purchased by immortality and the consequent luxury to contemplate historical change not as an

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imminent possibility but as a distant spectacle whose convulsions have settled into a comforting regularity that almost resembles natural patterns (210). But for Swift, stepping outside of time is finally a troubling fantasy. It is not achievable and not even desirable. Defying time is defying circumstance and leads to delusional isolation. This is the great failing of the Houyhnhnms, whose reaction to the agent of history, Gulliver, mobilizes the excessive unity of their species against another. In the annual debate about the extermination of the Yahoos, the abstractions of species reveal, once again, their violence. When Gulliver is forced to leave Houyhnhnm-land, structure extrudes the energies of history. Swift’s narrative thus dramatizes the—by then already conventional—model of utopia as “a static society” with its own “safeguards against radical alterations of the structure.”92 Swift prefers, in the end, smaller utopias that are built up from the occasional and the particular to expand connections and lower distinctions instead of seeking wholesale transformations. The radical indistinction between individual and species, particular and general, proximity and distance that Houyhnhnm society realizes is possible only through a purification that oppresses and excludes difference and variation. Swift’s portrayal of the Houyhnhnms extends in this manner his analysis of form, its potential for transformation and its dangerous cohesion. It is the allure and the terror of the excessively unified, pure body that Swift reveals in the Houyhnhnms. He recognizes the utopian potential of Gulliver’s imitative project, the power of the will to impose different modes on a malleable being. But he also sees the project’s terrifying flaw: Gulliver’s desire to switch sides entirely and completely undo his distinctive existence. In wishing to become a Houyhnhnm, Gulliver taps the energies of historical transformation for the purpose of transcending history and disappearing into the structural purity of the Houyhnhnms. This is a contradictory undertaking, and it is the complete erasure of Gulliver’s difference that Swift criticizes as the sign of a desire for a purity and perfection that is ultimately delusional. If Gulliver’s reserve was exposed in Brobdingnag, his adventures in Houyhnhnm-land reveal the dangers faced by a hero who loses all reserve. It is not so much interspecies companionship that we get at the end of Gulliver’s Travels than an exhibition of misdirected species plasticity. Because it is too radical, too transformative, Gulliver’s imitative project contradicts the promise of surfaces that Swift pursued when he assumed the role of the projector or when he staged the handkerchief scene. That promise had to do with the possibility of more explicitly collaborative scenarios that manage to bring different entities into productive

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and non-hierarchical contact without losing difference entirely. In his final journey, by contrast, Gulliver goes deep, goes native, and loses himself.

VII From the days of its first publication, Gulliver’s Travels has been seen as hostile to conventional religion, usually because of book 4’s misanthropy.93 Literary scholars are understandably partial to Swift’s fictional works, but Swift’s attachment to the Anglican establishment is not something that he leaves behind when he composes literary works. It is misleading to envision a nocturnal subversion of conventional religion in the literary works that the stout defender of Anglicanism abandons in the morning. The remarkable inventiveness of Gulliver’s Travels does not result from a freedom that Swift only felt in literary works. Much of it derives, instead, from Swift’s voluntarism and the way it became useful in the establishment fight against atheism. The most concrete link between Gulliver’s Travels and the world of apologetic writing is undoubtedly Swift’s debt to Richard Bentley. As we saw in Chapter 2, Bentley’s sermon against atheism invents Gulliver’s narrative engine when it deploys a detailed counterfactual conceit to show that our biological makeup fits our lives’ purpose. But as Bentley’s microscopic eyes morph into Gulliver’s in Brobdingnag, Swift transforms the intended affirmation of the current order into what already lay hidden in Bentley’s slightly too detailed counterfactual: a now completely unrestrained invitation to see the world with different eyes, from a perspective not available to human beings. Swift’s narrative is not intended to reassure us that we are well suited to our purpose in life. The combination of a carefully particularized yet counterfactual narrative seeks to illuminate truths about the human condition that we cannot grasp empirically, through sensory perception and reflection. Bentley’s microscopic eyes hope to settle us in the here and now. Swift intends to unsettle us, to experience what it is like to be ill fitted, and to grasp the constructedness of our habits and customs. Yes, Swift ridicules Bentley in A Tale of a Tub and “The Battle of the Books” (1704). But he also expands his counterfactual with relish, pushing it into constructive territory. There are broader debts to the apologetic tradition. Let us recall that the Anglican campaign against so-called atheists drew on voluntarism to amplify the idea of an arbitrary creator and a creation without inherent order; to stress that frail and willful human beings are thrown into a contingent world

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of puzzling particulars whose essences and larger order are not intelligible and can only be constructed; and to grasp infinite variety as an ontological truth that entailed the existence of fundamentally different, even superior, worlds and beings. These assertions were deployed to criticize the proud elevation of human reason by heterodox thinkers in the 1690s and beyond. They helped resist the atheist belief that the world was the way it is by some necessity, that the rules, laws, or principles that determined divine creation were intelligible to human beings. These assertions made it clear, finally, that human beings were not able to derive morality from empirical observation alone and that their happiness depended on revelation and obeying divine commands. These assertions allow us to appreciate the point of Swift’s dedicated and detailed imagination of various modes of being. If Gulliver’s first two journeys still show some restraint in this regard, the third and fourth journeys clearly indicate the will to push variety beyond the limits that the conceit of size differentials still respects. Taken together, Gulliver’s travels into several remote nations make us realize that order is arbitrarily imposed. They do so broadly, by displaying a wide range of social structures, beings, and behaviors, and they do so in detail—by the way that Swift strikes laughter from the realization of arbitrariness.94 They also do so by the progressive revelation of the absurd extent to which European civilization depends on abstractions and artificial distinctions. Included among these abstractions are essences and kinds and the assumption that they are durable realities. Along with the spectacle of rational horses and Yahoos, Gulliver’s final conversion to horselike being powerfully suggests that the order of kinds is not based on distinctions that are anchored in nature but is subject to historical change. Without such an anchor, variety is truly infinite. Swift rejects, in these ways, the necessity of the world’s structures and the normative hold of the manifest. He shows the arbitrariness, the contingency, the constructedness of the given. As we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, to insist on a truly infinite variety and to prompt human beings to imagine different worlds and modes of being became a strategy of those who sought to resist the atheist tendencies of a Toland, Spinoza, or Leibniz, tendencies Swift was well aware of. To assert that there is more than what meets the eye in our immediate experience, that there could have been or are different kinds and modes of being, was useful to those who wished to defend established religion and its claim to transcendent realities. When Gulliver sees lice eating off a beggar’s jacket with the same vividness that he sees hogs rooting, he has been placed beyond the compulsive fit between biological makeup and moral purpose that Toland had so

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rigorously articulated to dispense with the role of mysteries in the pursuit of a moral life. By emphasizing Gulliver’s ability to adapt to and even thrive in drastically different environments, Swift disrupts arguments that want to explain humankind’s place and purpose by focusing on their fit in existing, visible structures. Something above these structures is required to make sense of human life. Of course, Swift is not usually seen as someone who is much interested in transcendent realities. In certain ways this is true: he does not write much about them, and even his defense of the trinity has struck some as merely dutiful. Still, Swift’s ability to reject those who claim that the world as given and scrutinized yields every thing they need to live a moral life depends on transcendent realities. “Unrevealed philosophy” is for Swift fundamentally flawed.95 For all the wisdom and knowledge of ancient thinkers, Swift explains in a sermon on the excellence of Christianity, most of them either became “sour and morose, supercilious and untreatable” or fell “into the vulgar pursuits of common men.”96 Swift draws the lesson for his parishioners in this way: “So impossible is it for a man, who looks no further than the present world, to fix himself long in a contemplation where the present world hath no part. He hath no sure hold, no firm footing; he can never expect to remove the earth he rests upon, while he hath no support beside for his feet, but wants, like Archimedes, some other place whereon to stand.”97 The search for truth remains flawed when it is conducted without a place beyond the here and now. Such a place or, as Swift also puts it, such a “retreat” is precisely what Christianity offers with its prospect of “future hope.”98 Without such a retreat, Swift would not have been able to write a narrative that so imaginatively unsettles the hold of the given and so vividly renders the arbitrariness and mutability of order. Such a retreat above the world allowed Swift to grasp arbitrariness and mutability not only as frightening but also as relieving—as authorizing destruction and defense of the given and as licensing the construction of alternate forms of order. Swift’s voluntarism nourished such a complex stance. As we have seen in Swift’s collaboration with the projector, in Gulliver’s collaboration with the Lilliputians, or in his dalliances with the court maids, Swift constructs such alternate forms when he assembles beings in irreductive arrangements or suggests the pleasures of indistinction. The goal is to point to communal possibilities beyond the order of kinds, relationships without the metaphysics of form or the epistemology of depth. At their most transformative, Swift’s literary inventions not only let us feel the ridiculous weight of

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abstractions and hierarchies but conduct us into exhilarating zones of irreduction and indistinction where the frictionless play between poles suggest a union that works not by domination but by lowering difference and reserve to promote temporary coalitions. How to maintain union amid multiplying distinctions was probably the most basic and pressing issue to come out of Swift’s analysis of the disorder of kinds. Even as he grudgingly accepted the toleration of existing religious kinds, Swift was drawn to the voluntarist response, which created unity at the expense of distinction. But as his early belief in the ultimate sovereignty of the people— even after the creation of a commonwealth— suggests, a Hobbesian solution to the problem of unity was unlikely to satisfy Swift.99 But Swift was also familiar with a different way of thinking about the relationship between unity and distinction. I have in mind the metaphysical articulation of the issue in the mystery of the trinity. In his sermon on the subject, Swift defended the mysterious union of the three distinct persons of father, son, and holy ghost. He criticized all the “pestilent Books” that were trying to undermine this central Christian mystery by claiming that it is rationally “impossible . . . that Three can be One, and One can be Three.” Swift argues for this possibility by contending that “we are commanded . . . by God to believe [what] appears evident and certain to us, although we do not see, nor can conceive it.” The only thing scripture tells us and the only thing we need to believe is “that there is some kind of Unity and Distinction in the Divine Nature.”100 The reconciliation of unity and distinction was a divine matter, inaccessible to humans. Yet we have excellent reasons to believe in this possibility. Swift explored it repeatedly in several of his works by figuring unguarded contact across distinctions that temporarily gathers different beings in moments of possible or actual collaboration. In these moments, a simultaneous unity and distinction of sorts occurs. But it achieves no reconciliation and does not last.

Chapter 6

The Providence of Gathering and Scattering Dynamic Variety in Defoe

Swift and Defoe readily fit opposite camps. Defoe is an exuberant Whig, Swift a complicated Tory. Swift defends the Anglican establishment, Defoe is a dissenter. In the early eighteenth century, Swift and Defoe are rivals. Defoe’s The True-Born Englishman (1700) gives him notoriety and fame as a satirist before Swift establishes his reputation. Swift and Defoe are major contributors to the debate over the War of the Spanish Succession and tangle over the war, toleration, and Scotland.1 Swift calls Defoe “grave, sententious, dogmatical” and considers him “among the lowest Part of Mankind.”2 Defoe thinks Swift’s A Tale of a Tub is blasphemous.3 He is dubious to Swift because his faith links him to the turbulent and factious spirits of the midcentury that caused the proliferation of new religious kinds. Swift’s reliance on surfaces and roles, his willing acceptance of divisions between internal conviction and external action, runs counter to the primacy that nonconformists give to private experience and conscience. Swift’s respect for established custom stands opposite Defoe’s forceful critique—bolstered by appeals to natural law—of customary authority.4 Not surprisingly, these two writers have starkly different views of the killing of King Charles I, an act that deliberately jettisoned traditional authority.5 Such contrasts can conceal areas of fundamental agreement. The different positions on custom, for example, were motivated by the same belief in its arbitrariness. Both Swift’s respect and Defoe’s critique responded to this basic fact. A closely related pattern can be observed around the relationship of

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form and matter. Swift and Defoe both believed that matter was superior to form. They construed the events of the Glorious Revolution accordingly. Reflecting on the dissolution of government that occurred then, Swift pointed out in 1708 that “the Body of the People was . . . at Liberty, to chuse what Form of Government they pleased.”6 Eight years earlier, Defoe had characterized the people in 1688 as “A Chaos free to chuse for their own share, / What Case of Government they please to wear.”7 The difference lies in the stridency of Defoe’s statement. The substance is the same. It is Defoe’s moral philosophy, however, that brings him closest to Swift’s voluntarist stance. Human beings, Defoe believed, had no natural inclination toward moral order. “Man’s a lawless Wretch by Inclination,” he wrote in Jure Divino (1706).8 In an attack on “learned . . . talk of the rectitude of Nature and of natural religion,” Defoe questioned whether there was a single instance “when nature of its meer undirected inclination guided mankind to make the best choice of things, and . . . led him to choose virtue by a meer propensity of will without instruction or example.”9 Morality does not come from natural goodness. “Right and Wrong were settled first by Law,” Defoe argued, and this law was delivered by “immediate Dictate from on High.”10 Laws worked only if subjection to them was enforced. Defoe explains this for political government when he notes that “The High Pretences may perhaps be Great / But ’tis Subjection makes a Law compleat.”11 “Rule without Power’s an empty, senseless Word, / And Justice Nonsense is without the Sword.”12 Defoe’s emphasis on the need for enforced subjection grows out of his belief that human beings are driven by self-love, not concern for others or ideals of justice. “Self-Love’s the Ground of all the things we do,” he notes in Jure Divino and adds: “ ’Tis Hopes of Heaven, for which we Heaven obey.”13 Religion is an instance of self-love, and the fundamental law of nature is selfpreservation: it is “the only Law / That does Involuntary Duty Draw.”14 Defoe’s moral voluntarism differs from Swift’s in its prominent framing through the narrative of the fall, which causes man’s degeneration and makes the imposition of moral law necessary. In this, Defoe follows Pufendorf, whom he admired and cited.15 A second difference is Defoe’s emphasis on providence, on God’s involvement in human affairs, which Swift tended to deny. But while Defoe believed that God leaves signs in the world for humans to interpret, he was not confident about our ability to decipher them. This has likely something to do with the events of the seventeenth century. The nonconformist rebels of the interregnum had trusted that their early victories in the Civil War represented divine sanction of their revolutionary enterprise.

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This providential confidence, however, was sharply qualified by the event of the restoration and the subsequent persecution of dissenters through the provisions of the Clarendon Code.16 Defoe grew up during this period of persecution and disillusionment. Uncertainty and an awareness of abrupt changeability were part of his idea of providence. We can see Defoe’s complex understanding of providence in Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720). Rejecting the heterodox argument that God was bound by rules, Defoe has Crusoe stress God’s radical freedom to revise the script of providence. “It would be an ill Account we should give of the Government of divine Providence in the World,” he points out, “if we should argue, that its Events are so unavoidable, and every Circumstance so determined, that nothing can be altered.” Doing so would “deny even God himself the Privilege of being a free Agent.” Defoe stresses instead God’s willfulness, the “infinite Variation of his Providence, which in all its Actings seems to us to be at full Liberty to determine anew, and give Events a turn this Way or that Way, as its Sovereignty and Wisdom, shall direct.” God’s “spontaneous Power of acting” is unbound by any preceding rule or pattern, including its own precedents. His will is free and can endlessly rearrange circumstances and redirect events.17 God’s sovereignty and the unpredictability of His actions give individuals only a limited and always changeable sense of direction. “We are shortsighted Creatures, and can see but a very little before us,” Defoe notes.18 We cannot grasp divine intentions and plans. As “one Decree . . . revers[es] another, and one Action supersed[es] another,” divine variety evades our understanding.19 We may occasionally snatch a precious insight from meditating on some detail or avoid a course of action because of some insistent circumstance, but the reliability and extent of such guidance are limited, doubtable, revisable.20 The vagaries of interpreting providence are daunting. It is only at the day of final judgment that man encounters “that Light, where all things are naked and open; where he sees too late, that he has been a Cheat to himself.”21 Secure self-knowledge, certainty about our path and place in the world, are hard to come by. The uncertainties of providence notwithstanding, Defoe was able to preserve access to a millenarian strain. He maintained this access in part by viewing the fall as an event that was not entirely irreversible. Defoe readily admitted, for example, that “the capacious Understanding, with which Man was at first indu’d, sunk into Darkness of Mind, at his Fall.” But this dark state was not unchangeable. In the early eighteenth century, Defoe could still

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echo the project of Adamic restoration that had spurred the scientific endeavors of the Royal Society and its associates in the mid-seventeenth century.22 The cognitive loss caused by the fall was dramatic, but while it meant that “Man became an enquiring Creature, that wanted Instruction, and stood in need of Experience, and all Common Helps to improve him,” this difficult path might still “recover the Illumination.”23 Such combinations of darkness and light characterize other areas of Defoe’s thought. He was a passionate chronicler, for example, of the “wild Oppression,” “Tyranny and Lust” that drove the history of human government after the fall.24 But he could also project ideal visions of government in which unity and distinction were fully reconciled. He did so, for example, at the end of Jure Divino, when he presented “the Heaven of Government, where Men, / Eternal Unity of Wills maintain.”25 “The High Seraphic Union is so clear, / The Motions so exact and regular; / No Aid the mutual Force of Parts can want, / Nor either Branch, can either Branch supplant; / The Harmony of National Consent, / Makes all be Musick in a Government.”26 Despite such high strains, the “free Concurrence” he eulogized here evaporated quickly when Defoe was compelled soon after to dwell, once again, on “Britain’s strange Convulsions.”27 Similarly, Defoe could on occasion suggest that the tendency to evil was so strong because it may have lodged “in the Seeds of Nature.”28 But he also believed, as we shall see, that creation was arranged in a way that could promote human flourishing. Defoe could thus be equally realistic and idealistic, cynical and hopeful. There were providential signs, but their reliability was questionable and their interpretation elusive. God is concerned with mankind, but He is absolutely sovereign and can disregard and revise his providence at any time. History vividly illustrates human depravity, but there is also hope for illumination and heavenly union. Nature is tainted, yet it contains clues that allow humans to improve their lot. This double vision recalls the double-edged ontology of voluntarism, but it is here modified by a belief— sustained against considerable historical odds, one senses—in providence and millenarianism. The millenarian expectancy Defoe could recall, the providence he hung on to, allowed him to commit to the world as an ongoing, unfinished process. Swift had accepted the same process but refrained from committing to it. Instead, there was fear that every thing could fall apart. There was reliance on externals to hold every thing together. Defoe’s voluntarism, meanwhile, qualified the emphasis on the internal usually associated with nonconformist faith. The unfinished process of the world was for Defoe kept going, among

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other things, by prioritizing neither outside nor inside but treating them as equal forces that could act on each other in various ways. For Swift, hope was restrained and showed itself only occasionally, when he was tempted to imagine new forms of being together. Swift held off from projecting the process of constructive decomposition onto an ascending developmental line. He created moments of gathering that arose from an early stage of scattering, but typically concluded with redoubled scatterings that undid the gathering. Defoe’s providentialism, by contrast, allowed him to undertake such projection. Constructive decomposition led somewhere. Gathering and scattering were tied together in a dialectical relationship that drove the process of history. For Defoe, infinite variety was neither epistemological metaphor nor ontological truth. It was the providentially seeded goal of an unfolding process of human civilization, as we shall see. That religious ideas bear on Defoe’s thinking about variety can already be discerned in his defense of the trinity. Defoe had grown increasingly agitated about heterodox belief toward the end of his life.29 He entered the ring on behalf of the trinity in 1727, when he published A New Family Instructor. The book was squarely aimed at rebutting the arguments of “Deists, . . . Arians, Socinians, and Anti-Trinitarians.”30 Cast in the form of a conversation between a father and his children, A New Family Instructor at one point hones in on Christ, one of the three figures in the trinity whose special status as God’s son on earth had been debated in the context of ideas about species and identity.31 The father criticizes heterodox thinkers by arguing that “our Opposers cannot distinguish their Saviour under the various differing Representations in which the Scripture paints him out to us, and which seem, as they pretend, to contradict one another.”32 These opposers suffer from a misguided literalism that leads them to consider Jesus as “one and the same identical Person in the sense of Nature.”33 But such reduction is false. The father proceeds to paint a picture in which Jesus appears in all his variety: Here is our Saviour in the Glory of the Divine Nature, and There again in the lowest State of his Incarnation; Here as Jehovah, There as the Mediator; Here as the Lord our Maker, There as the Lord our Saviour; Here as God over all, blessed for ever, There as lifted up, and drawing all Men to him; Here in the Form of God, There in the Form of a Servant; Here he is the Image of the invisible God, the express Image; the Word, which was in the Beginning, and which

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was GOD, really GOD; There the Son of Man, and really Man, or the Deity or Humanity together, by that mysterious Union, the hypostatick Union, which is the Mystery hid from Ages.34 Defoe’s father leads us through all the different aspects in which the same person, Jesus Christ, is presented to us in scripture. He is, at different points, man, deity, servant, lord, visible, invisible, son, father. The literalism of the anti-trinitarians, who wish to reduce Jesus to a sameness that persists through time, is dismissed as inadequate to grasp the wondrous multiplicity of Jesus’s existence, which transcends the merely physical. Defoe firmly rejects the antitrinitarian claim that Jesus is one kind of being whose mode of existence is comprehensible to humans.35 Defoe’s defense of the trinity matters to my argument because the metaphysical variety Defoe endorses sheds light on his compositional practices as a writer of fictions. These practices, as we will see, are indebted to the basic idea that animates his defense of orthodox doctrine: one thing is not singular and bound but multiple, capable of several identities and functions. This idea troubles our assumptions about realism, which we tend to see as representing things empirically, as they occur to individual perception and reflection, with identities that remain recognizable even as they change in their passage through time and space. Yet Defoe’s writing, I suggest, is not limited by the probabilistic development of things as different yet similar. It is shaped by the wish to break the law of relative sameness and recognizability and to reveal that one kind of thing can be other kinds of things. I propose to approach the form of Defoe’s novels through the idea of a transcendent realism that draws on theology to realize an irreducible variety. This proposal responds to a quality of Defoe’s writing that, through the heaping up, suspension, and transformation of kinds, reaches beyond the constraints of manifest worldly structures. Defoe’s fictional presentation of objects and actions unsettles their established functions, identities, and positions and opens them up to transformative possibility. Even as they pursue what we have come to recognize as the construction of realistic scenes and settings, Defoe’s novels push past the perceivable and the probable to suggest modes of being that exceed the natural. In arguing that Defoe joins realism and transcendence, I build on some of the most accomplished religious interpretations of Defoe’s novels. George Starr’s and J. Paul Hunter’s works of the late 1960s and early 1970s insisted on the unity of the material and the spiritual in Defoe’s novels. Hunter did so by emphasizing the Puritan belief in the continued legibility of an empiricist

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book of nature. His search for symbols and patterns that organize the variety of Crusoe’s adventures taps crucial resources of the religious imagination and feeds an astute polemic against an empirically neutered realism. But it also imposes limits. Following larger trends in Defoe criticism of the 1960s and 1970s, both Hunter and Starr make the comprehension of variety through spiritual patterns the means by which they reclaim Defoe’s seemingly undisciplined fictions as possessed of surprising unity and purpose, including coherent developmental lines that move us from beginning to middle and end.36 Hunter’s emphasis on the term “comprehension” is especially marked, from the “comprehensive coherence” offered by the Puritan myth to the “comprehensive vision of life” Crusoe seeks to achieve.37 In their early works, Hunter and Starr bring an Aristotelian understanding of form to Defoe’s works.38 They argue that the aesthetic value of Defoe’s fictions lies in the development, coherence, and wholeness of the work, which depends on the successful organization of a diverse fictional matter by the shaping hand of form. I share Starr’s and Hunter’s belief that Defoe’s mode of composition is animated by theology, but I do not think that this mode suits an Aristotelian notion of form. I argue that Defoe creates some of his most important literary effects under the influence of a theology that does not grasp being through the hierarchy of form and matter but promotes the realization of an irreducible variety. This perspective challenges the Aristotelian manner of creating wholes. We have witnessed such a challenge in Richard Blackmore’s aesthetic, which recognized the sublime as a mode that rejects ideas of just design by accepting imperfection, privileging parts over wholes and energy over structure. Though his theology is not as strictly voluntarist as Blackmore’s, Defoe understood the relationship between the sublime and an infinite variety that sought to go beyond the given to reveal the plasticity of being. Defoe felt the need for modes of composition that departed from the naturally sanctioned ideals of order and uniformity advocated by someone like Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury. He realized, along with Blackmore, that the sublime authorized ways of arranging things that did not restrain or manage but unleash variety from the calibrations of just design. He forged a relationship between a providence that linked the fulfillment of human possibility to infinite variety and a sublime that sought to transcend natural and rational limits by figures of dramatic multiplication, expansion, and variation. That such an aesthetic suits Defoe’s defense of the trinity should not take much explaining. We shall see shortly how it sorts with the more dynamic character of Defoe’s fictional variety.

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Defoe’s interest in literary variety has not been a secret. It has been visible since his novels were first published. The brief preface to Robinson Crusoe, for example, states that “the Wonders of this Man’s Life exceed all that . . . is to be found extant; the Life of one Man being scarce capable of greater Variety.”39 Defoe makes good on this promise: from being the son of a middle-class father with a clear place in the world, Crusoe becomes a sailor, a trader, a slave, a planter, a slave trader, and a jack-of-all-trades on a desert island where he makes umbrellas, bread, pots, and boats, and ends up a rich merchant whose fortunes exceed all that one could expect after twenty-eight years in total isolation. Defoe’s faith in variety (and the way it pays off) also inspired the novel’s ending and sequels. To the consternation of many readers, Robinson Crusoe spins out in a fight with a pack of wolves, a hasty settlement in England, a return to his island at the ripe age of sixty-two, and a sequel in which Crusoe sets out again on a seafaring life, undeterred by the fact that he is now in his seventies. Defoe suggests that the “surprising Variety” of the initial volume explains its success, and he concludes the Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) by having his hero note that his life has consisted of “a long Variety of Changes”: for seventytwo years it has been “a Life of infinite Variety.”40 Similar claims can be found in Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724). The latter moves through a “Vast Variety of Fortunes” and the former experiences such an “abundance of delightful Incidents” that “infinite variety” is the only way to characterize her life.41 In 1725, Defoe published a very different kind of fiction. But even without a central character telling his or her life story, A New Voyage Round the World features Defoe’s customary boast about an unprecedented “Variety of Incidents” issuing in a “perfectly new . . . Form,” this time not organized by the arc of a life but a journey around the world.42 My brief tour indicates that Defoe saw infinite variety as the central aesthetic and commercial value of his fictions.43 He and his printers advertised this value on title pages and in prefaces again and again, clearly intending to lure readers with the promise of the infinite riches heaped together in the singular volume they hold. As an object, the printed, continuous prose narrative made it difficult to dismiss boasts about new forms and infinite varieties. Only reading the entire text, after all, could decide if such things were to be found in it. Such an object— still a fairly new commodity—made it possible to experiment with new forms. Its substance assisted an aesthetic of infinite variety just as much as the long philosophical poem did. But for Defoe, this aesthetic was not reducible to commercial interest. It was sanctioned by his providentialist faith.

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My argument about Defoean variety will begin with a subject that has recently been taken up by Robert James Merrett. Merrett’s Daniel Defoe: Contrarian (2013) recognizes a stylistic feature of Defoe’s writing that will interest me as well: Defoe’s tendency to deploy lexical plurality to produce referential uncertainty. Like me, Merrett finds much to do about Defoe’s tendency to provide alternate names for the same thing and to couple them through the conjunction “or.” Merrett views this tendency primarily through the lens of reader response criticism. In cultivating such polysemy, he argues, Defoe wishes to enhance readerly engagement with his fictions, fictions that Merrett sees in a tragic light as stories of failed integration. But while he has many intriguing things to say about Defoe’s interest in “the pluralities of selfhood,” Merrett in the end views these pluralities as a means that allows Defoe’s readers to accomplish what eludes his protagonists: the cultivation of “the reflexive practices required by the search for a healthy identity.”44 Defoe’s intention in depicting the failure of integration in Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders, in other words, is to promote an integrated sense of identity in the reader. What is missing in Merrett’s argument and others like it is an insight that also shapes some of Swift’s inventions: while disintegration is fearful, it can carry hope in a culture that has become aware of the extent to which essentializing distinctions have constructed misleading or oppressive realities. Understanding Defoe’s dynamic variety will allow us to see disintegration positively, as a type of constructive decomposition. Defoe is more at ease with such decomposition than Swift, and he has a correspondingly robust appreciation of its capacity to deliver us from oppressive structures. I will stress, then, not the tragic or strategic but the utopian aspects of Defoe’s decompositions.45 In The Theory of the Novel (1920), Georg Lukács identified the novel’s “bad infinity” as a central formal challenge. Lukács argued that the novel is able to impose some cohesion on its other wise illimitable matter only through the adoption of biography as an organizing form: “The novel overcomes its ‘bad’ infinity by recourse to the biographical form. On the one hand, the scope of the world is limited by the scope of the hero’s possible experiences and its mass is organized by the orientation of his development towards finding the meaning of life in self-recognition; on the other hand, the discretely heterogeneous mass of isolated persons, non-sensuous structures and meaningless events receives a unified articulation by the relating of each separate element to the central character and the problem symbolized by the story of his life.”46 As my brief excursion into the infinite variety of the lives Defoe paints suggested, none of this really describes the shape of Defoe’s fictions.

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For Defoe stretches the scope of his protagonists’ lives beyond probability in order to produce an infinite variety not to be found in the world. He repeatedly presents scenes of self-recognition only as a way station for further reinventions, and even though he relates each separate element of the narrative to the central character, the events, persons, and structures this character encounters along the way do not acquire meaning in the context of a unifying problem. The lives of Moll, Roxana, and Crusoe are so protean that whatever unity they possess cannot bear the symbolic weight Lukács assigns. In Defoe’s fictions, infinity is not bad. It is a positive value with liberating potential. To be fair to Lukács—whose Theory of the Novel remains an astonishing exercise in the ontology of literary form—he probably did not have Defoe in mind when he wrote about the biographical solution to the novel’s bad infinity. But it strikes me that we still often approach Defoe’s novels too intent on deciphering what Lukács’s statement implies: the development of a protagonist through particular experiences that add up to a larger whole, be it lesson, stance, or problem. The particulars are always comprehended by the general. I recognize, of course, that the business of interpretation cannot proceed unless there is a meaningful relationship between parts and whole. But our tendency to emphasize development as a hermeneutic key has often stood in the way of acknowledging—and working with—an inconvenient truth: that the parts of Defoe’s fictions (including his protagonists) often do not add up to a meaningful whole. I believe that our understanding of Defoe’s fictional designs does not gain much when we press manifold variety into structural cohesion. In the voluntarist tradition of literary invention that Defoe contributes to, variety does not belong to structure. It defines itself against the constraints of structure, opening up realms of possibility beyond the given. Let me begin to explain this by examining Defoe’s polysemy in Robinson Crusoe.

II In Robinson Crusoe, the joining of words by the conjunction “or” is often pure habit, a verbal tic that Defoe cannot seem to control. When Crusoe builds his first wall around his habitation, for example, he mentions the “Piles or Stakes,” the “Posts or Piles” he uses.47 When he regrets not having a wheelbarrow, he notes that he had “no possible Way to make the Iron Gudgeons for the Spindle or Axis of the Wheel” (111). He retrieves “Boards, or Plank” from the wrecked ship (120), has enough “Tortoise or Turtles” (152), but is

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without “Copper or Kettle” (181). In these instances and others like it, Defoe’s doubling of names and their linkage by the conjunction “or” appears to serve no significant purpose. No explanatory value is implied, not much tension suggested: all of these pairs function as near synonyms. Trying to make sense of this habit, we might turn to the didactic impulse that sometimes prompts Defoe’s doubling of names. Thus, he tells us that one of Crusoe’s fellow-slaves in Morocco is called “Ismael, who they call Muly or Moely” (72). He informs us that an open piece of land he encloses is a “Meadow-Land or Savanna, (as our People call it in the Western Colonies)” (165). Or he describes how Crusoe sees “one of the Villains lift up his Arm with a great Cutlash, as the Seamen call it, or Sword” (243). These examples indicate Defoe’s desire to display his grasp of the linguistic variety that such a merchant-adventurer as Crusoe is exposed to. There is confidence and pleasure in these didactic moments. Defoe relishes the opportunity to show his familiarity with a wide range of usages that cut across geographical, cultural, and social boundaries. This expansive tendency is no doubt part of Defoe’s glorification of the figure of the merchant; in an age of increasing colonial exchange, Defoe imagined him as connected to everything, universally conversant, and possessed of a “comprehensive Understanding.”48 When it occurs with something like the didactic explicitness we can see in my examples, Defoe’s doubling of names comes into focus as an expression of mercantile ideology, which Defoe passionately promoted throughout his life. Knowing the different names by which different nations and professions refer to the same “species of goods” is one of the foremost linguistic duties of the successful merchant, Defoe tells us in The Compleat English Tradesman (1725).49 Approached this way, Defoe’s doubling habit invites a political analysis of style that would diagnose the desire for comprehensive reference as the expression of an emergent global consciousness that finds its material basis in the British extraction of value from colonial exchange relations. That Defoe’s instinctive and his didactic doubling both take synonymic form is surely a sign that he intends to explain and stabilize reference so that the distant imperial sphere becomes a familiar semantic horizon for readers at home. The linguistic action of providing alternative names thus prepares the lexicon required for making yourself at home in a rapidly expanding colonial economy. The “comprehension” of this economy, in both senses of the word, would seem to be Defoe’s goal. Similarly subject to such comprehension, we might argue, would be Crusoe’s island, whose incomprehensible strangeness is emphasized during

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the early stages of the novel. The “violent Tournado or Hurricane” that destroys Crusoe’s ship takes his crew “quite out of our Knowledge” (87). As they are crashing toward land, Crusoe notes (again using his favorite conjunction) that “we knew nothing where we were, or upon what Land it was we were driven, whether an Island or the Main” (88). “What the Shore was, whether Rock or Sand, whether Steep or Shoal, we knew not. . . . the Land look’d more frightful than the Sea” (89). Defoe continues to cultivate a sense of being out of one’s knowledge after Crusoe’s escape from the storm. Crusoe’s first night is spent in an unfamiliar tree that could come straight out of Blackmore’s collection of counterfactual species, “a thick bushy Tree like a Firr, but thorny” (91). On his first excursion into the island’s interior, Crusoe fires his gun and an “innumerable Number of Fowls of many Sorts” rise into the air. This multitude protests his intrusion by a “confus’d Screaming, and crying every one according to his usual Note; but not one of them of any Kind that I knew” (96). The one bird Crusoe happens to kill seems “to be a Kind of Hawk, its Colour and Beak resembling it, but had no Talons or Claws” (97). A little later, he is “surpris’d and almost frighted with two or three Seals, which, while I was gazing at, not well knowing what they were, got into the Sea and escap’d me for that time” (110). Crusoe believes he has found “Hares, as I thought them to be, and Foxes, but they differ’d greatly from all the other Kinds I had met with; nor could I satisfy myself to eat them, tho I kill’d several” (138). The acknowledgment of unfamiliar species matters even later in the novel. When he builds a boat with Friday, Crusoe confesses he cannot “tell to this Day what Wood to call the Tree we cut down, except that it was very like the Tree we call Fustic, or between that and the Nicaragua Wood, for it was much of the same Colour and Smell” (225). In all of these cases, the world of the island escapes or deviates from the knowledge of species Crusoe brings with him. Many of the kinds of plants and animals he finds either completely resist established categories or can only be partially represented by them. The drift of my discussion should by now be recognizable. Establishing the lexicon of imperial expansion, recognizing and utilizing the island’s strange plants and animals, cultivating its open land, establishing dominion: these actions are related and make up Crusoe’s colonizing project. Linguistic comprehension echoes the physical mastery of the island, which is transformed from a strange space to a known and familiar place, a place that may eventually appear on the maps of colonial trade. On this reading, infinite variety would be little more than a canny ruse by which Defoe raises the engaging

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veil of multiplicity only to reduce, all the more stunningly, the many to the few, the multiform to the uniform, the strange to the known, the delightful to the useful. Realism disenchants romance. Reduction and comprehension express the autonomous individual, imperialism, and the objectifying tendencies of a realist style inspired by empiricism. This is the reading that still seems almost instinctively right to those of us whose critical practices were shaped by the political turn of the 1980s. To my ear, this reading no longer rings true. It is too suspicious of infinite variety, too unwilling to register the seriousness with which Defoe embraces this concept. Reduction and comprehension, I hope to show, do not dominate the linguistic and physical action of Robinson Crusoe. On both levels, Defoe’s novel moves toward making multiplicity irreducible, blurring distinctions of kind, and unsettling identities, without much regard for luring the reader toward comprehension. Even Defoe’s smallest device for the cultivation of variety, his use of the conjunction “or,” finally reveals this. The material situation on the island leaves Crusoe with relatively few resources for survival. Despite the remarkable number of things he retrieves from the wrecked ship, Crusoe’s island life is one of scarcity. Scarcity puts pressure on many objects to assume the role of several kinds. For example, when Crusoe decides to dig a cave in a hill close to his tent, he notes that it “serv’d me like a Cellar to my House” (102). He also remarks that in his “Fancy” he called the cave “my Kitchen” (102). A little later, he tries to enlarge the cave and notes: “I work’d to make this Room or Cave spacious enough to accommodate me as a Warehouse or Magazin, a Kitchen, a Dining-room and a Cellar” (112). Five lines down, Defoe expands the kinds of rooms further when he mentions that his “Cave or Vault” is now finished (112). In these ten pages, the place Crusoe creates begins to assume more and more functions, names, and identities until we begin to wonder where the cave’s commodiousness might end. Kinds gather here. This is true in a much more tangible sense as well, for when Crusoe reviews all the things he has retrieved for storage in the cave, he boasts that he “had the biggest Magazin of all Kinds . . . that ever were laid up . . . for one Man” (98). In this improbable gathering of kinds, Crusoe’s imagination turns scarcity into plenitude. The gathering in the cave produces a crowded scene, but the conjunction of kinds by “or” adds a twist. While “Warehouse or Magazin” joins nearly equivalent terms, “Room or Cave” and “Cave or Vault” are non-synonymic pairs. They add to the proliferation of kinds in the passage, but they also create an oscillation between two kinds, a zone of uncertainty where it is not

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clear which of the two names applies. We might say that this is a domestic version of the more dramatic uncertainty expressed by the conjunctions “island or main,” “rock or sand” when Crusoe is first washed ashore. If Crusoe simply called the cave his room or his vault or if he noted that the cave was like a room or vault, he would let us construct the relationship between the two terms (as he does when he says that the cave is his kitchen or is like a cellar). But the conjunction “or” (a scheme rather than a trope) suspends the two terms without informing us how the one relates to the other. If the gathering in the cave strains toward infinite variety through physical and figurative transformations, the conjunction of kinds by “or” creates variety by suspending such transformation and cultivating undecidability. I would like to suggest that such undecidability, such suspension, dramatizes the arbitrariness of kinds and names. It orients us toward their fungibility. Whether one thing is another or can be another is an important concern in an environment of scarcity. The literal taking of one thing for another can be vital. Sometimes, this is rather straightforward, as when Crusoe uses “Iron Crows” “for a pick-axe” (111). Yet such translations are often complicated by Defoe’s conjunctive habits. When he has to “Mow or Reap” (144) his barley, Crusoe is “sadly put to it for a Scythe or a Sicle . . . and all I could do was to make one as well as I could out of one of the Broad Swords or Cutlasses” (143). When he has to improvise a “Sieve, or Search” to make flour, he uses some sailors’ “Neckcloths of Callicoe, or Muslin” (147–148). Much of Crusoe’s work of invention on the island has to do with discovering in one thing its ability to serve as another. Yet the conjunction “or” often doubles such translation, making it less definitive, less complete, even when apparent synonyms are involved. One thing, it seems, is always more than one. One name is never enough. The sequential manifestation of such multiplicity can be observed when we trace some of Crusoe’s metaphorical transformations of his environment. At one point, Crusoe begins to call his main habitation “Home” (132) and his rough outpost in the middle of the island his “Country-House” (171). These redesignations occur in response to events that change Crusoe’s perception of his environment or situation. Crusoe begins to call his habitation “Home” only after he has explored the island further and has discovered the “delicious Vale” that will accommodate his country house (131). Once he has a place away, he calls the other place home. When Crusoe discovers the footprint in the sand and fears that cannibals may invade the island and devour him, he begins calling his “Home” his “Castle” (171). Even later, during a particularly

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anxious phase, he calls it his “Cell” (185). It is his home or castle or cell depending on circumstances. Crusoe’s muskets, once they are positioned for the defense of his property, become “Cannon[s]” (191), and his homely boat— at first “a Canoe” as well as “my little Periagua” (157–158)—becomes a “Frigate” (200). Both the sense of being at home and the sense of being threatened precipitate such metaphorical activity. But because Crusoe’s island life is precariously split between opposing poles—it is a “Life of Sorrow, one way” and a “Life of Mercy, another” (155)— such activity is constantly subject to revision. Thus, when he is shaken with fear about the cannibals, Crusoe lies awake “in my Bed, or Hammock” (201), seemingly doubting the transformative powers of metaphor as he suspends his place of rest between bed and hammock. Metaphorical domestication is reversible and the conjunction “or” works here to return Crusoe to a more fluid sense of identity. But because they fluctuate so often with changing circumstances, Crusoe’s metaphors finally reinforce the plasticity of identity suggested by the conjunction “or.” The vicissitudes of Crusoe’s island life render the borders and identities of things flexible.50 In some of the more transformative actions of Crusoe the maker—when he is doing more than using one thing as another—we can see more concretely how cultivating the island is linked to unsettling the borders and identities of things. A good example is Crusoe’s attempt to make “a Shovel or Spade.” Like sickle and scythe, spade and shovel are two different kinds of things, and the latter pair is designed to perform different functions (even though the spade may, in a limited way, serve as a shovel and vice versa). Crusoe realizes that he absolutely needs “a Shovel or Spade” to cultivate the ground but does not know “what kind of one to make” (111). He takes advantage of a tree that grows on the island which “in the Brasils they call the Iron Tree” (111). He cuts a piece from this tree and, with painstaking labor, “work’d it effectually by little and little into the Form of a Shovel or Spade, the Handle exactly shap’d like ours in England” (111). It is quick work to read this episode as an allegory of the English colonizer appropriating native raw materials and imposing on them his own forms and purposes. Doing so, however, overlooks some details. For example, even if the handle looks like an English handle, Crusoe is uncertain about exactly what kind of tool he hopes to make (perhaps not the colonizer’s confident imposition of form on shapeless native materials). There is also the curious concession that the form he does, in fact, create is that of a “Shovel or Spade” (my emphasis). These two tools have different shapes, but the form

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Crusoe creates does not quite seem to fit either spade or shovel. This is an episode of uncertain creation that results in a genuinely ambiguous product— both shovel and spade but neither completely. The conjunctive “or” represents such blurred identity. Only part of the English form is decisively impressed on the native tree.51 Crusoe’s uncertainty about form and about the extent to which the things he makes fit into the cata logue by which we distinguish kinds is more generally significant. Crusoe is often embarrassed by his failure to give things determinate shape. When he tries his hand at making pots, for example, he invites the reader to pity or laugh at his productions. “What odd misshapen ugly things I made,” he confesses and adds: “I could not make above two large earthen ugly things, I cannot call them Jarrs, in about two Months Labour” (145–146). These objects exist below the threshold of recognizable form, and Crusoe is almost ashamed of their shapelessness. A similarly disappointed tone can be heard in a passage in which he describes an anchor he has made. He has constructed “a Thing like an Anchor,” Crusoe reports, “but indeed which could not be call’d either Anchor or Graplin; however, it was the best I could make of its kind” (185). If the kind that Crusoe makes is neither anchor nor graplin, of what kind is the thing he has made? The thing serves the function of the anchor or graplin kind, but its dissimilar form excludes it from definitive membership in either group. Still, a blushing legitimacy seems to have been won for an object whose peculiarity lacks compelling similitude to the existing type, model, or sort. The anchor or graplin, just like the spade or shovel, works, somewhat. At other times, Crusoe is unembarrassed about the peculiar and shapeless things around him. Resistance to the existing catalogue of forms and the linguistic conventions that underwrite it becomes a point of bemused pride in a famous set piece of the novel, the description of Crusoe’s appearance after almost half of the twenty-eight years of his isolation have passed: Had any one in England been to meet such a Man as I was, it must either have frighted them, or rais’d a great deal of Laughter; and as I frequently stood still to look at my self, I could not but smile at the Notion of my travelling through Yorkshire with such an Equipage, and in such a Dress: Be pleas’d to take a Scetch of my Figure as follows: I had a great high shapeless Cap, made of Goat’s Skin, with a Flap hanging down behind. . . . I had a short Jacket of Goat-Skin, the Skirts coming down to about the middle of my Thighs; and a

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pair of open-knee’d Breeches of the same, the Breeches were made of the Skin of an old He-goat, whose Hair hung down such a Length on either Side, that like Pantaloons it reach’d to the middle of my Legs; Stockings and Shoes I had none, but had made me a Pair of somethings, I scarce know what to call them, like Buskins to slap over my Legs, and lace on either Side like Spatter-dashes; but of a most barbarous Shape, as indeed were all the rest of my Cloaths. (167) The strangeness of the forms that clothe Crusoe undercuts the attempt to represent them by their similitude to existing kinds. The cap is shapeless, the pants are very hairy, and for stockings and shoes Crusoe has nothing except some nameless “some-things,” like buskins (calf-high boots) and like spatterdashes (leather leggings to protect clothes from dirt), but different from both. The savage and the civilized, the crude and the refined clash audibly in this description. The resulting noise underscores the extent to which Crusoe’s things do not fit existing forms. But unlike others, this passage treats the misfit and the misshapen with affection. Through their connotative range, the fashionable pantaloons Crusoe mentions diffuse this affection to French, Italian, Middle Eastern, and Asian associations.52 Crusoe embraces his own existence sui generis when he describes his facial hair in a way that seems to resonate with some of these associations. He has enough scissors and blades, he notes, to keep his beard pretty short. Not so his moustache, which he “had trimm’d into a large Pair of Mahometan Whiskers, such as I had seen worn by some Turks, who I saw at Sallee . . . I will not say they were long enough to hang my Hat upon them; but they were of a Length and Shape monstrous enough, and such as in England would have pass’d for frightful” (168). The shapeless, the foreign, the monstrous, the savage, the animal—the whole incongruous, laughable, frightening ensemble of Crusoe’s figure— are not reduced to some kind of familiarity or coherence. They are here not a source of embarrassment but a source of a wry amusement that arises from their peculiarity, their incomprehensibility within the context of English categories and perceptions.53 Rather than insisting that the business of cultivating the island turns on the comprehension, reduction, and domination of the unfamiliar, Defoe’s novel invites us to imagine that this business entails unsettling the borders between things—making them unfamiliar, as it were. This requires modes of composition that make things oscillate with possibility and transformative potential. No single thing can simply be itself or by itself for long; its poten-

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tial for being something else or its ser vice as something and with something else is persistently invoked, conjunctively and figuratively. Because so much of the novel is devoted to the description of ordinary activities in a constrained environment, the ordinary develops affinities with the extraordinary. Crusoe’s appetite for making things—bread, boats, pots, umbrellas, cheese—is so large that the borders, identities, and functions of the few things he has at his disposal assume an unusual degree of malleability. Whether they are made or found, things on the island frequently cannot be assimilated or reduced to the clear outlines of existing species or kinds. More often than not, this is a good thing. Invention can flourish when things appear double, when they seem to be suspended from their position in established taxonomies. Unambiguous, fixed identities are of limited use on Crusoe’s island. As Crusoe’s celebratory self-description indicates, the misfit and the misshapen are not always the embarrassing result of necessity. In moments like the self-description, they become the smiling signifiers of a freedom and invention whose resourcefulness transcends existing molds.54 It is within a context permeated by a sense of translatability, malleability, and invention that we ought to situate Defoe’s pairing of terms by the conjunction “or.” The instinct for doubling speaks to an imagination that is deeply impressed by the idea that names are arbitrary, that they do not provide a reliable map of species, and that behind such names may lurk unforeseen possibilities. The stabilization of reference, in other words, is not the dominant motivation behind Defoe’s conjunctive habits, whose effects are calculated to unsettle readerly comprehension. Stabilization does not serve Crusoe’s project of domestication. Nor does it help Defoe’s pursuit of infinite variety. When Defoe links synonymous terms with the conjunction “or” he may wish to enlighten us about the wide world of equivalent terms. But he is also teaching us a more important lesson: that names are as arbitrary, variable, and open as the thing itself. Caves become kitchens, cellars, magazines, dining rooms, vaults. Sword or cutlass, sickle or scythe, sieve or search, calico or muslin: the possibility of translating one name, one thing into another is always raised. Domestication produces such multiplicity. Seen from this perspective, the island’s unknown species and kinds, their utter strangeness or their half-resemblance to familiar things, is not threatening, despite Crusoe’s initial fear of being devoured by wild beasts. What the island flora and fauna reveal about species variety is part of the lesson that Crusoe learns in making things and that Defoe impresses on us with his conjunctive and figurative habits. What we think we know about

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things—about their shapes, their names, their identity, and their relationships to each other—is an arbitrary imposition on a more fluid being. Opening the order of things, restoring a more malleable sense of identity, interrelation, and possibility is the work of Robinson Crusoe. This work is restorative because it loosens the congealed categories of human imposition and opens up being to a fuller sense of possibility. The encounter with new species, therefore, has to be understood not only as a threat but also as a promise. If Robinson Crusoe is a parable of the colonizing process, the success of this process depends not on seeing one thing or name as singular and same but on seeing one thing or name as several and different. Identity is not singular, but plural. Variety is not finite, but infinite. It is by putting persistent imaginative pressure on the determinate structures of the given that Defoe nourishes the sense that overtakes Crusoe’s visitors at the end of the novel: the sense that Crusoe’s island, like Prospero’s, is an “inchanted Island” (254). The different “figures” in which Crusoe appears to these visitors—generalissimo, governor, commander (255–256)—produce much of the enchantment woven at the end, but they are only an extension of the fluidity of kinds that the novel and Crusoe’s survival depend on throughout. This escape of kinds from fixed identities and hierarchies and their emergence as objects rich with transformative possibility provides a microscopic example of Defoe’s interest in constructive decomposition. A more significant model for this compositional mode can be gleaned from Defoe’s conception of the history of human civilization, the progress of which he pegs to a providential dialectic of scattering and gathering. It is this dialectic that sponsors compositional strategies in Robinson Crusoe that realize a more dynamic variety.

III In A General History of Discoveries and Improvements (1725–1726), Defoe turns to the biblical story of the tower of Babel to identify a crucial moment in the story of human civilization. At this time shortly after the flood, humanity had a single language and gathered “in the land of Shinar” to settle. The biblical story presents the human ambition to build a tower “whose top may reach unto heaven” as springing from a desire to “make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” God is displeased by this desire to tighten unity around a name and divides the people of Babel by giving them separate tongues so that they can no longer understand each

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other. As a result, they are “scattered . . . abroad . . . upon the face of all the earth.”55 Defoe interprets the actions of the people of Babel as a violation of God’s blessing earlier in the Book of Genesis, which had exhorted humanity to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth.”56 The multiplication of cultures by the divine imposition of linguistic diversity returns humankind to this blessing. For Defoe, this is an enabling moment in the history of civilization. The forceful scattering of “Families and Tribes” who can no longer communicate leads to “New Discoveries” and the cultivation of various hitherto untouched regions.57 “In about three hundred Years,” Defoe caps this initial chapter in the story of human empire, “the World [was] pretty well peopled, the Inhabitants possest of the greatest Part of it, and infinitely multiplying in People; Those People spreading themselves farther and farther, for new possessions.”58 This first chapter is quickly followed by a second, equally crucial one. After the scattering prompted by linguistic diversity, the dispersed communities eventually grow into small cities. These cities develop and begin to attract a diverse population. Defoe’s example is the ancient city of Tyre, which “by the exceeding Conflux of People which from all Parts of the then known World flock’d thither . . . became very populous.”59 Once density and diversity of population is achieved, the conditions are right for “that mighty, and now, most important Thing call’d Trade, which we have Reason to believe had also its beginning here.”60 The Tyrians were the “first of Sailors” and by the art of navigation were able to expand their connections to other nations.61 Such correspondence and trade, in turn, created prosperity, the visible manifestations of which were increased variety of people and goods gathered in one place. Defoe’s narrative of Tyre recalls the model of Holland, which preoccupied the imagination of English intellectuals in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. William Temple explained in his influential Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (1673) that the Dutch economy flourished because of Holland’s liberal immigration and toleration policies. These policies had attracted such a various population from different nations that civility and knowledge were improved and commercial activity had to expand, beyond Holland’s narrow boundaries and limited natural resources.62 Gathering and scattering, the Dutch example indicated, are related dynamics. The city of Tyre imparts this lesson as well, though in less peaceful form. At one point in his story of civilization, Defoe wonders whether the damage inflicted on Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king, was good

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or bad. He concludes it was good. Although “the Citizens had a very great loss in the demolishing of their Houses, and ruining their public Edifices; yet as it scatter’d a diligent and useful People into divers parts of the World,” Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction also proved creative.63 It helped spread knowledge and expertise to various regions, breaking up the dense collection of diversity in one place and dispersing it widely. Civilization can advance by violence, division, and displacement. The effects of such violent actions do not contradict divine providence, whose injunction to multiply and to replenish justifies the scattering as much as the gathering of persons and things. Though Defoe can be skeptical about the human ability to comprehend divine intentions by interpreting events in this world, revelation makes him confident that scattering and gathering are fundamental, interdependent forces of human history. Such scattering and gathering are assisted by God’s creation. “How wonderfully the Blessings of the Creation are Disperst up and down,” Defoe exclaims.64 “The different Climates and Soil in the World,” he observes, “have, by the Wisdom and Direction of Nature Natureing, which I call God, produc’d such differing Species of things, all of them in their kind equally Necessary, or at least Useful and Desirable; as insensibly preserves the Dependance, of the most Remote Parts of the World upon one another.”65 God’s act of creation scatters species and kinds across the face of the globe and thereby installs natural difference and separation to incite exchange and connection. In this sense, Defoe’s providentialism recognizes order in nature. The variety of God’s creation here is not infinite or arbitrary but calculated with a view to the providential goal of human flourishing. God creates a great variety of species and scatters them widely in order to prompt a human process of gathering that reaches its dynamic potential when it issues into another scattering. Infinite variety, then, is not realized by divine creation but depends on human beings who are commanded to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth.” Furthermore, Defoe goes on, “Variety is not only Natural, but Artificial; and as the Climates and Soil, have produc’d in every Country different Growths or Species of Things; so the differing Genius of the People of every Country, prompts them to different Improvements, and to different Customs.”66 Defoe repeatedly measures states of civilization by the degree to which such artificial variety has progressed. He points to the circumstance that, before the rise of Tyre, “we never find any difference in the kinds of the Ships, which they made use of in those Times; but promiscuously they are

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call’d Ships, for what business, or in what places soever they were made use of.”67 This circumstance shows that we are looking at a less civilized time period. The invention of new kinds of things and the names that distinguish them, on the other hand, are clear indicators of an advancing civilization. Defoe’s most enthusiastic statement on the human ability to invent new kinds can be found in an early text, An Essay upon Projects (1697). A detailed description of various schemes and proposals for the improvement of civil life (from insurance to banking, transportation, and retirement), An Essay upon Projects is eager to establish that new inventions are possible. Though some may side with Solomon’s judgment that “no new thing happens under the Sun,” Defoe flags his belief in progress when he insists that “some considerable Discovery has been made in these latter Ages, and Inventions of Human Original produc’d, which the World was ever without before.”68 As quick examples, he mentions the invention of the compass, of gunpowder, and of the iron knitting machine (invented by William Lee in 1589). Further examples come from the art of war, for Defoe “the highest perfection of Human Knowledge.” He points to “the new ways of Mines, Fougades, Entrenchments, Attacks, Lodgments, and a long Et Cetera of New Inventions which want Names.” He is amazed by “the new sorts of Bombs and unheard-of Mortars . . . with which our Fleets . . . can imitate God Almighty himself, and rain Fire and Brimstone out of Heaven, upon Towns built on firm Land.”69 In General History of Discoveries and Improvements, Defoe lists numerous innovations that happened after the “fateful Invention” of gunpowder: “The Tormentarij, or Artillery of several kinds, besides the mere Invention of the Cannon; such as Mortars, Patereroes, Hawitzers, Chambers, Bombs, Carkasses, Stinkpots, Hand Grenades, cum multis alijs, [are] all perfectly new; and not possible to be other wise.”70 All of these kinds illustrate the power of human invention to create the new. (What Defoe celebrates, Swift critiques.) War, indeed, is responsible for more than the invention of new kinds of weaponry. In Defoe’s historical analysis, the 1690s are an especially rich period of human invention because of England’s war with France. That war’s “Losses and Depredations” chiefly impacted “the Trading Part of the Nation” whose travel routes were no longer safe and whose goods frequently failed to reach their destinations. “Prompted by Necessity” in this manner, merchants and insurers “rack their Wits for New contrivances, New Inventions, New Trades, Stocks, Projects, and any thing to retrieve the desperate Credit of their Fortunes.” As a result, “really every day produce[s] new Contrivances,

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Engines, and Projects to get Money, never before thought of.”71 Because “the Affairs of Merchants are accompanied with such variety of Circumstances, such new and unusual Contingencies,” and because merchants, more than others, “live by their Wits,” they are especially likely to devise “New Ways to Live.”72 Defoe embraces the plasticity of human life, the potential of new institutions, inventions, and projects to change the way we live. In a related vein, the narrator of Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe notes that the English settlers on his island have “set up a new Form of Living” when they take temporary, unmarried native wives.73 Of course, even the enthusiastic An Essay upon Projects tempers the belief in the life-altering effects of inventions by a concern with fraud and deception. Defoe is worried about the spurious inventions that have deceived the world and criticizes the extent to which a projecting mania has gripped England. But he also realizes that the legitimate and the illegitimate are aspects of a single history of human invention. These aspects can be distinguished, but it is a tricky business. After all, projects that had seemed outlandish when they were first proposed proved successful.74 There is no way to purify human inventiveness, which is perhaps why Defoe mentions the tower of Babel in this earlier text as an admirable expression of the human spirit of projecting even though it contradicted providence.75 Providence, meanwhile, enjoins us to gather the various species and kinds that lie scattered in different corners of the world. For Defoe, the merchant fulfills this providential design: “the Merchant by his Correspondence reconciles that infinite Variety, which . . . has by the Infinite Wisdom of Providence, been scattred over the Face of the World.”76 Gathering and connecting that which lies separate in various cultures and regions of the globe, bringing the diversity that God has spread across the surface of the earth into the narrow compass of individual countries, are the means by which the merchant reconciles (literally, “brings together”) infinite variety. But trade also works in the opposite direction, does God’s work also by scattering things. “Trade carries the very Soil away, and transposes the World in Parts,” Defoe rhapsodizes at one point. It “remov[es] Mountains, and carr[ies] them over the Sea into other Countries.” “What a Quantity of the Terra Firma has been carried from New-Castle in Coles,” he exclaims, “whose Ashes lie mix’d with the Soil in most Parts of the World.”77 Transposing the world in parts also applies to the exportation and cultivation of plants in different regions, which Defoe advocates. There is no reason to assume, he contends, that certain species can prosper only in those regions in which they

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naturally occur. Coffee, Defoe is virtually certain, may be grown in far more places of the world than it currently is, including the British possessions in the West Indies such as Tobago, St. Vincent, and Jamaica. He goes on: “can any Man perswade us to believe, that Nutmegs and Mace will grow no where but in the Isle of Banda; Cloves no where but at Ternate, Amboyna, &c. and Cinnamon no where but at Ceylon; that Tea will not grow in any Dominions but those of China”?78 The providential goal of human history is scattering and gathering the diversity of the world’s things. In this way, Defoe offers us a modernization narrative that differs from the one I sketched in Chapter 1. The differentiation of insufficiently defined or overlapping kinds and spheres is not central to Defoe’s narrative, which imagines the emergence of modern societies on a grander historical scale according to a providential logic. Expansion, multiplication, and diversification are critical elements in such emergence, which is propelled by a dynamic process that goes from gathering to scattering to gathering to scattering and thus increases the variety of persons and things in any given region of the world. As the example of Babel shows, whenever cities or nations strive for coherence and endurance by drawing sharp borders around themselves, they will not prosper. The providential laws of human flourishing do not prescribe the drawing of borders but their constant crossing. Human actors are well-advised to follow these laws. They should know that keeping things apart from each other, leaving them alone or in their place, shutting them down in fixed identities, locking them in hierarchies, will put them at the wrong end of history. In writing Robinson Crusoe, Defoe tried to be at the right end. My observations on Defoe’s conjunctive habits have already indicated his desire to gather and unsettle things so that they point beyond the limits of the given and toward transformative possibility. But under the guidance of the providential dialectic of gathering and scattering, Defoe’s practice of constructive decomposition is able to shape his narratives on a larger scale.

IV Defoe’s Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe contains some of the more interesting comments Defoe makes about his practice as a writer of fictions. Defoe’s preface to Serious Reflections is, to a large extent, a defense against accusations that the Crusoe narratives

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are “feign’d, that the Names are borrow’d, and that it is all a Romance; that there never were any such Man or Place, or Circumstances in any Man’s Life.”79 Writing in the voice of Crusoe, Defoe responds to these charges by noting that his narratives are “the beautiful Representation of a Life of unexampled Misfortunes, and of a Variety not to be met with in the World, sincerely adapted to, and intended for the common Good of Mankind, and designed at first, as it is now further apply’ d, to the most serious uses possible” (51, italics in original). The Crusoe narratives are therefore “Allegorical [but] also Historical” (51), general and particular. Yet allegory and history are uneasy partners in Defoe’s defense. If the Crusoe narratives exceed in variety what is possible in the world (as Defoe happily asserts), how can they be historically probable or allegorically viable? If “the Fable is always made for the Moral” (51), as Defoe insists, can such subservience be maintained when the fable strives toward infinity and multiplicity? History and allegory seem both challenged by narratives that are dedicated to infinite variety. As Defoe continues his defense, he clarifies the nature of that challenge. Seemingly against his own assertion of improbable variety, Defoe argues for the historical reality of the events in Robinson Crusoe. Events like “the Fright and Fancies which succeeded the Story of the Print of a Man’s Foot, and Surprise of the old Goat, and the Thing rolling on my Bed, and my jumping out in a Fright . . . the Dream of being taken by Messengers, being arrested by Officers, the Manner of being driven on Shore by the Surge of the Sea, the Ship on Fire, the Description of starving; the Story of my Man Friday” are all true history (52). “It is most real,” the author adds, “that I had a Parrot, and taught it to call me by my Name, such a Servant a Savage, and afterwards a Christian, and that his Name was called Friday, and that he was ravish’d from me by Force, and died in the Hands that took him” (52). Likewise, “the Story of the Bear in the Tree, and the Fight with the Wolves in the Snow” are true: all of these “Parts of the Story are real Facts” and “Matter of real History” (52). They make up “one whole Scheme of a real Life of eight and twenty Years” (52). With these statements, Defoe vigorously upholds the fiction that Crusoe is the first-person author of his own true adventures. It is tempting to say that this assertion of “real History” is the rather boldfaced lie of an enterprising author eager to make more money with his franchise. “How can an author sincerely believe that he is telling the truth,” Michael McKeon has asked, “if he knows that he has invented the story to whose

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historicity he earnestly attests?”80 There may be an answer to this question that makes Defoe a little less insincere. Defoe’s strenuous appeal to historicity may not be all defiance.81 This becomes visible at a later stage of Serious Reflections, when Crusoe meditates on some of the events he mentions in the preface. When he turns to the story of the goat, Defoe lifts his mask momentarily. Here is how Crusoe gets back into this story: “I crept into the dark Cave in the Valley, where the old Goat lay just expiring, which, wherever it happen’d, is a true History, I assure you” (224). Yoking the assertion of true history to the possibility that the goat episode may have happened elsewhere has to make us laugh. At the very moment that he insists on the reality of the episode, Defoe undercuts Crusoe’s claim by raising the possibility that it may not have occurred on Crusoe’s island. Once the laughter has settled, Defoe’s suggestion that the goat story may have happened elsewhere, involving different actors, can be probed as a clue about his compositional practice. True history may not necessarily be measured by the truth of the narrative as a whole or the actual existence of Robinson Crusoe but by the “real Facts” that make up the “Parts of the Story.” Cornered by his critics and bent on defending his novel, Defoe seems to suggest that he has assembled “matter of real History” in the sense that he gathered and combined stories that he heard or read about. Crusoe’s life would then be the vehicle that allows these stories to be collected into an infinite variety that is both improbable and real. Contemplated from this perspective, the strident assertion of real history in the preface and the list of events presented there begins to look like a list of events that Defoe took from other sources or that he could plausibly claim to have taken from other sources. Defending the truth of his narrative, Defoe overreacts. Yet his defensiveness points us to the possibility that he may have composed an infinite variety from diverse gathered materials, thus imitating the providential law of human history. Using McKeon’s terms, we might say that Defoe fuses idealism and naive empiricism, scuttling both allegory and true history. The fusion of idealism and realism Defoe achieves through his combinatory method would not be without precedent. The most influential practitioner of such a method was the Greek painter Zeuxis. As Elizabeth Mansfield has shown, the myth of Zeuxis’s composite portrait of Helen of Troy, which was made up from the parts of several women, regained legitimacy in the Renaissance and in the eighteenth century as an aesthetic program that blended

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“realism and idealism.”82 Defoe may have learned about this program from Don Quixote (1605), a novel that, in Serious Reflections, he claims has influenced his portrait of Robinson Crusoe.83 Mansfield doesn’t mention him, but Cervantes references and adapts Zeuxis’s compositional method. He mentions Zeuxis’s name in the prologue of Don Quixote, and shortly after remarks that in “the famous Sancho Panza . . . I give you a compendium of all the squirely fun scattered throughout the whole troop of vain books of chivalry.”84 What was scattered has been gathered, a principle Cervantes invokes in several places.85 Mansfield argues that the Zeuxis myth expresses the “West’s abiding ambivalence” about the function of art, which it divides between providing “a reassuring affirmation of our daily existence” and “a means to transcend reality.”86 As my discussion has indicated, I see Defoe’s aesthetic as less divided, more confident about the possibility of transcendence. The list of true parts I rehearsed is not the only way in which Defoe represents Crusoe’s life in Serious Reflections. At a slightly later point, Defoe helps us reflect on the difficulties of translating an “utmost Variety of Particulars” into more allegorical and moral statements.87 Defoe has Crusoe explain that he has liv’d so long in a Life of Wonders in continu’d Storms, fought with the worse kind of Savages and Man-eaters, by unaccountable surprising Incidents; fed by Miracles greater than that of Ravens, suffered all Manner of Violences and Oppressions, injurious Reproaches, contempt of Men, Attacks of Devils, Corrections from Heaven, and Oppositions on Earth; have had innumerable Ups and Downs in Matters of Fortune, been in Slavery worse than Turkish, escaped by an exquisite Management, as that in the Story of Xury, and the Boat at Sallee, been taken up at Sea in Distress, rais’d again and depress’d again, and that oftner perhaps in one Man’s Life than ever was known before; Shipwreck’d often, tho’ more by Land than by Sea. (52) Defoe seeks to represent Crusoe’s life by deploying categories that are situated above such concrete particulars as Friday, the parrot, or the time he jumped out of bed. More general descriptors are used to capture the events of Crusoe’s life: all manner of violence and oppression, reproaches and contempt of men, attacks of devils, corrections from heaven, oppositions on earth, ups and downs, and so on. But too many narrative capsules are spilling

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on the floor to support a legible script or dominant lesson. Is Crusoe’s a story about the temptations human beings face by the devil, is it a story about the competing ambitions of man, or is it a story about the violence of human life? Clearly, it is about all of this (and more). In a more familiar allegorical vein, Defoe invokes the similes of life as a storm or shipwreck, yet the continuous or repetitive cast he gives these disasters only underscores how stretched these similes are in representing the infinite variety of Crusoe’s life. Also stretched is the biblical analogy Defoe mentions. Elijah’s survival by the divinely ordained assistance of ravens is declared an inferior miracle compared to what befalls Crusoe. No matter how close or distant these more generic scripts are to the particulars of the Crusoe narratives, they all fall short of producing a comprehensive picture, a moral that would sum up the fable. As Defoe yields to the public pressure of accounting for the moral substance of his narrative, its status as an example of some larger truth or lesson, his preface to Serious Reflections multiplies the generic scripts in such a way that closure and comprehensive meaning evaporate. Defoe is far more interested in stressing the miraculous, innumerable, unaccountable, and unprecedented events of his hero’s life than realizing its fit with already existing molds. The implied boast is that Crusoe’s life possesses such incidental variety that it cannot be gathered in these molds and instead consumes and breaks them. Even multiple generic capsules cannot contain the surprise and the variety of the historical particulars collected in the Crusoe narratives.88 Historical improbability and allegorical incomprehension join hands when a narrative is composed of multifarious bits and pieces of real history. Defoe’s belief in the revealed truth of scattering and gathering, along with his complex view of a providence that intrudes on worldly events but remains elusive and changeable, sponsors narratives whose infinite variety wants to exceed human comprehension. Any rule or pattern we may invoke or discern has finally no hold on the mass of fictional particulars. Such rules or patterns are human impositions, and Defoe’s narratives hope to escape their intrusions by imitating the providential dynamic of gathering and scattering. In imitating this dynamic, these narratives develop variety effects that unsettle the idea that things naturally or morally belong to durable classes, categories, places, and identities. Even Defoe’s remarkable reliance on the conjunction “or” belongs to this class of variety effects. Further consideration of these effects will help us see more clearly how Defoe’s narrative form is indebted to his providential beliefs. It will show us that Defoe

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found in the sublime a compositional mode that allowed him to translate these beliefs into narrative form.

V I have already commented on some of the attitudes that accompany Crusoe’s acts of making, from the uncertainty about form to the embarrassment or bemusement over shapelessness. The novel increases this range of attitudes when it includes an aggressively confident Crusoe. “I made abundance of things,” Crusoe explains early in the narrative, “even without tools, and some with no more Tools than an Adze and a Hatchet, which perhaps were never made that way before.” “By making the most rational Judgment of things, every Man,” he lectures us, “may be in Time Master of every mechanic Art.”89 This truth is exemplified when Crusoe invents a mechanism that continuously turns a grindstone even though he has “never seen any such thing in England.”90 While this account of making emphasizes the power of reason to invent things autonomously, Defoe is careful to add other factors. Nature, for example, “dictates even naturally” to Crusoe—who has never been to a dairy farm—how to make cheese and butter.91 Accident helps Crusoe discover, meanwhile, how to make clay pots when he finds a piece of clay hardened in the fire.92 Crusoe makes baskets and charcoal and roasts meat according to procedures he has observed in England.93 He makes a barley grinder and an umbrella following techniques he witnessed in Brazil.94 Reason, nature, accident, English and Brazilian ways all take turns in assisting Crusoe’s productivity, which is variously accompanied by uncertainty, confidence, embarrassment, and bemusement. Not one to leave anything out, Defoe adds abject failure and foolishness. When Crusoe decides to build a boat to increase his mobility, he embarks on a project that is not guided by reason but by “the Eagerness of [his] Fancy” to leave the island. Fancy has a strangely easy triumph. Reason should have told Crusoe from the start that cutting a boat out of a tree that has a diameter of five feet ten inches and sits one hundred yards away from water is a fool’s errand. When the boat is finished—ready to accommodate twenty-six people— it is too big and too heavy for Crusoe to move to the water. He has to abandon it, despite having worked on it continuously for almost half a year. “I went to work upon this Boat,” he confesses, “the most like a Fool, that ever Man did.”95 Capable of the most rational judgment of things, Crusoe is also the

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biggest fool. While nature whispers to him how to make cheese, she remains silent about boats. Defoe’s gathering of these scenes of making is not guided by an intention to impart a lesson about human productivity or to make a statement about Crusoe’s character or psychology. It is guided instead by a desire to display as many modes and attitudes of human productivity as possible. An implied conjunctive “or” arranges this display. Crusoe’s character, these alternations in modes and attitudes suggest, is not one. It does not hold together in any way that would support our belief that this novel contributes to the emergence of characters whose behavior allows us to make sense of them as individuals. Nor does it support the idea that Crusoe’s self-reflections feed a process of development: he is the biggest fool long after pure rationality leads him to invent the grindstone. Instead, Crusoe is a single collective thing, both one and many. He does not add up. What such combination of the one and the many has to do with the sublime can be gleaned from a scene in Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The scene illustrates how Defoe contrives variety effects. Fittingly, it is a scene of sublime passions. While at sea on the way back to his island, Crusoe and his shipmates descry a French merchant ship that has caught fire. The ship eventually sinks, and sixty-four Frenchmen escape in two boats. Against their expectations of certain death, they are rescued and brought aboard Crusoe’s ship. The narrator then takes some time to draw a portrait of their passions— of the various ways in which the rescued respond to their miraculous delivery: It is impossible for me to express the several Gestures, the strange Extasies, the Variety of Postures which these poor deliver’d People run into to express the Joy of their Souls at so unexpected a Deliverance; Grief and Fear are easily described; Sighs, Tears, Groans, and a very few Motions of the Head and Hands make up the sum of its Variety: But an Excess of Joy, a Surprize of Joy has a Thousand Extravagancies in it; there were some in Tears, some raging, and tearing themselves; as if they had been in the greatest Agonies of Sorrow, some stark-raving and down-right lunatick, some ran about the Ship stamping with their Feet, others wringing their Hands; some were dancing, some singing, some laughing, more crying; many quite dumb, not able to speak a Word; others sick and vomiting, several swooning, and ready to faint; and a few were Crossing themselves, and giving God Thanks.96

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An excess of joy produces an extravagant variety of responses in different individuals. Describing such variety is almost impossible, but in his attempt to do so, the narrator moves us from primarily psychological to physical responses, from rage to sorrow and lunacy to stamping feet, wringing hands, dancing, singing, laughing, crying, vomiting, swooning, and praying. Selfconscious about such a fantastic range of passionate responses, the narrator surmises that, perhaps, such extremes are to be attributed to the fact that the rescued are French, whose temper, after all, is “more volatile, more passionate, and more sprightly, and their Spirits more fluid than in other Nations.”97 Still, the main point for the narrator is that this passionate display does not compare to anything he has ever seen. Having thus put things in perspective, the narrator seems to have gained confidence to improve on his initial portrait of passional variety: It is further observable, that these Extravagancies did not shew themselves in that different Manner I have mention’d in different Persons only: But all the Variety would appear in a short Succession of Moments in one and the same Person. A Man that we saw this Minute dumb, and as it were stupid and confounded, should the next Minute be dancing and hallowing like an Antick; and the next Moment be tearing his Hair, or Pulling his Cloaths to Pieces, and stamping them under his Feet, like a mad Man; a few Moments after that, we should have him all in Tears, then sick, then swooning.98 If passional variety initially appeared in the contrast to its emergence from the same situation experienced by numerous actors, it is now evident, far more dramatically, in the contrast to its emergence from the same actor. Previously, it was possible to identify one extreme response with one actor. Now we find the entire range of extreme responses in one actor. We are asked to imagine that vomiting, laughing, praying, and dancing alternate with dizzying rapidity in a single person. As they are gathered from numerous actors and transferred to a single person, the multiple passions and responses shatter individual coherence. Having raised the excitement this high, the narrator is emboldened to revise his portrait of the passions even further. It was not only one person, he assures us, who displayed such a terrifyingly contrary sequence of emotions and actions but “the greatest Part of them; and if I remember right, our Surgeon was oblig’d to let above thirty of them Blood.”99 The extreme gathering of differences in a single entity here leads to the violent ex-

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pansion of the entity beyond its physical bounds. In this sharply intensifying portrait of passional variety, we can discern how the dynamic of gathering and scattering works as an engine of composition. The portrait is amusing, of course. It points to an author who is a little too eager to create excitement in a sequel charged with exceeding the infinite variety of the first volume. Yet the portrait reveals a compositional mode that characterizes Defoe’s writing more generally. It encapsulates a basic pattern of Defoe’s fiction and theology: the gathering of various things in a small compass generates an energy that shakes structural coherence, hierarchy, and singular identity and pushes beyond them. We have observed versions of this pattern not only in Defoe’s providential account of modernization but also in his defense of the trinity. If we are looking for a literary mode that could accommodate this pattern, it would not be realism, whose triple injunction of individualism, particularity, and probability Defoe so flagrantly transgresses when he collects all these diverse passions and bundles them in a single person. A much more likely candidate is the sublime. Defoe’s interest in the sublime has been noted by others, but it has primarily been addressed as a content Defoe is drawn to, from Crusoe’s shipwreck to the earthquake on the island and his response to the single footprint in the sand.100 These scenes show Defoe’s interest in the sublime, but I am less concerned with physical or psychological events than the compositional lessons Defoe takes from the sublime. As a compositional mode that stresses variety, combination, multitude, and expansion, the sublime is far more able than realism to assist Defoe’s project of realizing fictions that unsettle the manifest structures of the world to suggest plasticity and irreducible variety. At one point in his treatise on the sublime, Longinus addresses the power of circumstances in the creation of sublime effects. “The choice of Circumstances,” he points out, and “the throwing them together when chosen, bear very forcibly upon the imagination.”101 His example is Sappho’s description of the effects of love, which “collects from all Quarters the Accidents which attend that Passion.”102 The lines Longinus quotes—which capture the pains of love by depicting a variety of psychological and physiological effects— are less important here than his commentary. “Are you not in Admiration,” Longinus addresses his interlocutor after citing Sappho’s verses, to see how she accumulates all these things, the Soul, the Body, the Ear, the Tongue, the Colour, as if they were so many different Persons ready to expire? And do you not observe with how many con-

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trary Motions or Impulses she is agitated? She Chills, she Burns; she’s Foolish, she’s Wise; or she’s entirely out of her Wits, or she’s upon the point of Death: In a word, one would say, that she was not possest with any one single Passion, but that her Soul was the Rendezvous of all Passions. . . . Here you observe then, as I have already said, that all those great Circumstances introduced properly, and put together with judgment, are what create the main Beauty of her Poem. In like manner, when Homer gives us the Description of a Tempest, he takes care to express every thing which can appear Terrible in a Tempest.103 Longinus associates the sublime with a logic of accumulation that exceeds the ordinary because it gathers all the accidents that could describe a mental or a natural state. Perhaps not surprisingly, Longinus’s effort to represent Sappho’s crowded lines relies twice on the conjunction “or” and suggests that her combination of different organs and contrary impulses gives the impression of multiple persons. Sappho’s circumstantiality, her attention to accidents, achieves sublime effects by creating a variety that strains probability. As with Zeuxis, idealism and realism are close partners. In his discussion of Longinus’s comments on Sappho, Jonathan Lamb has emphasized that attending to the real and the particular does not necessarily go against the sublime. While many eighteenth-century writers wished to rivet the sublime to the grand and the general, others preferred to create sublime effects through circumstantial detail.104 Defoe’s portrait of French passions is indebted to Sappho’s circumstantial, cumulative logic, and it is ultimately only a more extreme manifestation of the constructive decomposition that governs Robinson Crusoe more generally. This novel is shaped by extensive acts of gathering that bring together, in a few hundred pages, accidents and circumstances that push beyond existing molds. Of course, the gradual collection of Crusoe’s different modes of production does not generate the sublime intensity we observed in Defoe’s portrait of multiple passions collected in a single Frenchman. A dilated sublime does not suddenly ravish the listener with irresistible force. Instead, such a sublime assembles its multitudes and varieties along an extended temporal axis to effect a more gradual swelling in the reader’s mind, beyond the limits of the probable, beyond what can be contained in a name, a structure, an allegory. In this way, even longer sequences of composition take their cue from the providence of gathering and scattering.

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We can observe this as well in a sequence of events that begins with Crusoe’s discovery of a footprint on the beach. Initially, this discovery prompts him to abandon his wish for company and fear that other human beings may be present on the island. But a desire for company repossesses Crusoe seventeen pages later, when a ship crashes on the island’s rocky shores. No one survives the wreck, and Crusoe is suddenly consumed with a longing for a companion. He cannot explain how this, to him, inexplicable desire wells up against all rational analysis and prompts him to utter “a thousand Times” one phrase: “that but one Man had been sav’d! O that it had been but One!”105 As Crusoe analyzes his response, he realizes that the repeated utterance of this wish amplified his passion so much that it produced involuntary physical reactions: “the Desires were so mov’d by it, that when I spoke the Words, my Hands would clinch together, and my Fingers press the Palms of my Hands . . . and my Teeth in my Head wou’d strike together, and set against one another so strong, that for some time I cou’d not part them again” (195). As with the rescued French, we move from the psychological to the physical, but this time the movement is caused by Crusoe’s repeated utterance of his wish for company. Crusoe suggests that the involuntary physical expressions of his desire for company, and thus the violence of the desire, originate in the repeated utterance. The audible iteration of the phrase “that but one Man had been sav’d” affects Crusoe’s mind so much that he loses control over the motion of his limbs. Even though he wants to part them, his teeth stay clenched, against his will. Crusoe’s response and his reflections on it appear to make a larger point about the power of external circumstance to shape human behavior.106 The footprint and the repeated utterance are both examples of how external forces can shape us in ways that escape our control and defy our wills. Overwhelming, disabling passions can be triggered by small or mechanical causes. The same logic seems to govern Crusoe’s desire to kill “savages” after he discovers their cannibal feast. Enraged by the cannibals’ actions, Crusoe begins a daily walk up a hill where he has a good view of the beach that serves the cannibals as the setting for their inhuman feasts. This daily physical action begins to interact with his determination to kill savages. “As long as I kept up my daily Tour to the Hill, to look out; so long also I kept up the Vigour of my Design, and my Spirits seem’d to be all the while in suitable Form” (182). The plan and the mind-set to kill continue strong because of the daily physical routine. But having kept up this routine for a while, Crusoe becomes “weary of the fruitless Excursion.”

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As a result, he informs us, his “Opinion of the Action it self began to alter” (183). The desire to kill savages is initially fortified by Crusoe’s daily tour, but when this tour becomes physically tiring and yields no results, the thought of the injustice of his design gains the upper hand. The footprint, the repeated utterance, and the walk up the hill tell similar stories. They show that the human mind is enmeshed in and swayed by physical contexts and circumstances. The most desperate longing may be produced by the mechanical repetition of a phrase; murderous passions may be fanned and deflated by continued physical exertions; the victory of principled moral reasoning may depend on the material difficulties of the less noble path; a small discovery may abruptly transform settled feelings into their opposites. These constellations reveal that the small, the repetitive, or the mechanical can trigger dramatic shifts of human desire and reasoning. They suggest that private experience and internal reflection, those steady guides of nonconformist believers, are weak instruments. Crusoe is repeatedly affected by small external events that trigger dramatic reorientations. And yet, in emphasizing the power of external events, Defoe does not compile a theory of human nature. This becomes apparent later in the novel, when Defoe is keen to show us that Crusoe is perfectly able to keep up his design to discover cannibals in spite of tedious physical exertions. Going back to his hill, Crusoe renews his quest and sets himself “upon the Scout, as often as possible, and indeed so often till I was heartily tir’d of it, for it was above a Year and Half that I waited. . . . This was very discouraging, and began to trouble me much, tho’ I cannot say that it did in this Case, as it had done some time before that, (viz.) wear off the Edge of my Desire to the Thing” (204). The “Case,” of course, has shifted. It started to shift with Crusoe’s desire for a companion after the shipwreck. The narrator does not explain this well, but the disappointment of the wish for a companion contributes to Crusoe’s desire to cross over to the mainland, a desire that becomes so violent that Crusoe abandons (once again) his “Resignation to Providence” (202).107 Suddenly, he has “no Power to turn my Thoughts to any thing, but to the Project of a Voyage to the Main, which came upon me with such an Impetuosity of Desire, that it was not to be resisted” (202). This abrupt desire then produces Crusoe’s dream, in which he anticipates the arrival of a companion (203). This dream in turn produces the insight that any escape from the island depends on finding someone who can help him, which leads to the plan of capturing a savage. These new circumstances change the case: they show and explain the strength of Crusoe’s

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desire, which is now capable of dismissing providence and overcoming physical strains that had earlier led him to make peace with God’s provision for the savages. At that earlier point, Crusoe had drawn back from his murderous plans because “these People had done me no Injury” and because God’s providence had let them go on in their unhappy ways. But “now” he has “other Reasons to offer” to justify the killing of innocent people (183). These include that the savages are enemies of his and would eat him if they could and that killing them would be self-defense. Also, it is self-preservation to escape from what he now decisively calls “this Death of a Life” (204). Crusoe points out that all the arguments against the killing of cannibals were in the end mastered by his “eager prevailing Desire of Deliverance” (204). If before we had a demonstration of the susceptibility of desire and moral argument to being swayed by small external circumstances, Defoe now demonstrates the opposite possibility. Even as it may have found its first foothold in the mechanical repetition of a single phrase, desire can overcome all external circumstances, reject providence and moral argument.108 In tracing these revolutions of Crusoe’s desires, I have focused on a single narrative sequence from the discovery of the footprint to the cannibal feast and the shipwreck. Within that sequence, Defoe has shown the ability of desire to overcome all circumstances, the power of external circumstance to disable the will, and the possibility that a desire so strong as to overcome remarkable obstacles may still originate in small external circumstances. While he pays detailed attention to the influence that the particular, the small, and the mechanical can have on an agent, Defoe does not mount, à la Hobbes, an argument for necessity.109 Nor does he argue that the human will is free. Instead, he shows us both necessity and freedom in one figure and then some recombination of these two basic orientations. The protocols of probability and realism cannot capture these revolutions. What seems to gather under the rubric of a materialist theory of human psychology is quickly undone by the assertions of an arbitrary will. Defoe explores extremes of human possibility in a single, solitary human figure. In his fiction, Defoe’s instinct is to be inclusive, to add and involve rather than reduce. The interactions between the small and the large, the mechanical and the spiritual, the one and the many point beyond probability toward the sublime plasticity of being. Defoe’s novels are far more interested in experimenting with possibilities than in shaping a probable course of events that adds up to a theory of human nature or a developing character. They are

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interested, in other words, in presenting the world as an ongoing, unfinished process. Things can happen in all kinds of ways: kinds may be open to uses and identities no one expected; the law of self-preservation can be weaponized to defy providence; invention can follow established practice, it can be intuitive, arbitrary, or follow nature; the will is rashly sovereign sometimes, sometimes it is overcome by minute external events. Crusoe’s journey is not a discovery of truth, morality, identity. It is an unsettling discovery of the range of human possibility designed to undermine the normative appearance of the given, to discover the extraordinary in the ordinary. Even as Crusoe scans the landscape for providential patterns, Defoe’s narrative reflects the voluntarist belief that there is no inherent order that can be found, no enduringly binding limit or form that resides in nature or tradition. All limits and forms either emerge from or are imposed on a more fluid and indeterminate scene. They are secondary and usually temporary. Defoe’s narrative inventions make palpable the freedom of such emergence and imposition. The most fundamental form that Defoe adopts to shape his narrative, the providential dialectic of gathering and scattering, is dynamic. It never settles down, always moving through collection and temporary coherence toward unsettling and replenishing dispersal. In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe demonstrates an authorial freedom that resembles that of a God who is not bound by his own actions or a preexisting script. The narrator’s spontaneous power of acting, his energy, inventiveness, and sense of possibility are more important than the meaningful cohesion of the whole. Defoe’s narrative providence is just as complex as his divine providence. For this reason, the relationship between parts and whole is not one of submission. There is no plan, no destination. Rather, the parts enjoy an independence and cumulative force all of their own. They gather and sometimes accumulate rapidly, but they are not meant to come to rest in one place. Just like Robinson Crusoe’s protagonist, they do not add up to any one thing. Defoe’s author does not care to be accountable to the parts. He can always add others and change course. In this sense, too, Defoe belongs to a voluntarist tradition of literary invention.

Conclusion

In arguing for a voluntarist tradition of literary invention that emphasizes its ontological commitments, Infinite Variety has tried to step out of the long shadow cast by the epistemological tradition and our stories about modernizing and secularizing societies. The disenchantment of the world to what is observable and probable and the consequent elevation of enlightened subject over clueless object do not define the literary inventions I have examined. They owe their life, instead, to the unsettling of the relationship between subject and object that occurred when essences, universals, and the order of kinds became questionable. In the voluntarist and skeptical traditions of thought I have traced, such unsettling was deliberately fostered, often—though by no means always—in the interest of strengthening established religion and undercutting the false certainties of heterodox thought. Mobilizing an incomprehensible, willful creator, these traditions disabled the subject and mystified the object. They helped give generative powers to matter and extended the scope of variety, possibility, and transformation. They found constructive uses for the imagination of beings and modes of being that did not exist. These traditions authorized the literary inventions I have pursued, among them Samuel Clarke’s six-legged horses, Richard Bentley’s microscopic eyes, John Locke’s thinking matter, Jonathan Swift’s war exercises on a handkerchief, and Crusoe’s species-defying appearance after fourteen years of island life. The ways of writing I have discussed in this book are not defined by the secular protocols of knowledge and representation that we so often construe as dominant aspects of empiricism, new science, and enlightenment. These protocols, I have shown, are tied to a voluntarist theology. By honoring this tie, I have been able to tell a different story about literary invention in the early eighteenth century.

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My return to the ontological commitments of literary invention suggests that the period between 1688 and 1730 raises questions about the argument that modern literature takes a mimetic turn. According to this argument— familiar from Northrop Frye, Mikhail Bakhtin, or Ian Watt—modern literary forms seek to shed the idealizing distance of earlier genres such as epic and romance by diving headfirst into a contemporary, open-ended reality that has been emptied of such universal values as hierarchy, harmony, and fullness. The representation of this contemporary reality does not require such values. It demands, first and foremost, fidelity to the complexity of manifest appearances, which are now perceived as the untranscendable horizon of human endeavor. Consider for a moment how this argument for a mimetic turn would have sounded in the context of the theological debates this study has traced. For the conservative participants in these debates and most of the writers I have discussed, the idea that appearances present an untranscendable limit that alone should drive representation would undoubtedly have smacked of atheist reduction. Infinite Variety has argued that other alignments shape literary modernity. The invention of modern literary forms does not require secularization. On the contrary, such invention thrived in the context of a resurgent voluntarist theology that respiritualized the world by suggesting that, even though they seemed familiar, the divinely created structures of the world were irreducibly strange. Their essences were inaccessible, their shapes and their arrangement were arbitrary. They composed a somewhat stable, but finally imperfect, contingent order. This belief did not discourage empiricist inquiry. It redoubled the attention to particulars, the observation and collection of traits and qualities. Yet it also endowed such inquiry with a sense of the illimitable, the provisional, and the uncertain that returned the observer to the metaphysical gap between divine and human spheres. This gap nourished mystery, strengthened revelation, and authorized the imagination of different worlds and modes of being. There was a mimetic turn that owed something to the growing emphasis on empiricism and probability, but the voluntarist tradition exceeded the chaste limits of representing the manifest and pursued transfiguration and utopian possibility. Even the so-called “realism” of Defoe cannot be explained by focusing on knowledge protocols and the full and faithful representation of appearances. We have to include the refiguration of being to do justice to its effects. I suspect that those who continue to feel committed to secularization would argue that Infinite Variety fits their story just fine. They are likely to

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construe the anti-atheist arguments for an imperfect, arbitrary world in the manner of a Ralph Cudworth or Hans Blumenberg, as an all-too-subversive Christianization of Epicurus’s argument for the accidental origins of the world. I imagine such proponents would argue that the voluntarist claim that values do not reside in earthly structures contributes to what Alexandre Koyré noted as early as 1953 when he described the modern “devalorization of being, the divorce of the world of value and the world of facts.”1 And they would, of course, see the emergence of a world in which order does not inhere as another aspect of the epistemological revolution that empowered the individual’s perception, representation, and interpretation of a newly clueless world. But to many of the thinkers I have discussed in this book, a clueless world does not mean that God has withdrawn. To them, an imperfect and arbitrary world is the clearest sign of a willfully sovereign God. Can we dismiss this as the flickers of a fading Christian tradition? My chapter on Blackmore emphasized that imperfections can be a privileged aspect of being in the voluntarist tradition. When placed against such values as perfection, harmony, and fullness, imperfection or arbitrariness can look secular or even atheist. Yet the fervor that could attach to the vision of an arbitrary world is undeniable in Blackmore’s poetry and Clarke’s lectures. Should we explain such feelings by saying that they were artificially roused and instrumentalized to push back against the atheist scare? And that they are therefore a symptom of secularization? If we did that, we would probably have to take the next step as well and argue that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century project of baptizing empiricism and ancient atomism is already a symptom of secularization since it involves a self-conscious use of theology to get desired results. And if we did that, we would probably have to declare the entire voluntarist tradition, including its roots in medieval theology, as already filled with the seeds of secularization. We might as well join Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), discovered the origins of instrumental reason in pagan animal sacrifice. My point is that evidence of religion’s usefulness is useless as an indicator of its decline. Behind the marshaling of such evidence lurks a rather idealistic assumption: that religion is only authentic when it is untainted by conscious or unconscious assumptions of utility. I would venture to assert that religion was never free of such assumptions and that this is why we can discover religion’s usefulness in all periods of human history. Secularization stories depend on the assumption that religious faith is authentic only as long as it is

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not bent toward human purpose. The unselfconscious participation in established ways is, once again, the modern measure of the premodern. The infinite regress of secularization stories suggests a seemingly inescapable interest in the story of disbelief, whose force is also responsible for the difficulties we have in accepting the union of skepticism and credulity, of empiricism and utopian possibility, of novel reading and transfiguration. I have tried to shed this interest. Rather than committing myself in advance to the storylines provided by modernization and secularization, I have tried to assume that belief is more powerful than disbelief because it can turn ideas into lived realities and change the way we inhabit the world. That is why I have emphasized the existential aspects of voluntarism. Facing up to an arbitrary, contingent, and imperfect creation is not easy. For a believer, it is fearful and unsettling because it goes hand in hand with a sense of humanity’s inconsequence. It requires a strong yet never certain trust that God will preserve the cosmos and respect the covenant. But being unsettled in this way could also be enabling. It allowed the writers I have discussed to realize the constructedness of the world. It licensed imaginative experiments, in literature and elsewhere, that declared the mere representation of appearances as insufficient and misleading. Even when they were conducted by conservative or even authoritarian writers, such experiments suggested that unrealized possibilities lurked in the world’s astonishing variety. The existence of such possibilities remains invisible in stories that make a secularizing epistemology the matrix of modernity. My hope is that this book has helped to indicate the dimensions of our blind spot.

notes

introduCtion 1. Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genre and Modes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 167, 103. 2. For arguments about increased genre mixture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see, in addition to Fowler, Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Ralph Cohen, “On the Interrelations of Eighteenth-Century Literary Forms,” in New Approaches to EighteenthCentury Literature, ed. Phillip Harth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 33– 78; and Margaret Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 3. Fowler, Kinds of Literature, 73. 4. Fowler, Kinds of Literature, 277. 5. For work that demonstrates the political alarms raised by those who were arguing against the sovereignty of the spirit, see Steven Shapin, “Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clarke Disputes,” Isis 72:2 (1981), 187–215 and Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Compare the work of J. G. A. Pocock, who has explained how the debates of the 1690s about the incarnation were closely tied to the independent power of the Anglican Church: “Within the Margins: The Definitions of Orthodoxy,” in The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750, ed. Roger Lund (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 33–53. 6. See Chapter 2 for a discussion of apologetic writers who contend for a more complicated and irreducible world. 7. My book thus continues the reassessment of the relationship between enlightenment and religion that has been going on since the 1990s. See Jonathan Sheehan’s useful overview of these reassessments: “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay,” American Historical Review 108:4 (2003), 1061–1080. Jennifer Snead offers a helpful overview for the literary side: “Religion and Eighteenth- Century Literature,” Literature Compass 5:4 (2008), 707–720. 8. For examples of the continuing influence of the idea that a more spiritual male form has to shape female matter, see Nathaniel Highmore, History of Generation (London,

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1651), 85–86, 111; Thomas Chamberlayne, The Compleate Midwife’s Practice (London, 1656), 62–64; Aristoteles Master-Piece (London, 1684), 32–33. 9. For examples of writers who treat form/matter as analogous to the relationship of government/people (or multitude), see Thomas Shadwell, A Congratulatory Poem on his Highness the Prince of Orange His Coming into England (London, 1689); Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman (London, 1700); Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (1889; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1984), 124–125. See also the full title of Hobbes’s most famous work: The Leviathan, or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651). 10. Pope, To a Lady: Of the Characters of Women, lines 41–42. I quote from The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Routledge, 1989), 561. 11. Pope, To a Lady, lines 153–154. 12. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. David Quint (New York: Longman, 2008), 2:2:245. 13. Anna Jameson, Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical (Annapolis, MD: J. Hughes, 1832), reprinted in Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 244. 14. I will not be able to pursue this point, but it seems likely that Defoe’s aesthetic of variety helps explain his interest in female protagonists. The gender of variety, I suspect, owes something to its kinship with matter, with which it shares what had once been a disability but what was becoming a shared ability: the coaxing of forms out of a mass of particulars. 15. I discuss the politics of deformity in Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 59–100. 16. For examples of scholars who argue for the redefinition of deformity from wonder to error, see Rosemarie Garland Thomson, “Introduction: From Wonder to Error— A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 1–22. Compare the work of Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum (introduction to “Defects”: Engendering the Modern Body, ed. Deutsch and Nussbaum [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000], 1–31), who agree with Garland Thomson (7). See also the essay by Lennard Davis in the same volume, which echoes the same account: “Dr. Johnson, Amelia, and the Discourse of Disability in the Eighteenth Century,” in “Defects,” 57–61. For a good summary of this kind of argument, see David M. Turner, Disability in EighteenthCentury England: Imagining Physical Impairment (London: Routledge, 2012), 5. 17. Post Angel, no. 1 (June 1701), 423, cited in Turner, Disability in Eighteenth- Century England, 37. 18. Lennard Davis has enlisted the early novel in the process of creating the modern discourse of disability because it represents the normal, typical, probable life and conforms to existing cultural norms (“Who Put the The in The Novel: Identity Politics and Disability in Novel Studies,” in Davis, Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions [New York: New York University Press, 2002], 79–101). 19. Compare my discussion of Blackmore in Chapter 3.

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20. For an instructive account of Skinner’s and Dunn’s critique of Lovejoy, see Heather Keenleyside, “Matter, Form, Idea: What Lovejoy’s History of Ideas Might Have to Do with Literature,” ELH 84:1 (2017), 228–230. 21. Quentin Skinner: “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8:1 (1969), 10–11, cited in Keenleyside, “Matter, Form, Idea,” 228. 22. Darrin M. McMahon, “The Return of the History of Ideas?” in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, ed. Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 13–31; John Tresch, “Cosmologies Materialized: History of Science and History of Ideas,” in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, 153–172. De Bolla invokes Lovejoy in a crucial footnote that Keenleyside retrieves in “Matter, Form, Idea” from his The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 12n1. 23. Samuel Moyn has persuasively urged that intellectual historians need to link ideas and practices: “Imaginary Intellectual History,” in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History, 112–130.

Chapter 1. toward a voluntarist aesthetiC 1. This turn from metaphysics to morality and epistemology has recently been questioned (see my discussion below). One of the more influential assertions of this turn can be found in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), where Michael McKeon argues that the late seventeenth century witnessed a transition “from metaphysics and theology to epistemology” that made more practical questions of knowledge central to literary invention in subsequent decades (83). McKeon’s assessment aligns with a tradition of historical scholarship represented by G. R. Cragg, From Puritanism to the Age of Reason: A Study of Changes in Religious Thought Within the Church of England, 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966) (originally published in 1950) and Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion, 1660–1780, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Compare also the more recent discussion of this issue by Blair Worden. In “The Question of Secularization,” Worden argues for a late seventeenth-century turn from metaphysics to practical morality (A Nation Transformed: England After the Restoration, ed. Alan Houston and Steve Pincus [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 20–40). 2. Examples of the ontological turn in anthropology, philosophy, and science studies include: Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, transl. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, transl. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013);

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Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, transl. Ray Brassier (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 3. Ian Watt’s emphasis on the epistemological sources of the novel form (The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957], 11–15) echoes Mikhail Bakhtin’s. Unbeknownst to Watt, Bakhtin had suggested earlier that the novel is “determined by experience, knowledge and practice. . . . When the novel becomes the dominant genre, epistemology becomes the dominant discipline” (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992], 15). For John Bender’s association of the novel with epistemology, see, for example, “Novel Knowledge: Judgment, Experience, Experiment,” in Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt, ed. Yota Basaki, Subha Mukherji, and Jan-Melissa Schramm (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 131–151. While J. Paul Hunter is rather more skeptical about the novel’s devotion to realism, probability, and secularization, he too notes that “most novels seem to begin in epistemology” and that “epistemology is central to almost all eighteenth-century fiction” (Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth- Century English Fiction [New York: Norton, 1990], 44, 46). McKeon argues for “the epistemological origins of the English novel” in The Origins of the English Novel, 63. Catherine Gallagher (whom Bender’s essay cites) argues that the novel is a modern form of writing because it trains readers in a “cognitive provisionality” that is characteristic of modern society (“The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006], 347). The continuing importance of Watt’s and McKeon’s argument about the novel has been underscored by Catherine Ingrassia (introduction to A Companion to the EighteenthCentury English Novel and Culture, ed. Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia [Oxford: Blackwell, 2005], 2–6); Brian Cowan (“Making Publics and Making Novels: Post-Habermasian Perspectives,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth- Century Novel, ed. J. A. Downie [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016], 55–58); Thomas Keymer (“Restoration Fiction,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth- Century Novel, 157); and April London (The Cambridge Introduction to the Eighteenth- Century Novel [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012], 5). 4. Watt and Adorno both emphasize nominalism as a relevant philosophical context for the emergence of the novel. Adorno argues that “the rise of the novel” represents the “rise of the nominalistic and thus paradoxical form par excellence” (Aesthetic Theory, transl. Robert Hullot-Kentor [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997], 201). For Watt’s emphasis on nominalism, see The Rise of the Novel, 16, 27–28. 5. Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” 346. 6. Watt argues that Robinson Crusoe’s religious content is less than sincere in The Rise of the Novel, 81. McKeon argues that Crusoe’s discovery of religion justifies possessive individualism, social mobility, and exchange value in The Origins of the English Novel, 334–336. 7. The argument that novels succeed when they insulate readers from riskier modes of reading persists in a remarkable book that is engaged in a project related to my own,

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Sarah Tindal Kareem’s Eighteenth- Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 8. Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” 347. 9. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 11. 10. Helen Thompson has recently made a related case against the separation of subject and object in Locke. Citing McKeon’s assertion that “ ‘Locke’s indivisible “truth” is overseen by a standard objective truth whose first premise is the empiricist credo that the instrument of verification can and must be separated from the object verified,’ ” she disagrees: “Locke does not divorce percipients from the bodies they know, whether miniscule or macroscopic. As the ground for truth, empiricism institutes not separation but relation. The realism that empirical knowledge bequeaths literary history is not mimetic reflection of objects in the world” (Thompson, Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017], 3). 11. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, transl. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 182. 12. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 182. 13. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 183. 14. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 183. 15. Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 8. 16. See, for example, Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Jesse Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth- Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Jason Pearl, Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014); Kareem, Eighteenth- Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder. 17. See, for example, Julie Park, The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth- Century England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Sandra Macpherson, Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Lynn Festa, Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019); Thompson, Fictional Matter. 18. See, for example, Misty Anderson, Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth- Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief, and the Borders of the Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) and Sarah Ellenzweig, The Fringes of Belief: English Literature, Ancient Heresy, and the Politics of Freethinking, 1660–1760 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 19. See, for example, Howard Weinbrot, Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture, 1660–1780 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) and Philip Connell, Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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20. For an account of Latour’s argument for the relationship between differentiation and mixture, see my Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 151–153. 21. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, transl. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2006). 22. Roy Wagner, whose anthropology Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen consider formative for the ontological turn, argues that “anthropology will not come to terms with its mediative basis and its professed aims until our invention of other cultures can reproduce, at least in principle, the way in which those cultures invent themselves. We must be able to experience our subject matter directly, as alternative meaning, rather than indirectly, through literalization or reduction to the terms of our ideologies” (Wagner, The Invention of Culture [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], 30–31). Holbraad and Pedersen’s argument for Wagner’s shaping influence on the ontological turn can be found in their The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 69–109. For their own statement on the need to grasp the native’s point of view, see The Ontological Turn, 7. Holbraad and Pedersen also disclose that certain versions of the posthumanist turn of recent years are lured by the same dream to overcome the biased and model-building observer and to let the observed dictate its own terms. They recommend that we allow things “to make a difference as things to the way we may speak of them—to help to dictate their own terms of engagement, becoming, so to speak, their own ‘thing-theorists’—by virtue of the characteristics that make them most thing-like” (The Ontological Turn, 200). By contrast, my own ontological turn via Gadamer is humanist: it insists on the inescapability of difference and the incompleteness of dialogue. 23. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 19. 24. See Dipesh Chakrabarti, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth- Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). See also Dominick LaCapra, who invoked Gadamer and Heidegger in the 1980s to reorient intellectual history toward more dialogic practices: Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 23–71. 25. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). For Felski’s comments on Gadamer and the importance of hermeneutics, see pp. 32–33. 26. For an excellent account of this tradition, see J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 27. James Tully, introduction to Samuel Pufendorf: On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), xvii. Peter Harrison has argued against the link between voluntarism and new science in “Voluntarism and Early Modern Science,” History of Science 40 (2002), 1–27. John Henry’s re-

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sponse makes clear that the link continues to be an impor tant aspect of our thinking about seventeenth-century science: “Voluntarist Theology at the Origins of Modern Science: A Response to Peter Harrison,” History of Science 47 (2009), 79–113. See also Henry, “Religion and the Scientific Revolution,” in The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion, ed. Peter Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 39–58. 28. Tully, introduction, xvii. 29. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 77. Compare the work of Pufendorf, who writes that “no Actions are in themselves good or bad, honest or vile, till they are made so by some Law” (Of the Law of Nature and Nations [London, 1729], 121). 30. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, 123. Schneewind refers to Pufendorf, but the sentence applies more broadly. 31. Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations, 100. 32. Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations, 2. 33. The Political Writings of Leibniz, transl. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 71. 34. Descartes, Reply to the Six Objections, ed. R. M. Eaton (New York: Scribner’s, 1927), 264–266, cited in The Political Writings of Leibniz, 71n3. 35. Descartes, Reply to the Six Objections, 264–266, cited in The Political Writings of Leibniz, 72n3. 36. G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, ed. and transl. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 158. 37. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, 10. 38. For longer intellectual histories of nominalist theology/voluntarism, see Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999); Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). For a closely related account, see Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). David Sepkoski explains the relationship between nominalism and voluntarism succinctly when he notes that voluntarism is joined to nominalism because it provides the theology for the latter’s ontology: Nominalism and Constructivism in Seventeenth- Century Mathematical Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2007), 9. 39. Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, 232. 40. Hobbes, Leviathan, 3. 41. Sepkoski, Nominalism and Constructivism, 103. On Barrow’s voluntarism, see Antoni Malet, “Isaac Barrow on the Mathematization of Nature: Theological Voluntarism and the Rise of Geometrical Optics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 58:2 (1997), 265–287. 42. Sepkoski, Nominalism and Constructivism, 46. See also the work of Heiko A. Oberman, who has emphasized that the voluntarist distinction between God’s absolute and ordained power links speculation on what God might be able to do to truth: “to

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reach truth we must consider not only what God actually decides to do . . . but also what God is able to do” (Oberman, “Some Notes on the Theology of Nominalism: With Attention to Its Relation to the Renaissance,” Harvard Theological Review 53:1 [1960], 58). 43. Oakley argues for voluntarism as a covenantal tradition in Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order: An Excursion in the History of Ideas from Abelard to Leibniz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). 44. Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations, 97. 45. For a brief account of the tension between Clarke’s natural and moral philosophy, see Stephen Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 48–49. 46. See my discussion of Clarke in the next chapter. 47. For Swift’s argument that outward observance can produce inward change, see my discussion in Chapter 5. 48. Ulrich Langer’s Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance: Nominalist Theology and Literature in France and Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990) is the most important attempt by a literary historian to articulate a voluntarist aesthetic (Langer prefers “nominalist theology” to “voluntarism”). I will note overlaps and similarities with Langer in the endnotes as I continue. Additional contributions to a voluntarist/ nominalist aesthetic can be found in Nominalism and Literary Discourse: New Perspectives, ed. Hugo Keiper, Christoph Bode, and Richard Utz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997). 49. Compare Langer’s discussion of the primacy of the writer’s will: Divine and Poetic Freedom, 110. 50. In a rare departure from much more limited treatments of nominalism as a context of early eighteenth-century literature, Nicholas Hudson has emphasized that the mimetic function recedes under nominalist assumptions. Gulliver’s Travels, for example, is a nominalist text for Hudson because it displays language adrift from its representative function. Swift’s narrative, Hudson shows, is deeply vested in demonstrating that our general names for things, including species names, constitute an order that exists parallel to but not in nature and derives solely from human activity. This nominal order, in other words, does not reflect reality but constitutes it. Such an understanding of nominalism corresponds to what Sepkoski argues about seventeenth-century mathematics in Nominalism and Constructivism. See Hudson, “Gulliver’s Travels and Locke’s Radical Nominalism,” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 1 (1994), 247–266. 51. Compare Langer’s discussion of contingency, of the nominalist/voluntarist sense that the world could be different: Divine and Poetic Freedom, 22. 52. Blanford Parker, The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7. 53. Parker, The Triumph of Augustan Poetics, 59. 54. Fredric Bogel, The Difference Satire Makes: Rhetoric and Reading from Jonson to Byron (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 246. 55. My emphasis on construction should clarify my use of the term “invention.” I do not mean to invoke its older meanings of “finding” or “discovery,” meanings that ulti-

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mately go back to the tradition of rhetoric and such names as Cicero and Quintilian. I wish to highlight instead meanings of “invention” that developed later, in the sixteenth century. At that point, invention begins to signify the contrivance of new ways of doing something. Constructive decomposition is such a way. 56. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 297. 57. For Blumenberg’s argument that nominalist/voluntarist and Epicurean constructions of the world are related, see Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, 163–198. For Cudworth’s and Leibniz’s association of nominalism and epicureanism, see my discussion in Chapter 2. 58. For the argument that voluntarism was important to new scientists, see, for example, James Force and Richard Popkin, Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990). For an account of voluntarism’s importance to the Christianization of Epicurean philosophy, see Margaret Osler, “Fortune, Fate, and Divination: Gassendi’s Voluntarist Theology and the Baptism of Epicureanism,” in Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquility: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 155–174. For a challenge to the argument that new scientists like Newton and Boyle adopted voluntarist assumptions, see Harrison, “Voluntarism and Early Modern Science.” For a well-reasoned response that defends the importance of voluntarism, see Henry, “Voluntarist Theology at the Origins of Modern Science” and “Religion and the Scientific Revolution.” 59. For Blumenberg’s assertion that the nominalist God is the superfluous God, see Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, 165.

Chapter 2. glorious arbitr ariness 1. For a mention of the giraffe as a mixture of camel and panther, see Nathanael Carpenter, Geography Delineated (Oxford, 1625), 279–280. For a history of the rhinoceros’s representation in early modern Europe, see T. H. Clark, The Rhinoceros from Dürer to Stubbs, 1515–1799 (London: Sotheby’s, 1986). 2. The confrontation between traditional systems of European knowledge and the new forms of life that were observed in the Americas is the subject of Anthony Pagden’s European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993) and Anthony Grafton’s New World, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). See also Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, ed. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), a volume that addresses the social, political, economic, and colonial contexts in which the old world’s encounter with new world species unfolded. Especially useful in the context of my argument are Harold J. Cook’s “Global Economies and Local

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Knowledge in the East Indies: Jacobus Bontius Learns the Fact of Nature” (100–118), which emphasizes the wealth of information about new species brought back by European scientific travelers in the seventeenth century, and E. C. Spary’s “Of Nutmegs and Botanists: The Colonial Cultivation of Botanical Identity” (187–203), which addresses a later historical period and details the instability of the new species “nutmeg” by exploring the struggles between the scientific, colonial, and economic interests vested in identifying nutmeg. 3. John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (London, 1701), 207. 4. Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested, 24. 5. John Ray, Philosophical Letters (London, 1718), 342–343. 6. Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested, 380–381. 7. Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested, 19. 8. Preston to Ray, January 13, 1701, reprinted in Ray, Philosophical Letters, 309–310. 9. Edward Tyson, Phocaena, or, The Anatomy of a Porpess (London, 1680), 1–2. 10. Tyson, Phocaena, 11. 11. Tyson, Orang- Outang (London, 1699), 20. 12. Tyson, Phocaena, 11. 13. Tyson, Orang- Outang, Epistle Dedicatory (no pagination, no signatures). 14. Tyson feels compelled to affirm that his chimpanzee is “wholly a Brute” and a “meer Brute” in Orang- Outang, 5 and 82, respectively. 15. Tyson, Orang- Outang, 54. 16. Tyson remarks that “there is no reason to think, that Agents do perform such and such Actions, because they are found with Organs proper thereunto: for then our Pygmie really might be a Man” (Orang- Outang, 55). 17. Tyson, Orang- Outang, 55. 18. For Tyson’s Platonic assumptions, see Phocaena, 3. 19. Tyson, Phocaena, 2. 20. Tyson, Phocaena, 3. 21. Tyson notes, for example, that human distempers and diseases may benefit from the anatomy of animals, “there being not that difference between our Bodies and theirs” (Phocaena, 8). “Sensation and Motion,” he explains earlier, “and what other functions there are of the soul, by such a Comparative survey may be rendered more intelligible; and from a clearer knowledge of them in Brutes, at length we may come the better to know our selves” (Phocaena, 7). 22. Quotations from Blackmore in this paragraph can be found in The LayMonastery, Wednesday, November 25, 1713, reprinted in The Lay-Monastery (London, 1714), 29–30. 23. Tyson, Phocaena, 3. 24. Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested, 23. 25. Phillip Sloan, “John Locke, John Ray, and the Problem of the Natural System,” Journal of the History of Biology 5:1 (1972), 1–53; M. M. Slaughter, Universal Languages and

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Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 26. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 463. 27. For Locke’s changelings, mules, gimars, rat-cats, man-dogs, and man-hogs, see Essay, 451–455. For his bird-fishes, porpoises, amphibious animals, animal-vegetables, and mermaids, see Essay, 447. For his parrot, see Essay, 333–334. 28. Locke, Essay, 455. 29. John Ray, De Variis Plantarum Methodis Dissertatio Brevis, in Ray, Synopsis Methodica Stirpium Britannicarum, 2nd ed. (London, 1696), 5, cited in Slaughter, Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy, 212. 30. The Young Students Library (London, 1692), 479. 31. Thomas Baker, Reflections upon Learning (London, 1699), 97. 32. For Swift’s critique of epistemological depth, see my discussion in Chapter 5. 33. Baker, Reflections upon Learning, 77. 34. Baker, Reflections upon Learning, 76. 35. Baker, Reflections upon Learning, 76. 36. Louis Landa has pointed out that the formula that nature was as mysterious as mystery was real was especially frequent in defenses of the trinity: Essays in EighteenthCentury English Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 99–101. 37. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, ed. and transl. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 2003), 642. Subsequent page references in the main text. On Montaigne’s alignment of religious and epistemological crises, see Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 52–53. 38. Richard Popkin has shown that, in the early stages of its revival, skepticism is often a tool in the defense of established religion: Popkin, The History of Scepticism, 52–53. 39. For Pufendorf ’s endorsement of the infinite variety of human customs and law, see my discussion in Chapter 1. For Locke’s use of ethnographic evidence, see his discussion of innate practical principles in book 1, chapter 3 of Essay. For a nuanced account of Locke’s relationship to the tradition of skepticism, see Daniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 34–68. 40. Locke dramatizes the gap between human and divine intellect in Essay, 554–555. 41. Glanvill and Parker were both engaged in controversy with Andrew Marvell. Glanvill defended the Church against Marvell’s attacks in The Rehearsal Transpros’ d (1672), which was itself occasioned by Parker’s controversial writings. For Glanvill’s defense of the Church against Marvell’s attacks, see An Apology and Advice for Some Clergy (London, 1674). 42. Samuel Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie (Oxford, 1666), 54. Subsequent page references in the main text.

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43. For Parker’s rejections of Platonic restrictions on divine power, including necessity, see An Account of the Nature and Extent of the Divine Dominion and Goodnesse (Oxford, 1666), 26–27, 59. 44. Parker, An Account, 2–3. 45. Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (London, 1661), 229, 193. Subsequent page references in the main text. 46. The idea of a judicious credulity is Glanvill’s; he aligns himself with “a set of enlarged souls that are more judiciously credulous” (The Vanity of Dogmatizing, 183). 47. For Baker’s ridicule of Glanvill, see Reflections upon Learning, 84. 48. Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 201–203. 49. The restrained version of Vanity of Dogmatizing appeared in Joseph Glanvill, Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion (London, 1676). 50. William Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion, and Politics in England and Its Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 92. Sarah Ellenzweig has also described an aristocratic skepticism toward religion in the restoration that reacted against enthusiastic sects. See The Fringes of Belief: English Literature, Ancient Heresy, and the Politics of Freethinking, 1660–1760 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 16. 51. For a history of the alliance between the new science and Anglicanism, see John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment: Science, Religion, and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 52. On the importance of Bentley’s and Clarke’s lectures, see Margaret Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 162–163. 53. On Newton’s voluntarism, see, for example, James Force, “Newton’s God of Dominion: The Unity of Newton’s Theological, Scientific, and Political Thought,” in James Force and Richard Popkin, Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), 75–102. For a dissenting view, see Peter Harrison, “Was Newton a Voluntarist?” in Newton and Newtonianism: New Studies, ed. James Force and Sarah Hutton (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004), 39–63. 54. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 457. 55. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 464. 56. See James Force on the voluntarist leanings of the apologetic tradition associated with the Royal Society: “The Breakdown of the Newtonian Synthesis of Science and Religion: Hume, Newton, and the Royal Society,” in Force and Popkin, Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology, 143–151. On the same issue, see also Steven Shapin, “Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the LeibnizClarke Disputes,” Isis 72:2 (1981), 187–215. 57. Richard Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism (London, 1693), lecture three, 13.

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58. For Ray’s rejection of the idea that beauty is strictly relative, see The Wisdom of God Manifested, 117–118. 59. Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, lecture eight, 37. 60. Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, lecture eight, 37. 61. Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, lecture five, 23. 62. Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, lecture five, 24. 63. For Bentley’s rejection of an innate idea of God, see The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, lecture one, 5, and lecture three, 5. For his critique of anthropocentrism, see lecture eight, 6–8. For the suggestion that the world is arbitrary, see lecture eight, 7, 16. 64. Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, lecture four, 5, lecture eight, 36, lecture eight, 7. Compare similar formulations in Robert Boyle’s Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv’ d Notion of Nature (London, 1686), where he invokes, among other similar phrasings, “the present Structure and Constitution of the World” (72) and “the present System of our Vortex” (207). 65. Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, lecture eight, 7. Bentley rejects humankind as the mea sure of the universe in the following words: “We do not determin the Final Causes and Usefulness of the Systematical parts of the World, merely as they have respect to the Exigencies or Conveniencies of Human Life” (lecture eight, 8). 66. Bentley calls the “Union of a Rational Soul with Matter” in human beings “an arbitrary institution of the Divine Wisdom” (The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, lecture eight, 7). For Clarke’s argument that the human body is an arbitrary structure composed by a willful sovereign, see A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (London, 1706): “Are our Five Senses, by an Absolute Necessity in the Nature of the Thing, All and the only Possible Ways of Perception? And is it impossible and contradictory, that there should be any Being in the Universe, indued with ways of Perception different from those that are the result of Our present Composition? Or are these things, on the contrary, purely Arbitrary; and the same Power that gave Us these, may have given Others to Other Beings, and might (if he had pleas’d) have given Us Others in this present State, and may yet have made us capable of different Ones in Another State? . . . If any one say, that these Senses of ours are Necessarily the only ways of Perception; how does that appear? And is it not infinitely more reasonable to suppose, that this is a mere Prejudice, arising from Custom and an attending to bare Sense in opposition to Reason? For suppose Men had been created only with Four Senses, and had never known the use of Sight; would they not then have had the same Reason to conclude there were but four possible ways of Perception, as they have Now to fancy that there are but Five?” (132–134). 67. Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, lecture eight, 7–8. 68. Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, lecture eight, 7. 69. Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, lecture eight, 7. 70. Bentley’s argument that God’s power and wisdom are manifested through their production of a great number and variety of inhabited worlds in other systems strikes Steven J. Dick as radical. See his Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 149–150.

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71. Bentley, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism, lecture eight, 7. 72. Clarke, A Demonstration, 79. 73. Clarke, A Demonstration, 107–110. 74. Clarke, A Demonstration, 107. 75. Clarke’s tendency to reemphasize necessity in the second half of his lectures takes him into paradoxical formulations that illustrate difficulties inherent in the covenantal tradition of voluntarism: “The Divine Nature is under no Necessity, but such as is consistent with the most perfect Liberty and Freest Choice . . . yet it is nevertheless as truly and absolutely impossible for God not to do (or to do any thing contrary to,) what his Moral Attributes require of him to do; as if he was really, not a Free, but a Necessary Agent” (A Demonstration, 191). 76. J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 310–323. Compare also the work of Stephen Gaukroger, who comments on the tension between Clarke’s assertion of God’s absolute freedom and the “fitness” He nonetheless observes (The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–1760 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010], 48–49). 77. Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678), 873. 78. G. W. Leibniz, “Discourse on Metaphysics,” in Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, ed. and transl. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett 1989), 39. 79. Samuel Clarke, A Collection of Papers, which Passed between the Late Learned Mr. Leibniz and Dr. Clarke (London, 1717), 117. 80. Leibniz owns the “necessity of a sufficient Reason” in Clarke, A Collection of Papers, 117. 81. For an account of Leibniz’s flirt with Spinoza, see Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 505–510. 82. Clarke, A Collection of Papers, 45. 83. Clarke, A Collection of Papers, 135–137. 84. Leibniz, “The Monadology,” in Philosophical Essays, 220. 85. Leibniz, “Discourse on Metaphysics,” in Philosophical Essays, 39. 86. For Leibniz’s claims about infinite variety, see Clarke, A Collection of Papers, 177. 87. Leibniz, “The Monadology,” in Philosophical Essays, 220. 88. Clarke, A Demonstration, 77. 89. Clarke, A Collection of Papers, 39. 90. Leibniz notes the impossibility of divine action without reason in Clarke, A Collection of Papers, 63. 91. For the medieval counterfactual of the universe moving forward in a straight line, see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 58. 92. Quotations in two preceding sentences are from Leibniz in Clarke, A Collection of Papers, 99.

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93. Quotations from Leibniz in two preceding sentences in Clarke, A Collection of Papers, 101. 94. Leibniz in Clarke, A Collection of Papers, 103. For Hans Blumenberg, Leibniz’s equation between voluntarism and atomism is the climax of the exchange: Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1999), 165. 95. Quotations from Leibniz in preceding two sentences in Clarke, A Collection of Papers, 207, 223. 96. Quotations from Leibniz in preceding two sentences in Clarke, A Collection of Papers, 267, 275. 97. For a recent argument that Leibniz contributes to the modern use of counterfactuals, see Catherine Gallagher, Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 16–26. On the constraints of Leibniz’s possible world argument and his use of counterfactuals, see Michael Griffin, Leibniz, God and Necessity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 83–111 and 165–184, respectively. Leibniz’s possible world argument does play an impor tant subsequent role in the history of German aesthetics associated with such names as Christian Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten, and Johann Christian Gottsched. See, for example, the discussion in Stefanie Buchenau, The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment: The Art of Invention and the Invention of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 122 and Frederick C. Beiser, Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 98. 98. Clark, A Demonstration, 37. 99. For the distinction between critical and constructive uses of counterfactuals, see Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 174–179. 100. Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested, 129–130. 101. Henry More, An Antidote against Atheisme (London, 1653), 75. 102. More’s “what if?” scenarios can be found in More, An Antidote, in the order I list them in the main text: 49, 83, 88, 71, 88. 103. More, An Antidote, 49. 104. More, An Antidote, 49. 105. Quotations in this paragraph can be found, in the order of their appearance in the main text, in More, An Antidote, 103, 88, 88, B2v, 86. 106. Leibniz, “Discourse on Metaphysics,” in Philosophical Essays, 38. More mechanically inclined, Leibniz also explicitly disagreed with More’s idea of a world soul: see “A Specimen of Dynamics,” in Philosophical Essays, 125–126. 107. Dick points out that More adopted the belief in a plurality of worlds as early as 1646 (Plurality of Worlds, 50–53). 108. Marjorie Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (1959; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 113–143. 109. William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth (London, 1696), E7v.

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110. Whiston emphasizes the present constitution of the world in A New Theory, O3v. His anti-anthropocentrism can be seen on G4v– G5v. The plurality of worlds is asserted on D4v–D5r. 111. Whiston, A New Theory, L5r. 112. Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 249–250. 113. Shapin’s “Of Gods and Kings” offers a nuanced and carefully contextualized portrayal of the political uses of the God-nature relationship in early eighteenth-century England. He extends Jacob’s account in The Newtonians and the English Revolution. 114. Whiston wobbles on man’s place in the world when he balances human inferiority and incomprehension against human participation in the divine nature: A New Theory, D8v–E1r. 115. For Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s discussion of immanence and its politically empowering effects, see Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 116. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 177. 117. For Sepkoski’s arguments about the constructivist aspect of nominalism/voluntarism, see my discussion in Chapter 1. Nicholas Hudson has argued that Gulliver’s Travels relies on the assumption that our general names for things, including species names, constitute an order that exists parallel to, but not in, nature and derives solely from human activity. This nominal order, in other words, does not reflect reality but constitutes it (Hudson, “Gulliver’s Travels and Locke’s Radical Nominalism,” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 1 [1994], 247–266). 118. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 174–179. 119. Locke, Essay, 339, 340, 341, 343, 343, 344. 120. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 178. On Locke’s constructive use of counterfactuals, see Kathryn Tabb’s “Madness as Method: On Locke’s Thought Experiments about Personal Identity,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26:5 (2018), 871–889; and David Soles and Katherine Bradfield, “Some Remarks on Locke’s Use of Thought Experiments,” Locke Studies 1 (2001), 31–62. 121. Locke, Essay, 347. 122. I am indebted to Jonathan Lamb’s “Locke’s Wild Fancies,” which also argues for the collaboration of the factual and the counterfactual in the new science and in Locke (The Eighteenth Century 48:3 [2007], 187–204). 123. Locke, Essay, 333–334.

Chapter 3. energy and struCture 1. For Richard Blackmore’s praise of Bentley, see A Satyr against Wit (London, 1700), 6. 2. Blackmore’s Creation (London, 1712) presents the following counterfactual conceits: different planetary speeds (242–243); a different magnetic force (16–17); a different

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position of earth or sun (24–25, 58–64, 74–75); a world without wind (95–96); a better, more perfect world (132); different species (220–221). 3. The distinction of God’s absolute and ordained power and its history is the subject of Francis Oakley’s Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order: An Excursion in the History of Ideas from Abelard to Leibniz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). Blackmore signals his adherence to this distinction in many places, including his essay on the laws of nature. In this essay, he argues that God’s proprietorship in human beings gives him absolute power over them. But he adds that God decided, of his own free will, to serve as a governor who “would rule [human beings] by Laws as Rational Creatures; by which he has signify’d his Plea sure, that he will not use and dispose of Men as he is their unlimited Lord and Proprietor, but will deal with them as a Magistrate and Judge” (“An Essay upon the Laws of Nature,” in Blackmore, Essays upon Several Subjects [Dublin, 1716], 20 [pagination and signatures discontinuous]). 4. Blackmore, The Lay-Monastery (London, 1714), 28. 5. Francis Oakley argues for voluntarism as a covenantal tradition in Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order. See my discussion in Chapter 1. 6. Blackmore uses the term “Worldmaker” to describe Epicurus in “An Essay upon Atheism,” in Essays upon Several Subjects (London, 1717), 31. 7. Blackmore, “An Essay upon the Immortality of the Soul,” in Essays upon Several Subjects (Dublin), 9–10. Compare William Whiston’s closely related stance on God’s active conservation of the world: A New Theory of the Earth (London, 1696), H3v. Antiatheist writing with a voluntarist flavor has often recourse to a weakening of the distinction between God’s creation and preservation. For a further example, see Walter Charleton, The Darkness of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature (London, 1652), 17, 94, 112. 8. For David Womersley’s reconsideration of Blackmore’s place in the literary scene of the early eighteenth century, see introduction to Augustan Critical Writing, ed. Womersley (London: Penguin, 1997), xix–xxxi. For an extension of this argument, see Womersley’s “Dulness and Pope,” Proceedings of the British Academy: 2004 Lectures, vol. 131 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 229–250. Adam Rounce rehearses some of the critiques of Blackmore by Dryden, Pope, and Gay in “The Difficulties of Quantifying Taste: Blackmore and Poetic Reception in the Eighteenth Century,” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries 9:1 (2017), 26. 9. Womersley, introduction, xxxvii. 10. For an account of how a Whiggish cultural program was promoted by Whig patrons who found a powerful social center in the Kit-Cat Club, see Abigail Williams, “Patronage and Whig Literary Culture in the Early Eighteenth Century,” in Cultures of Whiggism: New Essays on English Literature and Culture, ed. David Womersley, assisted by Paddy Bullard and Abigail Williams (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 149– 172. Williams’s account is valuable in part because it revises long-standing assumptions about the decline of court patronage after 1688. For a remarkable group portrait of the attempt to promote a distinctly Whiggish national culture, see Ophelia Fields, The KitCat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation (London: Harper Press, 2008).

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11. I refer to the periodical The Lay-Monk (1713), to which Blackmore and his friend John Hughes made the main contributions. For an account of the program of politeness that characterizes Tatler, Guardian, and Spectator, see Lawrence Klein, “Joseph Addison’s Whiggism,” in Cultures of Whiggism, 108–126. 12. Blackmore, The Kit-cats (London, 1708), 14. Womersley ties Blackmore’s project to the Kit-Cat Club in introduction, xix. 13. Blackmore, A Satyr against Wit, 9. 14. In “Patronage and Whig Literary Culture,” Williams points out that Bentley received patronage from Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax (157); that Clarke collaborated with Jacob Tonson, an influential member of the Kit-Cat Club, in producing a lavish edition of Caesar’s Commentaries (1712) dedicated to the (recently disgraced) Duke of Marlborough (162); and that John Hughes was patronized by Baron Somers (156). 15. For an excellent account of the sublime’s currencies in the eighteenth century, see Jonathan Lamb, “The Sublime,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4, ed. H. B. Nisbet, George Alexander Kennedy, and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 381–393. 16. For Blackmore’s appreciation of Milton, see, for example, The Nature of Man (London, 1711), 17–18. Christine Gerrard notes that Blackmore was closely associated with the “Whig poetic agenda of the 1690s and early 1700s . . . to remodel poetry on Christian rather than classical influences” (Gerrard, “Pope, Peri Bathous, and the Whig Sublime,” in Cultures of Whiggism, 201). 17. The Works of Dionysius Longinus, transl. Leonard Welsted (London, 1712). Welsted calls Milton “our great Master” on p. 158. 18. John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), in The Critical Works of John Dennis, vol. 1, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939), 325–374. 19. For a brief account of Dennis’s relationship to Blackmore, see Albert Rosenberg, Sir Richard Blackmore: A Poet and Physician of the Augustan Age (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1953), 119–121. 20. The Critical Works of John Dennis, 1:359. 21. Blackmore, Prince Arthur (London, 1714), A2r. 22. Rosenberg, Sir Richard Blackmore and Harry M. Solomon, Sir Richard Blackmore (Boston: Twayne, 1980). Of the two, Rosenberg’s biography is far better informed. 23. David B. Morris, The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in Eighteenth- Century England (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972), 84. 24. Blackmore’s defense of established religion became more marked over time. While in Creation (1712) he exempted Deists from the category of atheism (xxxix), his Just Prejudices against the Arian Hypothesis (London, 1721) defended traditional Christianity against Deist, Arian, and Socinian beliefs. 25. Ulrich Langer’s Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance: Nominalist Theology and Literature in France and Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990) prefers “nominalist theology” to “voluntarism.” Langer emphasizes the voluntarist pri-

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macy of the writer’s will (110) and notes the artistic license provided by the stress on the arbitrary freedom of the divine will and the consequent assumption that the world could be fundamentally different from the way it now stands (22). Hans Blumenberg’s account of the artistic consequences of a voluntarist theology can be found in fairly compact form in “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans,” in Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001), 59–60. 26. I have paraphrased Blumenberg’s discussion in “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans,” 59–60. 27. In book 5 of Creation, Blackmore declares that he intends to consider and refute Aristotle’s argument for the eternity of the world (211). Blackmore notes that Spinoza “forms the World by Physical Necessity” in “An Essay upon Atheism” (Essays upon Several Subjects [London], 93). He criticizes Spinoza’s philosophy in Creation, 154–156. 28. Blackmore, Creation, 211. Subsequent references to this poem in the main text. 29. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, transl. Anthony M. Esolen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), book 1, lines 262–263. Lucretius depicts the transformations of matter in book 2 as follows: “Besides, all things turn into something else. / Rivers and leaves and the glad pasture turn / Into cattle; the cattle turn their substance into / Our flesh, and often from our flesh the vigor / Of beasts is fed, and the winged might of the birds” (Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, book 2, lines 874–878). 30. Blackmore, “Essay upon the Laws of Nature,” in Essays upon Several Subjects (Dublin), 12. 31. Blackmore, “An Essay upon the Immortality of the Soul,” in Essays upon Several Subjects (Dublin), 10. 32. For Cudworth’s critique of voluntarism, see The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678), 873. For Leibniz’s critique of the same, see his comments in Samuel Clarke, A Collection of Papers, which Passed between the Late Learned Mr. Leibniz and Dr. Clarke (London, 1717), 103. 33. For Blackmore’s critique of moral necessity, see Lay-Monastery, 215–216. 34. For Hobbes’s association of free will with Catholicism, see Hobbes, The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (London, 1656), 1–2. Hobbes rejected the idea that man’s “Will is Free, and determined to this or that action, not by the will of God, nor necessary causes, but by the power of the Will it Self ” (The Questions Concerning Liberty, 2). 35. Hobbes, The Questions Concerning Liberty, a1r. 36. Blackmore, Lay-Monastery, 29. 37. Blackmore, Natural Theology (London, 1728), 16. 38. Blackmore, Natural Theology, 22. 39. Blackmore, Natural Theology, 29. 40. See pages 6 and 222 in Creation for statements that attribute these human qualities to God. 41. Blackmore, “Essay upon Atheism,” in Essays upon Several Subjects (London), 108.

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42. Blackmore, “Essay upon Atheism,” 115. 43. Blackmore, “Essay upon Atheism,” 100. Compare the following: God has given man “ free elective Power” to “chuse Rebellion and Disobedience to his great Lawgiver” (“An Essay upon Future Felicity,” in Essays upon Several Subjects [London], 348). 44. Blackmore, “Essay upon Atheism,” 53. 45. Blackmore, “Essay upon Atheism,” 123. Compare this statement: “I must acknowledge, that the Moral Goodness and Beauty, the Wickedness and Deformity of Actions, which some great Divines derive from the intrinsick Nature of Things, without any Consideration of a Law that commands or prohibits them, is what I am not able to conceive” (“An Essay upon the Laws of Nature,” in Essays upon Several Subjects [Dublin], 11). 46. Blackmore, “The Preface,” in Essays upon Several Subjects (London), v–vi. 47. For Blackmore’s rejection of Hobbesian necessity, see, for example, LayMonastery, 215–217. The phrase “voluntary Necessity” is on p. 217. 48. For a clear statement that law is the command of a superior to an inferior, see Blackmore, “An Essay upon the Laws of Nature,” in Essays upon Several Subjects [Dublin], 23–24. 49. Blackmore, Lay-Monastery, 204, 153. 50. Blackmore, Lay-Monastery, 154. 51. Blackmore, Lay-Monastery, 154. 52. Blackmore, Lay-Monastery, 157–158. 53. Blackmore, Lay-Monastery, 158. See also this comment on diversity of temperament: “So very fertile” is the British soil of “Diversity of Genius and Disposition,” Blackmore points out in a different essay, that “an English Man needs not go abroad to learn the Humours” of other nations. “Let him but travel from Temple-Bar to Ludgate, and he will meet among his own Country-men, the French Man, the Spaniard, the Italian, and the German; he’ll find Persons as much disagreeing, as all the Nations in Europe can show” (Blackmore, Lay-Monastery, 134). 54. Blackmore, Lay-Monastery, 135. 55. Blackmore, Lay-Monastery, 114. 56. Blackmore, Lay-Monastery, 115. 57. Blackmore, Prince Arthur (London, 1695), 96–97. These lines are spoken by Hoel’s bard, but Blackmore does not seek to give voice to pagan sentiments here. The bard begins his speech by noting “All Beings we in fruitful Nature find, / Proceeded from the great Eternal Mind; / Streams of his unexhausted Spring of Power, / And cherish’d with his Influence, endure” (Prince Arthur, 95). While less detailed than the narrator’s account of creation, the bard echoes Blackmore’s cosmology and language (“unexhausted Power” is a frequent expression in Blackmore to describe God’s continued creation). 58. Blackmore, The Nature of Man, 84. 59. Blackmore, Lay-Monastery, 28. 60. Blackmore, Lay-Monastery, 116. 61. For Blackmore’s argument that natural defects serve a purpose, see, for example, Creation, 128–140.

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62. G. W. Leibniz, “Discourse on Metaphysics,” in Philosophical Essays, ed. and transl. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 39. 63. Blackmore, Prince Arthur, 45–46. 64. Blackmore, Prince Arthur, 49. 65. Blackmore, Prince Arthur, 49. 66. James Noggle provides a rich analysis of the Tory tradition of the sublime in The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 67. Blanford Parker, The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 9. 68. Parker, The Triumph of Augustan Poetics, 74. 69. Parker, The Triumph of Augustan Poetics, 92. 70. Langer has argued that “specifically nominalist features of God can be seen in the way certain Renaissance authors construct their fictional worlds.” These features include “the feeling of contingency, the feeling that things could easily be other wise, and that they are dependent on an only partially motivated decision of their author.” These feelings are important as well in Blackmore’s aesthetic (Langer, Divine and Poetic Freedom, 22). Langer prefers the term “nominalist theology” over “voluntarism.” 71. Blackmore signals some skepticism about the Newtonian attempt to explain gravity and planetary motion mathematically, in part because he worries that such an explanation may detract from the sovereignty of God’s will, which directs, ultimately, all motion. Of course, this argument about God’s will, as we saw in Chapter 2, is not alien to the Newtonians, who insisted on the ultimate sovereignty of God and presented natural laws as preliminary. For Blackmore’s engagement with Newton and the Newtonians, see Creation, 80–81, 86–87. 72. “To show his Art th’attentive Author wrought / The noble Mould with more Concern and Thought. / His Soul, pure Substance of Angelic Kind, / Divinely temper’d, and with Care refin’d, / Now lodg’d in Clay, did at its Entrance give / So quick a Touch, as made that Clay to Live” (Blackmore, Prince Arthur [London, 1714], 46). I quote from this later edition because it makes this point more powerfully than the 1695 edition. 73. On the privileging of smaller units of composition and the secondary value of the structure of the whole, see The Works of Dionysius Longinus, 3–4; on the priority of energy over order, see The Works of Dionysius Longinus, 70 (“as Order is the property of a composed sedate Spirit, so Disorder is the Mark of Passion and Emotion in the Soul”); on the acceptance of imperfection as the price of the sublime, see The Works of Dionysius Longinus, 97 (“which is more preferable, whether in Prose or in Poetry, that Sublime which has some Faults, or that Mediocrity which is perfect and entire in all its Parts?”). In his comments on Longinus, Welsted mentions the risks of the sublime mode: “It must be granted, that those Writers, who excel so highly in the Grand and Lofty, are liable to numerous Failings . . . but how can one expect it should be other wise? Human Spirit in such Works is wrought to its utmost stretch, and cannot . . . possibly support it self through the whole with equal Majesty. . . . There is a kind of Unconstancy in the productions of great

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Genius’s. Now you shall see them striking the Clouds with their Heads; now touching the lowest ground: they have their Risings and their Wanes” (The Works of Dionysius Longinus, 187). In the preface to King Arthur, Blackmore indicates his familiarity with Longinus’s argument about the sublime as a risky mode, liable to misfire: defects are the likely by-products of high aim (King Arthur [London, 1697], iv). 74. The Critical Works of John Dennis, 1:202. 75. The Critical Works of John Dennis, 1:203. 76. The Critical Works of John Dennis, 1:83. 77. Blackmore, A Paraphrase on the Book of Job (London, 1700), c2v. 78. Blackmore, A Paraphrase on the Book of Job, d1r. 79. Blackmore, Lay-Monastery, 203. 80. Blackmore, A Paraphrase on the Book of Job, d1v. 81. Blackmore, Prince Arthur, 13. 82. The Works of Dionysius Longinus, 37. 83. Blackmore, A Paraphrase on the Book of Job, i1r–i1v. “Despicable Spot” describes earth in Blackmore, “An Essay upon the Immortality of the Soul,” in Essays upon Several Subjects (Dublin), 4. 84. Blackmore’s ekphrastic poems are concerned with representing Raphael’s cartoons (initially drafts for tapestries ordered by Pope Leo). These cartoons were hung by William III in a special gallery at Hampton Court, where Blackmore saw them. For a poem that is especially interested in the lifelike effects of painting, see “The Story of St. Peter’s Draught of Fish,” in Blackmore, A Hymn to the Light of the World (London, 1703), 20–21. Blackmore attributes such effects, it seems rather literally, to divine influence (22). 85. Blackmore, The Nature of Man, 56–58. 86. On Blackmore’s depiction of protean matter, see my discussion in the first section of this chapter. 87. Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, vol. 3 (London, 1796), 149. 88. James Force’s attempt to associate Pope’s poem with Newtonian voluntarism is intriguing but finally unpersuasive: “Holy Grail, (Almost) Wholly Newton: Revisiting the Newtonian Elements in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man,” Enlightenment and Dissent 25 (2009), 106–134. Force relies on F. E. L. Priestley, “Pope and the Great Chain of Being,” one of the first critiques of the affinity between An Essay on Man and the chain of being: Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age, ed. Millar McLure and F. W. Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), 213–228. Fred Parker has made an excellent case for the poem’s debts to the skeptical tradition: Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 86–137. Tom Jones’s new edition of An Essay on Man richly situates the poem in contemporary philosophical and theological debate: Pope, An Essay on Man, ed. Tom Jones (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). Courtney Weiss Smith argues for the Essay’s debts to empiricism and against its allegiance to rationalism in Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth- Century England (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 167–169.

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89. Pope’s dismissal of bloodlines and his idealizing portrait of human-animal relations can be found in An Essay on Man, 4:193–216, 3:147–168. Subsequent references to books and lines appear in the main text. I cite Pope’s poetry from The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Routledge, 1989). 90. Pope criticizes the idea of an interventionist God when he rejects the possibility of God suspending natural laws (An Essay on Man, 4:123–130). 91. On the totalizing tendencies of More’s ontology, see my discussion in Chapter 2. 92. For examples of zeugma, chiasmus, and anaphora in Pope’s Rape of the Lock, see 2:107, 2:11, 4:1–10, respectively. 93. Pope, Rape of the Lock, 2:107. 94. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, lines 69 and 719–722. 95. Pope dismisses the question of why things are the way they are in An Essay on Man, 1:35–42. At 4:131–134, he mocks our wish for a better world. The invitation to submit to the given can be found at 1:164 and 1:285. 96. For stabs against institutional religion and priestcraft, see the following lines: “Say, where full instinct is th’unerring guide, / What Pope or Council can they need beside?” (3:83–84) and “In the same temple, the resounding wood, / All vocal beings hymn’d their equal God: / The shrine with gore unstain’d, with gold undrest, / Unbrib’d, unbloody, stood the blameless priest” (3:155–158). 97. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, lines 544–549. 98. I have been broadly glossing, in these last few sentences, the beautiful image of the pebble thrown into water that Pope presents at the end of An Essay on Man, 4:364–372. 99. Noggle, The Skeptical Sublime, 96–128. 100. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, lines 147–148. 101. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, line 179. 102. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, lines 171–174 (deformity) and 245–252, 285–288 (whole over part). 103. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, line 249. 104. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, lines 677–678. 105. Noggle, The Skeptical Sublime, 29. 106. Noggle, The Skeptical Sublime, 26.

Chapter 4. embarr assed invention 1. For Locke’s emphasis that the qualities and properties of things depend more on their surroundings than on what they contain, see An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 586–587. 2. Locke, Essay, 554. 3. Locke, Essay, 444. 4. See Chapters 1 and 2 for a discussion of the status of counterfactuals in voluntarism.

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5. For a sense of the eclectic nature of Locke’s faith and its continuous development, see John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 327–451. 6. For Shaftesbury’s critique of voluntarism, see Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 262–268, 294–295. 7. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, to Michael Ainsworth, June 3, 1709, cited in Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth- Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 65. 8. J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 150. Schneewind’s study offers a nuanced discussion of Locke’s voluntarist philosophy: 141–159. Compare also the work of John Marshall, who emphasizes how far Locke’s philosophy is from assertions of man’s good nature or natural benevolence: John Locke, 346. 9. Locke, Essay, 69. 10. Schneewind mentions Thomas Burnet: The Invention of Autonomy, 149–150. I can add Henry Lee, Anti- Scepticism (London, 1702). 11. For the characterization of Stillingfleet as the leading theologian and apologist of the Church of England, see Barry Till, “Stillingfleet, Edward (1635–1699),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., edited by Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article26526 (accessed June 18, 2013). John Yolton shows that a “storm of criticism” surrounds Locke’s Essay in the 1690s: John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 8. 12. On Peter Browne’s criticism of Locke, see Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas, 122–124. In a letter to his friend William Molyneux dated February 22, 1697, Locke notes that “Dr. Sherlock . . . has been pleased to declare against my doctrine of innate ideas, from the pulpit in the Temple, and, as I have been told, charged it with little less than atheism” (The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. de Beer, 8 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–1989], 6:7). In his Second Remarks upon An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1697), Thomas Burnet criticizes Locke for his amoral sensualism (5) and believes that “Materialists will profit too much from [Locke’s] Notion or Concession that Matter may think” (13). 13. Sarah Hutton, “Edward Stillingfleet, Henry More, and the Decline of Moses Atticus: A Note on Seventeenth-Century Anglican Apologetics,” in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, 1640–1700, ed. Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 76. 14. Stephen Gaukroger has emphasized that the doctrines of the trinity and the incarnation were central to the definition of Christianity against Muslims and Jews in eleventh-century Europe and shaped early philosophical debate about species: The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), 59–63. I thank Ethan Knapp for referring me to Gaukroger’s work.

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15. William III’s injunction is quoted in Stephen Hampton, Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 130. 16. Quotations from Swift in this paragraph are from “A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit” (1704). They can be found in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, vol. 1, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), 171–172. 17. Toland’s prominent and explicit use of Locke can be seen, for example, in Christianity Not Mysterious, 2nd ed. (London, 1696), 82–83, where he borrows from “an excellent modern Philosopher” the distinction between real and nominal essence. For an account of Toland’s early relationship to Locke, see Robert E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 6–8. 18. Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious, 76. 19. Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious, 151–169. For Locke’s growing anticlericalism, see Marshall, John Locke, 330. 20. Stillingfleet, A Discourse in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity, in The Works of the Eminent and Most Learned Prelate, Dr. Edw. Stillingfleet (London 1709–1710), 3:511. 21. The Correspondence of John Locke, 6:134. 22. For Molyneux’s request regarding Blackmore and Locke’s response, see The Correspondence of John Locke, 6:134, 144. 23. For Locke’s relationship with Sydenham, see Roger Woolhouse, Locke: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 80–81. For Blackmore’s relationship with Sydenham, see Harry Solomon, Sir Richard Blackmore (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 22–23. 24. The Correspondence of John Locke, 5:767. 25. The Correspondence of John Locke, 6:8. 26. The Correspondence of John Locke, 6:122, 123. 27. The Correspondence of John Locke, 6:163. 28. Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 412. 29. Cranston, John Locke, 415. 30. For Yolton’s comment, see John Locke and the Way of Ideas, 10. For Woolhouse’s, see Locke: A Biography, 389–391. 31. John Locke, Mr. Locke’s Reply to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to His Second Letter (1699), reprinted in The Works of John Locke, 9 vols. (London, 1794), 3:249. Subsequent page references to this edition in the main text. 32. See the following pages for Locke’s characterizations of himself and Stillingfleet across his three responses: The Works of John Locke, 3:28, 48, 94–95, 125, 139, 147, 179–180, 257, 259, 300, 498. 33. Locke, Essay, 8, 10. 34. For an account of Stillingfleet’s argument about the theological usefulness of Platonism, see Hutton, “Edward Stillingfleet, Henry More, and the Decline of Moses Atticus,” 68–84. 35. Stillingfleet refers the reader to More’s discussion of a beautiful and ordered universe in Origines Sacrae (London, 1662), 464. Sarah Hutton points out that in Origines

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Sacrae, Stillingfleet begins to articulate some reservations regarding some of the Neoplatonic tendencies in More but notes that “Stillingfleet still belongs within the same Anglican platonizing tradition as More” (“Edward Stillingfleet, Henry More, and the Decline of Moses Atticus,” 76). 36. Henry More, An Antidote against Atheism (London, 1653), B2v. 37. More, An Antidote, 61–62. 38. More, An Antidote, 13–14. 39. More, An Antidote, 14–15. 40. Thomas Burnet is one of the more prominent early critics of Locke to censure the Essay for its sensualism: Burnet, Remarks upon an Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (London, 1697), 4–5. 41. Edward Stillingfleet, The Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to Mr. Locke’s Second Letter (London, 1698), reprinted in Stillingfleet, The Works, 3:563. 42. For Locke’s references to Stillingfleet’s Modena reference, see The Works of John Locke, 3:220, 222, 259, 355, 425. 43. Locke’s grievances over the means by which his Essay was drawn into the controversy can be found in The Works of John Locke, 3:193–230, 249–300. 44. Locke explicitly owns Stillingfleet’s charge of an excessive length that issues from his self-absorbed ponderings in this statement: “I have, I confess, been so unwary to write out of my own thoughts, which your lordship has, more than once, with some sort of reprimand taken notice of. I own it, your lordship is much in the right”: The Works of John Locke, 3:425. 45. Unlike Stillingfleet, Locke claims to respect the intellectual property of others: The Works of John Locke, 3:137. 46. Complaints about Stillingfleet’s use of plural pronouns can be found in The Works of John Locke, 3:43–44, 55, 74, 112, 121, 205, 222. 47. On Locke’s inability to establish whether he is answerable, see also the following statement: “I am ashamed to importune your lordship so often about the same matter; but I meet with so many places in your lordship’s (I had almost said new) way of writing that put me to a stand, not knowing whether I am meant or no, that I am at a loss whether I should clear myself from what possibly your lordship does not lay to my charge; and yet the reader, thinking it meant of me, should conclude that to be in my book which is not there, and which I utterly disown” (The Works of John Locke, 3:45). Compare also the following statement regarding Stillingfleet’s quotations of Toland: “But let the ten lines which your lordship has set down out of him be, if you please, supposed to be precisely my words, and that he quoted my book for them, I do not see how even this intitles him to any more of my book than he has quoted; or how any words of mine, in other parts of my book, can be ascribed to him, or argued against as his, or rather, as I know not whose, which was the thing I complained of ” (The Works of John Locke, 3:210). 48. Stillingfleet, The Works, 3:563. 49. Stillingfleet, The Works, 3:587. 50. On the lack of connection in Stillingfleet’s writing, see also Locke’s following comment: “But supposing every writer had not that exactness of method, which showed,

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by the natural and visible connexion of the parts of his discourse, that every thing was laid in its proper place; is it a sufficient answer, not to take any notice of it? The reason why I put this question, is, because if this be a rule in controversy, I humbly conceive, I might have passed over the greatest part of what your lordship has said to me, because the disposition it has under numerical figures, is so far from giving me a view of the orderly connexion of the parts of your discourse, that I have often been tempted to suspect the negligence of the printer” (The Works of John Locke, 3:271). 51. Murray Cohen associates Locke’s emphasis on the importance of particles with a major epistemological shift that wrests language from an isomorphic relationship to nature (expressed in the relationship between word and thing) and presents it instead as reflecting the habits and structures of the mind: Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England, 1640–1785 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 52. Locke, Essay, 471–472. 53. Locke, Essay, 473. 54. Locke, Essay, 473. 55. For Stillingfleet’s argument about the agreement and disagreement of ideas, see The Works, 3:564–565. Locke acknowledges that the agreement or disagreement of ideas is strongest when these ideas are clear and distinct in Essay, 525–526. 56. Stillingfleet, The Works, 3:565. 57. Compare a passage in which Locke contrasts his own unreserved style with the “reserve” assumed by writing that features “quotations and collections of other men’s opinions” (The Works of John Locke, 3:425). 58. I have focused here on a passage that supports a narrative arc. But I cannot claim that this narrative arc presents a turning point that Locke never goes back on in the third letter. He does go back, reviving the more submissive tones of his first reply as well as reactivating the resentment that he ends on here. It is part of the volatility of Locke’s engagement with Stillingfleet that conciliation and confrontation, submissiveness and rebelliousness never quite leave Locke’s repertoire. 59. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 3. 60. Locke, Essay, 472. 61. Marshall notes that “comprehension” gained “wide currency” as a term that refers to a new church settlement in 1668: John Locke, 57. For a brief history of two attempts to introduce bills of comprehension in 1667 and 1668, see Walter G. Simon, “Comprehension in the Age of Charles II,” Church History 31:4 (1962), 440–448. 62. Marshall, John Locke, 95. 63. Marshall, John Locke, 96–100. 64. Stillingfleet, The Mischief of Separation (London, 1680), 10. 65. Stillingfleet, The Mischief of Separation, 12–13. 66. Stillingfleet’s late advocacy of comprehension is noted in John Marshall, “John Locke and Latitudinarianism,” in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, 258.

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67. Marshall, John Locke, 63 (individual moral inquiry), 358 (no role for comprehension). 68. Locke wrote that “the truth of religion . . . may be unknown to the magistrate as well as to any other man” (The Works of John Locke, 5:174). 69. Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (London, 1689), A3v–A4r. 70. For Locke’s analogy between persons, churches, and nations, see The Works of John Locke, 5:18–20. On the political difference between comprehension and toleration, see Richard Ashcraft, “Latitudinarianism and Toleration: Historical Myth Versus Political History,” in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, 151–177. 71. Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 55. 72. Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 54. For a nuanced account of Locke’s position on the toleration of Catholics, see Marshall, John Locke, 686–694. 73. The Correspondence of John Locke, 3:1182, quoted in Marshall, John Locke, 370. 74. Locke, Essay, 539–542. 75. The classic account of the debate that ensued Locke’s suggestion is John Yolton’s Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth- Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 76. Stillingfleet, The Works, 3:534. 77. Stillingfleet articulates some of these consequences in The Works, 3:534–542. 78. Stillingfleet quotes Locke’s defense in The Works, 3:542. 79. For the medieval speculation that God could have sent a donkey instead of his son, see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 58. 80. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), xiii. 81. On Locke’s assertion that human beings are free to create words that do not correspond to anything existing, see my discussion in Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 119–125. 82. Locke, Essay, 470.

Chapter 5. the ConstruCtive swift 1. Samuel Parker, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (London, 1670), 22. 2. Jonathan Swift, The Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man (The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1951–1968], 2:5); Swift, The Advantages Proposed by Repealing the Sacramental Test (Prose Works, 12:244). 3. Swift, Sentiments of a Church- of-England Man (Prose Works, 2:11). 4. Swift, Examiner 31, March 8, 1710 (Prose Works, 3:102). 5. Swift, Examiner 31, March 8, 1710 (Prose Works, 3:103). 6. Swift, A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome (Prose Works, 1:228).

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7. Swift, “A Sermon upon the Martyrdom of K. Charles” (Prose Works, 9:224). 8. Swift, Examiner 30, March 1, 1710 (Prose Works, 3:97). On the excessive unity of factions, see Swift, A Letter to a Member of Parliament in Ireland (Prose Works, 2:129). 9. Swift, “A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit” (Prose Works, 1:174). 10. Swift, Examiner 31, March 8, 1710 (Prose Works, 3:102). 11. Swift, Sentiments of a Church- of-England Man (Prose Works, 2:11). 12. Swift associates “knot,” “body,” and “set” in The Conduct of the Allies (Prose Works, 6:45). He equates “sect” and “sort” in “On False Witness” (Prose Works, 9:227) and refers to “the several Tribes and Denominations of Free-Thinkers” in Letter to a Young Gentleman, lately Entered into Holy Orders (Prose Works, 9:78). In A Preface to the Right Rev. Dr. Burnet, Swift speaks of “the several Classes of Freethinkers and Dissenters” (Prose Works, 4:77). In A Tale of a Tub, Swift uses “Species,” “Sorts,” and “Races” interchangeably (Prose Works, 1:56–57). 13. The sales cata logue of Swift’s library lists Hobbes’s Leviathan as one of the works that bear his annotations. Swift also owned a copy of Pufendorf ’s De officio hominis, in the English translation (Harold Williams, Dean Swift’s Library [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932]). Swift’s familiarity with and use of Hobbes’s writings has long been recognized (for a recent example, see Jess Keiser, “Very Like a Whale: Metaphor and Materialism in Hobbes and Swift,” Modern Philology 113:2 [2015], 198–223). Most of the attention has been focused on Swift’s response to Hobbes’s materialism. Hobbes’s voluntarism has, as far as I can tell, only been seen as a critical context for understanding Swift’s view of the world by Patrick Reilly. In Jonathan Swift: The Brave Desponder (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), Reilly makes a persuasive argument that Swift’s view of order as arbitrary imposition is indebted to Hobbes (20–57). He does not address the constructivist aspect of Hobbes’s or Swift’s voluntarism. 14. Swift, “A Sermon on the Excellency of Christianity” (Prose Works, 9:241). 15. Swift, “On the Trinity” (Prose Works, 9:164). 16. Swift, “On the Trinity” (Prose Works, 9:166). 17. Swift, “Ode to Dr William Sancroft,” line 17. I quote from Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 61. 18. Swift, “Thoughts on Various Subjects” (Prose Works, 4:245). 19. Swift, “A Sermon on the Excellency of Christianity” (Prose Works, 9:244). 20. Swift, “On the Testimony of Conscience” (Prose Works, 9:154–155). 21. Swift, “On the Testimony of Conscience” (Prose Works, 9:157); Swift, “Thoughts on Various Subjects” (Prose Works, 4:243). 22. Swift, “Remarks upon a Book, Intitled, The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted” (Prose Works, 2:74). 23. For Swift’s debts to Montaigne, see Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1–91. For a broader account of Swift’s debt to skepticism that includes Montaigne, see

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Tim Parnell, “Swift, Sterne, and the Skeptical Tradition,” Studies in Eighteenth- Century Culture 23 (1994), 221–242. 24. Swift, An Enquiry into the Behaviour of the Queen’s Last Ministry (Prose Works, 8:139). 25. Daniel Eilon, Factions’ Fictions: Ideological Closure in Swift’s Satire (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991), 16, cited in Paul Neiman, “Things Indifferent: Adiaphora, Superstition, and Religious Ideology in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub,” Modern Philology 114:4 (2017), 820. 26. F. R. Leavis, “The Irony of Swift,” in Determinations (London: Chatto and Windus, 1934), 81, 107, cited in Seamus Deane, “Classic Swift,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift, ed. Christopher Fox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 244. 27. Deane, “Classic Swift,” 245. 28. Reilly, The Brave Desponder, 119. 29. Michael DePorte, “Swift, God, and Power,” in Walking Naboth’s Vineyard: New Studies of Swift, ed. Christopher Fox and Brenda Tooley (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 77. 30. Swift to John Gay, November 20, 1729, in Swift, Correspondence, ed. Harold Williams, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963–1965), 3:360. 31. DePorte, “Swift, God, and Power,” 77. 32. Swift, A Tale of a Tub (Prose Works, 1:108). 33. Reilly, The Brave Desponder, 54. 34. Reilly, The Brave Desponder, 119. 35. Criticizing the psychological school of Swift criticism (though not Reilly, whose psychologism is more restrained), Deane writes that “madness, illness, sexual disturbance, revulsion at the human body and its functions, and a whole fleet of other guesses or claims [have been] cited to explain what is remarkable about [Swift’s] work.” This has been going on, he adds, “for two and a half centuries” (Deane, “Classic Swift,” 243). 36. Warren Montag’s The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man (London: Verso, 1994) has sought to correct the assumption that Swift is not interested in philosophy. 37. Scholars who have emphasized constructive aspects of Swift’s satire include: Kathleen Williams, who notes that Swift uses his satiric “tools of destruction . . . for a positive and constructive purpose” (Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise [Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1958], 211); Ralph Cohen, who associates Swiftian decomposition with hope (“The Augustan Mode in English Poetry,” in Studies in the Eighteenth Century: Papers Presented at the David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar Canberra 1966, ed. R. F. Brissenden [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968], 171–192); Nicholas Hudson, who argues that Gulliver’s Travels advances an understanding of language as not reflecting but constituting reality (“Gulliver’s Travels and Locke’s Radical Nominalism,” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 1 [1994], 283–299); Fredric Bogel, who stresses satire’s constructive aspect (The Difference Satire Makes: Rhetoric and Reading from Jonson to Byron [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001]); and Michael

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Suarez, who notes that “constructive elements . . . are present even in the darkest Swiftian satires” (“Swift’s Satire and Parody,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift, ed. Christopher Fox [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 115). 38. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 3. 39. For an account of Swift’s and his contemporaries’ fondness for “A Description of a City Shower,” see Maurice Johnson, The Sin of Wit: Jonathan Swift as a Poet (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1950), 84–85. 40. For readings that make disintegration or at least disorder the dominant note of Swift’s poem, see Brendan O’Hehir, “Meaning of Swift’s ‘Description of a City Shower,’ ” ELH 27:3 (1960), 194–207; Roger Savage, “Swift’s Fallen City, ‘A Description of the Morning,’ ” in The World of Jonathan Swift, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), 171–194; Louise Barnett, Swift’s Poetic Worlds (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1981), 129–132; David Vieth, “Metaphors and Metamorphoses: Basic Techniques in the Middle Period of Swift’s Poetry, 1698–1719,” in Contemporary Studies of Swift’s Poetry, ed. J. I. Fischer and Donald C. Mell (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1981), 33–42. 41. Nora Crow Jaffe briefly suggests a more positive reading of the storm in The Poet Swift (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1977) when she writes that “the fury of the storm makes human fury trivial and breaks down human barriers” (81). 42. Swift, “A Description of a City Shower,” line 63. I quote from Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems. Subsequent quotations in the main text. 43. I agree with John Irwin Fischer, who has argued against O’Hehir’s gloomy deciphering of these lines through Virgil’s depiction of Dido’s fatal first meeting with Aeneas: On Swift’s Poetry (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1978), 105–106. 44. Swift actively advocated for an approximation of Whig and Tory values in Sentiments of a Church- of-England Man (1708). 45. My interpretation of the beau’s self-enclosure aligns with Bogel’s analysis of Swift’s tendency to critique “categoriality through images of geographic setting, of physical objects, and of the body” (The Difference Satire Makes, 224). 46. For a discussion of the relationship between Swift’s rendition of the trapped Greeks and Virgil’s and Dryden’s, see O’Hehir, “Meaning of Swift’s ‘Description of a City Shower,’ ” 197. 47. For a similar point regarding the leveling tendencies of Swift’s epic simile, see Todd Parker, “Swift’s ‘Description of a City Shower’: The Epistemological Force of Filth,” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 4 (1998), 285–304, especially p. 299. 48. I depart from Rogers’s edition, which follows the 1735 Faulkner edition and calls the stain “cloudy.” I follow, instead, the text of the first printing in Tatler 238 (October 17, 1710), which has “mingled.” 49. For the figurative uses of “nap,” see Oxford English Dictionary. 50. Pedro Fernández has pointed out the delight contained in these lines: “Consuming Flame: Commerce, Waste and the Writing of Expansion, 1661–1730” (PhD diss., Washington University, 2020), 150.

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51. David Womersley, “Swift’s Shapeshifting,” in Swift’s Travels: Eighteenth- Century British Satire and Its Legacy, ed. Nicholas Hudson and Aaron Santesso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 111–112. 52. Swift, “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,” lines 12, 5, and 6. I quote from Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems, ed. Rogers. Subsequent references in the main text. 53. Barnett, Swift’s Poetic Worlds, 175. 54. For moments when Swift creates distance to his subject, see the contrast between Corinna’s urban squalor and the language of pastoral innocence: lines 1–2 and 8–9. 55. Denis Donoghue has observed Swift’s stance on dreams: Jonathan Swift: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 197–199. 56. Swift, “On Brotherly Love” (Prose Works, 9:176–177). 57. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Prose Works, 11:191). 58. Claude Rawson has pointed out that Swift’s irony is “seldom docile to any simple (upside-down or other) scheme”: Gulliver and the Gentle Reader: Studies in Swift and Our Time (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 53. 59. Swift, A Project for the Advancement of Religion (Prose Works, 2:50). 60. Swift, A Project for the Advancement of Religion (Prose Works, 2:57). 61. Swift, “Thoughts on Various Subjects” (Prose Works, 4:251). 62. Swift, “A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit” (Prose Works, 1:175). 63. Swift, Examiner 29, February 22, 1710 (Prose Works, 3:91–92). 64. Swift, Examiner 29, February 22, 1710 (Prose Works, 3:92). 65. Swift himself experienced such divisions between internal and external states. In “Thoughts on Religion,” he writes: “I am not answerable to God for the doubts that arise in my own breast, since they are the consequences of that reason which he hath planted in me, if I take care to conceal these doubts from others, if I use my best endeavours to subdue them, and if they have no influence on the conduct of my life” (Prose Works, 9:262). 66. Swift, A Tale of a Tub (Prose Works, 1:40, 109). 67. Swift, A Tale of a Tub (Prose Works, 1:46). 68. On metaphor’s deceptive qualities, see Hobbes, Leviathan, 17, 21, 22, 25. Blanford Parker has argued that the literary critique of metaphor in the second half of the seventeenth century is part of a broader movement from a (Renaissance) poetics of analogy to an (Augustan) poetics of literalness: The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 56. 69. Donoghue, Jonathan Swift, 144. 70. Roger Lund, “Swift’s Sermons, Public Conscience, and the Privatization of Religion,” Prose Studies 18:3 (1995), 162. 71. For Swift’s ironic treatment of surface lovers, see Swift, A Tale of a Tub (Prose Works, 1:109–110). 72. I agree with Donoghue that Swift prefers surface over depth. See Donoghue, Jonathan Swift, 7–8, 80–81. Pat Rogers gestures in the same direction in “Swift and the

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Idea of Authority,” in The World of Jonathan Swift: Essays for the Tercentenary, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), 29–30. 73. Swift, A Tale of a Tub (Prose Works, 1:109). Swift criticizes the close examination of ancient authors and the searching analysis of religious mysteries in A Tale of a Tub (Prose Works, 1:58) and “On the Trinity” (Prose Works, 9:167), respectively. 74. Swift, Some Free Thoughts upon the Present State of Affairs (Prose Works, 8:80). 75. Swift, An Enquiry into the Behaviour of the Queen’s Last Ministry (Prose Works, 8:138, 139). 76. Swift, An Enquiry into the Behaviour of the Queen’s Last Ministry (Prose Works, 8:139); Swift, Some Free Thoughts upon the Present State of Affairs (Prose Works, 8:80). 77. Swift, An Enquiry into the Behaviour of the Queen’s Last Ministry (Prose Works, 8:138–139). 78. Swift to Archbishop King, July 12, 1711 (Correspondence, 1:238). 79. Swift, “Hints towards an Essay on Conversation” (Prose Works, 4:92). 80. Swift, Examiner 31, March 8, 1710 (Prose Works, 3:102). 81. Swift, A Tale of a Tub (Prose Works, 1:134–135). 82. Edward Said argues that Swift valued his writings according to the fullness with which they meet the occasion: “Swift’s Tory Anarchy,” Eighteenth- Century Studies 3:1 (1969), 51–53. 83. Swift, “Hints towards an Essay on Conversation” (Prose Works, 4:93). 84. Swift, “Thoughts on Various Subjects” (Prose Works, 4:244). Swift discusses here the same subject as in “Hints.” 85. Swift assumes the voice of Lady Acheson in “A Panegyrick on the Dean”: “When bent upon some smart lampoon, / You toss and turn your brain till noon; / Which, in its jumblings round the skull, / Dilates, and makes the vessel full: / While nothing comes but froth at first, / You think your giddy head will burst: / But, squeezing out four lines in rhyme, / Are largely paid for all your time” ( Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems, ed. Rogers, lines 189–196). 86. That true invention depends on attending to circumstance and occasion is also indicated, in ironic fashion, by Swift’s speaker in “A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit” (Prose Works, 1:174). 87. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Prose Works, 11:40). Subsequent page references appear in the main text. 88. Swift, “On Brotherly Love” (Prose Works, 9:177). 89. Swift, “On Brotherly Love” (Prose Works, 9:176). 90. Suarez, “Swift’s Satire and Parody,” 121–122. 91. Swift, A Tale of a Tub (Prose Works, 1:26). 92. Northrop Frye, “Va rieties of Literary Utopias,” Daedalus 94:2 (1965), 329. 93. The charge that Gulliver’s Travels undermines conventional religious values was often brought, beginning in the eighteenth century, against book 4’s misanthropy: see Louis Landa’s brief discussion in “Swift, the Mysteries, and Deism,” in Landa, Essays in Eighteenth- Century English Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980),

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90. For a more recent example of such a charge, see Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 147. 94. For an example of Swift getting a laugh out of the realization of arbitrariness, see the moment in Lilliput when he notes that the two main political parties derive their names from the differently sized heels on their shoes. 95. Swift, “A Sermon on the Excellency of Christianity” (Prose Works, 9:246). 96. Swift, “A Sermon on the Excellency of Christianity” (Prose Works, 9:244–245). 97. Swift, “A Sermon on the Excellency of Christianity” (Prose Works, 9:245). 98. For “retreat” and “ future hope,” see Swift, “A Sermon on the Excellency of Christianity” (Prose Works, 9:246, 245). 99. Swift suggests that the people retain sovereignty even after the creation of a commonwealth in A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome: “This unlimited Power placed fundamentally in the Body of a People, is what the best Legislators of all Ages have endeavoured . . . to deposite in such Hands as would preserve the People from Rapine, and Oppression within, as well as Violence from without. Most of them seem to agree in this; that it was a Trust too great to be committed to any one Man, or Assembly; and therefore they left the Right still in the whole Body; but the Administration, or executive Part, in the Hands of One, the Few, or the Many” (Swift, Prose Works, 1:195–196). 100. Swift, “On the Trinity” (Prose Works, 9:167, 164, 167).

Chapter 6. the providenCe of gathering and sCattering 1. For the competition between Swift and Defoe in the early eighteenth century, see Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 294–298. 2. The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1951–1968), 2:113, 3:14. 3. See Leopold Damrosch’s account of Defoe’s reaction to A Tale of a Tub: Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 144–145. 4. Book 4 of Jure Divino (London, 1706) vividly displays Defoe’s critique of custom. 5. For Defoe’s view of Charles I’s death, see Defoe’s preface to Jure Divino in Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, vols. 1–8, ed. W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003–2005). The passage I have in mind is in Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 2:42–45. For Swift’s, see “A Sermon on the Martyrdom of K. Charles I” (Prose Works, 9:219–231). 6. Swift, The Sentiments of a Church- of-England Man (Prose Works, 2:20–21). 7. Defoe, The True-Born Englishman (London, 1700), lines 812–813, in Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 1:107.

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8. Jure Divino, book 5, line 19 (Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 2:172). 9. Defoe, The Compleat English Gentleman (1890), in Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe, vols. 1–10, ed. W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006–2007), 10:94. 10. Jure Divino, book 2, line 192 (Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 2:108); Jure Divino, book 5, line 33 (Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 2:173). 11. Defoe, Jure Divino, book 2, lines 556–557 (Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 2:119). 12. Defoe, Jure Divino, book 2, lines 563–564 (Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 2:119). 13. Defoe, Jure Divino, book 4, line 173 (Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 2:152); Defoe, Jure Divino, book 4, line 185 (Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 2:152). 14. Defoe, Jure Divino, book 3, lines 243–244 (Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 2:134–135). 15. Pufendorf ties natural law to man’s depravity in The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature (London, 1691), a2v– a3r. Defoe cites Pufendorf in the footnotes he appended to Jure Divino (Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 2:94, 104, 260). He called him “ingenious” in The Interest of the Several Princes and States of Europe (London, 1698), 13. The most sustained argument for Pufendorf ’s importance to Defoe remains Maximillian Novak’s Defoe and the Nature of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963). 16. For an account of the shift in nonconformist confidence in providence in the late seventeenth century, see N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth- Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 19–24. 17. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, vols. 1–10, ed. W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008–2009), 3:195–196. 18. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 3:246. 19. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 3:196. 20. One example in Robinson Crusoe for the uncertainty of our interpretation of providence is Crusoe’s decision, late in the novel, to avoid traveling home by sea and to undertake an arduous land journey across half of Europe instead. Providence heeded, they avoid a disaster at sea, but Crusoe and his company encounter instead a pack of ravenous wolves that they barely manage to fight off. 21. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 3:167. 22. For an account of the project to recover Adam’s cognitive abilities, see Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 23. Jure Divino, book 7, footnote to line 109 (Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 2:219).

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24. Jure Divino, book 2, line 31 (Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 2:102); Jure Divino book 9, line 419 (Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 2:290). 25. Jure Divino, book 11, lines 237–238 (Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 2:325). 26. Jure Divino, book 11, lines 215–220 (Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 2:325). 27. Jure Divino, book 11, line 265 (Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 2:326); Jure Divino, book 11, line 540 (Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 2:339). 28. Jure Divino, book 6, line 325 (Defoe, Satire, Fantasy, and Writings on the Supernatural, 2:208). 29. In Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), Maximillian Novak argues for the importance of Defoe’s growing hostility to heterodox thought: 653–660. 30. Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe, 3:217. 31. On Christ’s incarnation as an early focus of debates over species and identity, see Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), 55–63. For an example of the use of species and identity to think through Christ’s unique status, see John Hacket, A Century of Sermons (London, 1675), 197. 32. Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe, 3:253. 33. Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe, 3:254. 34. Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe, 3:254. 35. In an interesting book that should find more readers, Katherine Clark has argued that Defoe’s trinitarianism is central to understanding his thinking about commerce, history, politics, and literature (Daniel Defoe: The Whole Frame of Nature, Time, and Providence [Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007]). But I cannot accept Clark’s assertion that Defoe found epistemological ambiguity intolerable and used such compound names as “Gentleman-Tradesman” to criticize amphibious phenomena (The Whole Frame, 38, 46). By contrast, Defoe’s defense of the trinity in New Family Instructor insists on the validity of multiple meanings and representations, and this stance chimes with Defoe’s “Gentleman-Tradesman,” which is a good rather than an evil for Defoe. 36. For a useful overview of the development of Defoe criticism from the 1950s to today, see Ashley Marshall, “Fabricating Defoes: From Anonymous Hack to Master of Fictions,” Eighteenth- Century Life 36 (2012), especially 1–13. 37. In J. Paul Hunter’s The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), “comprehensive coherence” is one of the major gifts of the Puritan myth (101). Central metaphors of Puritanism are described as “comprehensive metaphors” (113). Though Crusoe frequently fumbles in this endeavor, he nonetheless seeks “a comprehensive vision of life” (151). After his conversion “Crusoe’s more comprehensive awareness improves his sense of order” (173).

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38. Starr retreated, to an extent, from his emphasis on the “unified whole” of Defoe’s novels (Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965], viii). In Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), he argued that casuistry was a source of fragmentation in Defoe’s novels (ix). Hunter revised his Aristotelian approach to Defoe’s fictional order as well. See, for example, “Serious Reflections on Farther Adventures: Resistances to Closure in Eighteenth-Century English Novels,” in Augustan Subjects: Essays in Honor of Martin C. Battestin, ed. Albert J. Rivero (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 288–289. 39. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 1:55. 40. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 2:3, 174, 217. Compare also the comment Defoe makes at the end of Robinson Crusoe, when he boasts that Crusoe’s life has been “of a Variety which the world will seldom be able to show the like of ” (The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 1:283). 41. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 9:19, 6:24–25. 42. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 10:31. 43. Kate Loveman offers an excellent account of variety as the central commercial value of Defoe’s fiction in “ ‘A Life of Continu’d Variety’: Crime, Readers, and the Structure of Defoe’s Moll Flanders,” Eighteenth- Century Fiction 26 (2013), 1–32. She sees Defoe’s cultivation of variety primarily as a means to open up his fictions to as many different readers, reading habits, and uses as possible. For this reason, Loveman does not see variety as an order or principle that exists in some independence from the marketplace. I argue, by contrast, that Defoe’s fictional variety was more than the pragmatic result of marketing calculations. Material and spiritual considerations jointly underwrote Defoe’s quest for variety. 44. Robert James Merrett, Daniel Defoe: Contrarian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 69, 60. 45. For a discussion of Robinson Crusoe’s place in the tradition of utopian narrative, see Maximillian Novak, “Edenic Desires: Robinson Crusoe, the Robinsonade, and Utopias,” in Historical Boundaries, Narrative Forms: Essays on British Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century in Honor of Everett Zimmerman, ed. Lorna Clymer and Robert Mayer (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2007), 19–36. See also Jason Pearl’s discussion of Robinson Crusoe in Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 75–97. 46. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 81. 47. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 1:105. Subsequent page references to Robinson Crusoe in the main text. 48. See Defoe’s celebration of the tradesman in The Compleat English Tradesman, vol. 2 (1727), in Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe, 8:43–44. The quotation is on 43. 49. Defoe, The Compleat English Tradesman, vol. 1 (1725), in Religious and Didactic Writings of Daniel Defoe, 7:53.

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50. Michael Seidel has commented on Defoe’s use of metaphors and “doublets,” but primarily as a strategy of familiarization: “Robinson Crusoe: Va rieties of Fictional Experience,” in The Cambridge Companion to Robinson Crusoe, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 191–192. 51. It is worth noting that Crusoe deviates on other occasions from the imposition of English forms: Crusoe’s umbrella, for example, is made following procedures he has seen in Brazil. Similarly, his mortar for grinding barley into flour is made following the way “the Indians in Brasil make their Canoes” (The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 1:157, 147). 52. See the entry for pantaloons in Oxford English Dictionary. 53. Lincoln Faller has argued that Defoe entertains but dismisses the transformative potential of the mixed and the in-between: “Captain Misson’s Failed Utopia, Crusoe’s Failed Colony: Race and Identity in New, Not Quite Imaginable Worlds,” The Eighteenth Century 43 (2002), 1–17. I hope to show that Defoe makes the transformative potential of the mixed and the in-between central to Crusoe’s world-making. 54. Lynn Festa’s “Crusoe’s Island of Misfit Things” (The Eighteenth Century 52 [2011], 443–471) intriguingly splits its concerns between failure and promise. On the one hand, Festa sees the representation of things in Defoe’s novel as characterized by the always failing need “to create provisional unity out of the irremediably heterogeneous elements that make up the world of the novel” (446). Accordingly, she repeatedly emphasizes the failure of things in the novel to fit the category they belong to (455, 458, 465). On the other hand, Festa would like to reach a point of promise where the representational work of the novel lures us with “its multiple points of entry, its multitude of possible uses [and] embroils its user in an ongoing negotiation and activity” (466). But as long as Defoe is seen as aspiring to unity and homogeneity (however vainly), the positive vision of multiplicity Festa presents as the novel’s promise cannot be realized. 55. Quotations in preceding four sentences: Gen. 11:1–9. I cite from The Holy Bible (London, 1611). 56. Defoe, A General History of Discoveries and Improvements (1725–1726), in Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe, vols. 1–8, ed. W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001–2002), 4:31. 57. Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe, 4:31. 58. Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe, 4:68. 59. Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe, 4:45. 60. Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe, 4:45. 61. Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe, 4:44. 62. The argument Temple makes about Holland can be found in The Works of Sir William Temple (London, 1731), 1:59–64. Defoe himself refers to the Dutch success as relying on “Numbers of People . . . found in a narrow[ ] compass”: Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe, 4:207. See also his comments on the Dutch economy in Review III, Book 6, No. 2 (January 3, 1706). I rely on The Review, ed. Arthur Wellesley Secord (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938). 63. Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe, 4:72.

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64. Defoe, A General History of Trade, and Especially Consider’ d as Respects the British Commerce, as well at Home as to All Parts of the World (London, 1713), 24. This is the first pamphlet of four Defoe published monthly in 1713 between June and September. 65. Defoe, Review III, Book 6, No. 2 (January 3, 1706). 66. Defoe, Review III, Book 6, No. 2 (January 3, 1706). 67. Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe, 4:57. 68. Defoe, An Essay upon Projects, in Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, vols. 1–8, ed. W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000). I cite from Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, 8:41. 69. Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, 8:34. 70. Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe, 4:231. 71. Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, 8:35. 72. Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, 8:133, 36. 73. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 2:55. 74. Defoe discusses the problems of the projecting mania in Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, 8:36–37. His example for an outlandish project that has paid off handsomely is William Phips’s retrieval of 200,000 pounds sterling from a sunk Spanish ship: Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, 8:38–39. 75. For Defoe’s discussion of Babel in An Essay upon Projects, see Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, 8:40. 76. Defoe, Review III, Book 6, No. 2 (January 3, 1706). 77. Defoe, Review III, Book 6, No. 2 (January 3, 1706). 78. Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe, 4:223. 79. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 3:51. Subsequent page references to this text can be found in the main body. 80. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 120. 81. This kernel of truth in Defoe’s defiant assertion of historicity also eludes Catherine Gallagher, who sees it as contradictory: Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 339. 82. Elizabeth Mansfield, Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 7. 83. Defoe’s remarks in the Serious Reflections about the relationship between Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote focus on allegory and history, but they also profess that describing Robinson as quixotic is high praise (The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 3:51). 84. Cervantes mentions Zeuxis in Don Quixote, transl. John Rutherford (New York: Penguin, 2003), 12. His comments on the composite portrait of Sancho Panza are in Don Quixote, 17. 85. See the Zeuxian defense of romance Cervantes gives to the canon, who otherwise rejects the genre. The author composing in such a genre, the canon explains, “can portray the wiles of an Ulysses, the piety of an Aeneas, the courage of an Achilles, the

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misfortunes of a Hector, the treachery of a Sinon, the friendship of a Euryalus, the generosity of an Alexander, the resolve of a Caesar, the clemency and honesty of a Trajan, the fidelity of a Zopyrus, the wisdom of a Cato, and, in short, all the faculties that contribute to the perfection of an illustrious man, whether he unites them all in one hero or distributes them among several” (Don Quixote, 441). 86. Mansfield, Too Beautiful to Picture, 7. On Zeuxis’s importance in Don Quixote, see Frederick A. De Armas, Quixotic Frescoes: Cervantes and Italian Renaissance Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 177–188. 87. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 2:126. 88. The resistance to the containment of narrative energy by established patterns is also more directly thematic, of course: Crusoe’s resistance to the middle station is perhaps the most prominent example. Note also how the novel invokes biblical analogy only to dismiss it. After his first disastrous sea journey, Crusoe considers going back home, noting that he would have been happy and that his father would have been “an Emblem of our Blessed Saviour’s Parable [and would have] kill’d the fatted Calf for me” (The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 1:66). This generic mold is raised only to be dismissed. 89. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 1:107. 90. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 1:118. 91. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 1:166. 92. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 1:146. 93. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 1:136, 187, 214. 94. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 1:147, 157. 95. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 1:150–151. 96. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 2:17. 97. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 2:17. 98. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 2:17. 99. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 2:17. 100. For a discussion of Defoe’s interest in the sublime, see Gary Hentzi, “Sublime Moments and Social Authority in Robinson Crusoe and A Journal of the Plague Year,” Eighteenth- Century Studies 26 (1993), 419–434. 101. The Works of Dionysius Longinus, transl. Leonard Welsted (London, 1712), 35. 102. The Works of Dionysius Longinus, 35. 103. The Works of Dionysius Longinus, 37. 104. On the side of those who rejected particularity for the sublime, Lamb includes Alexander Pope, John Gay, Samuel Johnson, William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, and John Baillie. On the side of those who saw no contradiction between the particular and the sublime, he mentions William Blake, Thomas Blackwell, Edward Gibbon, Joseph Priestley, and Richard Paine Knight: Jonathan Lamb, “The Sublime,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4, ed. H. B. Nisbet, George Alexander Kennedy, and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 412–413. 105. The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 1:195. Subsequent page references in the main text.

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106. When mea sured by narrated time, these seventeen pages contain nine years, almost a third of Crusoe’s twenty-eight-year stay (on 175, he’s on the island fifteen years, on 189 he’s in his twenty-third year, and on 193, he has moved on another “fifteen or sixteen months”; page references to: The Novels of Daniel Defoe, vol. 1). 107. In explaining his changed circumstances, Crusoe points to “the long Continuance of my Troubles, and the Disappointments I had met in the Wreck . . . where I had been so near the obtaining what I so earnestly long’d for, viz. Some-body to speak to, and to learn some Knowledge from the Place where I was, and of the probable Means of my Deliverance” (The Novels of Daniel Defoe, 1:202). 108. In The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Geoffrey Sill has convincingly argued that Defoe’s fictions offer a natural history of the passions. I am not persuaded, however, that Defoe’s fictions are as committed to taming and moderating the passions, as Sill claims. 109. For arguments that see the early novel as depicting a world in which individual freedom is submerged in the causal chains that determine agents, see Sandra Macpherson, Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) and Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

ConClusion 1. Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 2.

index

Adorno, Theodor, 18, 211 Anderson, Misty, 217n18 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 246n93 Aristotle, 7, 73, 86, 110 Atheism, 4–5, 62, 150; arguments against, 5, 27–30, 48–56, 60–63, 73–82, 137, 150, 168–170, 176–177 Backscheider, Paula, 216n3, 246n1 Baker, Thomas, 39–40, 46 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 210, 216n3 Barnett, Louise, 145 Barrow, Isaac, 27, 32 Beiser, Frederick C., 227n97 Bender, John, 16, 20 Bentley, Richard, 12, 48–54, 56, 59–60, 62–66, 69, 70, 71, 106, 110, 168, 210 Blackmore, Richard: and creativity, 73, 85–89, 91–95; and energy, 70, 80–82, 86–89, 94–95; and imperfection, 82–91; and invention, 91–95, 105–106; and literary history, 70–73, 84–85, 106; relation to Alexander Pope, 70–71, 97–98, 101–102, 104–106; relation to John Dennis, 71–72, 89–91, 106; relation to Thomas Hobbes, 77–79; and the sublime, 71–72, 83–86, 89–91, 105–106; and transcendence, 82, 92–94, 96, 104–106; and voluntarism, 69–70, 72–73, 75–76, 78–82, 104–105 Blount, Charles, 5, 62, 97 Blumenberg, Hans, 26, 32, 73, 211 Bogel, Fredric, 31 Bolla, Peter de, 11 Boyle, Robert, 2, 24, 32, 44, 48, 75, 108, 160 Brown, Tom, 70 Browne, Peter, 110 Buchenau, Stephanie, 227n97 Bulman, William, 224n50 Burnet, Thomas, 6, 40, 110

Campbell, Mary Baine, 217n16 Carey, Daniel, 223n39 Carpenter, Nathanael, 221n1 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 218n24 Chamberlayne, Thomas, 214n8 Charleton, Walter, 2, 24, 32, 75 Clark, Katherine, 248n35 Clark, T. H., 221n1 Clarke, Samuel, 12, 28–29, 48, 49, 52, 54–59, 60, 62, 63–66, 70, 71, 96, 106, 132 Cohen, Murray, 239n51 Cohen, Ralph, 213n2, 242n37 Colie, Rosalie, 213n2 Connell, Philip, 217n19 Cook, Harold J., 221n2 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third Earl of Shaftesbury, 6, 32, 106, 109–110, 178 Counterfactuals, 3, 11, 59–60, 69, 76–77, 86; constructive, 26–27, 54–55, 57–59, 66–68, 106, 131–133, 168–169; critical, 49–52, 60–61, 102–103 Cowan, Brian, 216n3 Coward, William, 5, 97 Cragg, G. R., 215n1 Cranston, Maurice, 114 Creation: arbitrary, 1–3, 5–6, 23–26, 48–55, 76–77, 87–88, 168–169; comprehensible, 35–37, 43–44, 56–57, 60–63, 192; continuous, 49, 70, 75, 81; incomprehensible, 44–45, 79–80, 108–109, 136–137 Creativity, 8–9, 18–19, 33–34, 72–73, 85–89, 91–96, 138, 193–194 Cudworth, Ralph, 6, 32, 56, 58, 77, 211 Damrosch, Leopold, 246n3 Davis, Lennard, 214n16, 214n18 Deane, Seamus, 138

256

index

Decomposition, 31, 73–75, 83–86, 101–102, 119–121, 128–129; constructive, 1–3, 9–10, 31–32, 91–95, 140–147, 175–176, 180, 204 Defoe, Daniel: compositional mode, 175–178, 188–190, 195–200, 203–207; Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 201–203; A General History of Discoveries and Improvements, 190–195; and invention, 187–189, 193–194, 197–198, 200–204, 208; and providence, 173–176, 190–195, 199–200, 206–208; and realism, 177–178, 183–184, 197–198, 203–207; Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 195–200; relation to Jonathan Swift, 172–173, 175–176, 180; Robinson Crusoe, 181–190, 205–207; and the sublime, 178, 200–204; and variety, 175–181, 183–184, 189–194, 196–204; and voluntarism, 173–176, 208 Deformity, 8–10, 50–52, 82–91, 105–106, 145–147, 159, 187–188. See also Imperfection Dennis, John, 72, 89–91, 106 DePorte, Michael, 138 Descartes, René, 25 Descola, Philippe, 215n2 Deutsch, Helen, 214n16 Dick, Steven J., 225n70, 227n107 Donoghue, Denis, 151 Doody, Margaret, 213n2 Dryden, John, 70, 84 Dunn, John, 11 Dunton, John, 9, 39 Dupré, Louis, 219n38 Eilon, Daniel, 138 Ellenzweig, Sarah, 217n18, 224n50 Empiricism, 8, 15–19, 45–47, 84–85, 129, 131–133, 168–169, 177–178, 184, 197, 209–212; relation to voluntarism, 26, 29–30, 108–109, 210 Epicurus, 28, 70, 211 Epistemology, 15–20, 29, 40–47, 117–119, 124–125, 150–152 Essences, 1–2, 26, 33–39, 41–45, 52–54, 96–97, 110–113, 128–129, 136–137 Faller, Lincoln, 250n53 Felski, Rita, 23 Fernández, Pedro, 243n50 Festa, Lynn, 217n17, 250n54

Fields, Ophelia, 229n10 Fischer, John Irwin, 243n43 Force, James, 49, 96 Form, 81, 144–147, 178–181, 186–187; relation to matter, 1–2, 6–9, 85–86, 97, 111, 116–117, 145–147, 172–173 Fowler, Alistair, 3–4 Frye, Northrop, 210 Funkenstein, Amos, 26, 59, 66, 67 Gadamer, Hans- Georg, 22, 23 Gallagher, Catherine, 16, 17, 20 Gascoigne, John, 224n51 Gassendi, Pierre, 24, 32, 75 Gaukroger, Stephen, 110 Gay, John, 70, 138 Gerrard, Christine, 230n16 Gibbons, Grinling, 93–95 Gillespie, Michael Allen, 26, 63 Glanvill, Joseph, 12, 43, 45–47 Grafton, Anthony, 221n2 Griffin, Michael, 227n97 Hacket, John, 248n31 Hacking, Ian, 215n2 Hampton, Stephen, 237n15 Hardt, Michael, 65 Harrison, Peter, 47 Heidegger, Martin, 23 Henry, John, 218n27 Hentzi, Gary, 252n100 Hermeneutics, 22–23, 129, 181 Highmore, Nathaniel, 213n8 Hobbes, Thomas, 2, 3, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 41, 77, 79, 136, 137, 140, 151, 160, 171, 207 Holbraad, Martin, 218n22 Horkheimer, Max, 211 Hudson, Nicholas, 66 Hughes, John, 71 Hunter, J. Paul, 177–178 Hutcheson, Francis, 6 Hutton, Sarah, 236n13 Imperfection, 6, 49, 56–57, 82–91, 104–106, 137, 151–152, 178, 211. See also Deformity Ingrassia, Catherine, 216n3 Invention, 1–5, 9–12, 24–25, 30–32; in Alexander Pope, 105–106; and disability, 8–10, 19, 114–115, 121–122, 124–127, 152–153, 201–204; and gender, 6–7; in Immanuel Kant, 18–19; and intellectual

index history, 10–12; liberty of, 2, 24–25, 29, 52–55, 61–62, 95, 119–120, 127–128, 131–138, 149, 187–189, 193–194; and the novel, 15–20. See also Voluntarism: constructivist aspect of Israel, Jonathan, 48–49 Jacob, Margaret, 243n52 Jaffe, Nora Crow, 243n41 Jameson, Anna, 7–8 Jameson, Fredric, 22 Johnson, Maurice, 243n39 Jones, Tom, 96 Kant, Immanuel, 18–19, 20 Kareem, Sarah Tindal, 216n7 Keeble, N. H., 247n16 Keenleyside, Heather, 11 Keiser, Jess, 241n13 Keymer, Thomas, 216n3 Kinds: fabricated, 181–188; literary, 3–4, 111–112, 142–143; natural, 33–40, 51–53, 73–77, 160–162, 165–168, 183, 189–190; social, 41–45, 129–131, 134–136, 141–142, 145–147 Klein, Lawrence, 230n11 Knapp, Ethan, 236n14 Kohn, Eduardo, 215n2 Koyré, Alexandre, 211 Kramnick, Jonathan, 217n17 LaCapra, Dominick, 218n24 Lamb, Jonathan, 204 Landa, Louis, 223n36, 245n93 Langer, Ulrich, 73 Latour, Bruno, 22 Leavis, F. R., 138 Lee, Henry, 236n10 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 6, 12, 25, 32, 48, 56–59, 60, 62, 64, 77, 82, 89, 96, 103, 132, 169 Limborch, Philipp van, 131 Locke, John: and comprehensive style, 121–128; and counterfactuals, 67–68, 131–133; and invention, 111–112, 127–129, 131–133; and particles, 122–128; and print culture, 111–112, 122; relation to Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, 109–110; relation to Edward Stillingfleet, 110–111, 113–115, 129–130; relation to John Toland, 112–113; and social class, 113–114,

257

115–117, 119–124, 127–128; and toleration, 129–131; and voluntarism, 108–110, 127–128, 131–132 London, April, 216n3 Longinus, 8, 71–72, 89, 90, 105, 106, 203–204. See also Sublime Lovejoy, Arthur, 11 Loveman, Kate, 249n43 Lucretius, 74, 76, 77, 87, 88, 91 Lukács, Georg, 180–181 Lund, Roger, 151 Macpherson, Sandra, 217n17 Malet, Antoni, 219n41 Marshall, Ashley, 248n36 Marshall, John, 130 Matter, 1–2, 6–7, 32, 73–75, 116–117, 119–120, 131–133, 180–181 McKeon, Michael, 16, 17, 20, 128, 196, 197 McMahon, Darrin, 11 Mehta, Uday Singh, 218n24 Meillassoux, Quentin, 215n2 Merrett, Robert James, 180 Michelangelo, 92 Milton, John, 71–72, 113 Modernization: 15–22, 195, 209 Molesworth, Jesse, 217n16 Molyneux, William, 113–114 Montag, Warren, 242n36 Montaigne, Michel de, 41–43, 52, 137 More, Henry, 6, 45, 60–62, 69, 110, 117–118 Morris, David B., 72 Moyn, Samuel, 215n23 Negri, Antonio, 65 Neiman, Paul, 242n25 Neoplatonism, 43–45, 56, 60–62, 110–111, 117–118, 132; politics of, 64–65; style of, 128 Newton, Isaac, 27, 32, 48, 56, 63, 70 Nicolson, Marjorie, 62 Noggle, James, 105, 106 Nominalism, 16–17; relation to voluntarism, 26, 30 Novak, Maximillian, 247n15, 248n29 Nussbaum, Felicity, 214n16 Oakley, Francis, 27, 70 Oberman, Heiko A., 219n42 O’Hehir, Brendan, 243n40

258

index

Ontology, 10–11, 16, 18, 22–23, 65, 96, 99–101, 180–181, 209–210; voluntarist, 4–6, 29, 89–90, 139–140, 168–169 Order, 1–6, 32, 96, 171; externally imposed, 23–26, 48–56, 62–63, 76–82, 102, 119–120, 136–138, 168–169, 173, 184–185, 189; inherent, 6, 25, 33–37, 43–44, 60–62, 101, 109–110, 117–118, 192; transfiguration of, 93–96, 149–150, 153–158, 181–190 Osler, Margaret, 221n58 Ovid, 74, 91 Pagden, Anthony, 221n2 Park, Julie, 217n17 Parker, Blanford, 31, 84 Parker, Fred, 96 Parker, Samuel, 43–45, 134 Parker, Todd, 243n47 Parnell, Tim, 241n23 Pearl, Jason, 217n16 Pedersen, Morten Axel, 218n22 Pickering, Andrew, 215n2 Pocock, J.G.A, 213n5 Pope, Alexander: and anti-essentialism, 96–99; and counterfactuals, 102–103; and Deist tendencies, 100, 103–104; and figures of speech, 100–101; and invention, 105–106; relation to Richard Blackmore 70–71, 101–102, 104–105 Popkin, Richard, 221n58, 223n37 Popple, William, 130 Preston, Charles, 34–35 Priestley, F. E. L., 234n88 Pufendorf, Samuel, 2, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 43, 136, 173 Rawson, Claude, 241n23, 244n58 Ray, John, 34–35, 38–39, 40, 48, 50, 60, 136 Reilly, Patrick, 138, 139 Rivers, Isabel, 215n1 Rogers, Pat, 244n72 Rosenberg, Albert, 230n19 Rounce, Adam, 229n8 Said, Edward, 138 Sappho, 8, 90, 203–204 Savage, Roger, 243n40 Schneewind, J. B., 55, 109 Secularization, 8–9, 15–18, 30, 48, 85, 209–212 Seidel, Michael, 250n50

Sepkoski, David, 27, 66 Shadwell, Thomas, 214n9 Shakespeare, William, 7 Shapin, Steven, 213n5 Sheehan, Jonathan, 213n7 Sherlock, William, 110 Sill, Geoffrey, 253n108 Simon, Walter G., 239n61 Skepticism, 3, 24, 41–47, 137, 149–150 Skinner, Quentin, 11 Slaughter, M. M., 38 Sloan, Phillip, 38 Smith, Courtney Weiss, 96 Snead, Jennifer, 213n7 Solomon, Harry M., 230n22 Spary, E. C., 221n2 Spinoza, Baruch, 48, 54, 55, 56, 62, 65, 66, 73, 169 Starr, George, 177–178 Stillingfleet, Edward, 6, 9, 13, 110–133 Suarez, Michael, 156 Sublime, 71–72, 83–86, 89–91, 105–106, 123, 126, 178, 201–204. See also Longinus Sullivan, Robert E., 237n17 Swift, Jonathan: and authoritarianism, 138–140; “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,” 145–147; and compositional modes, 140–141, 144, 147, 156–158; “A Description of a City Shower,” 141–145; and disgust, 159–163; and factionalism, 134–136; Gulliver’s Travels, 153–168; “Hints towards an Essay on Conversation,” 152–153; and invention, 138–141, 152–158; and personation, 148–150, 166–168; A Project for the Advancement of Religion, 148–150; and surfaces, 148–149, 150–153; and voluntarism, 136–140, 168–171 Sydenham, Thomas, 71, 113 Taylor, Charles, 20 Temple, William, 191 Thompson, Helen, 217n10 Thomson, Ann, 213n5 Thomson, Rosemarie Garland, 214n16 Till, Barry, 236n11 Tindal, Matthew, 137 Toland, John, 5, 62, 97, 103–104, 112, 122, 123, 124–126, 169 Tresch, John, 11 Trinity, 5, 41, 63–64, 110–113, 121, 136, 171, 176–177

index Tully, James, 24 Turner, David M., 9 Tyson, Edward, 35–38, 68, 78, 136 Utopia, 41, 46–47, 99, 106, 150, 157, 166–167, 171 Variety, infinite: aesthetic of, 4, 9, 27–31, 93–96, 177–181, 199–200; gender of, 7–8; irreducible, 6–8, 24–25, 37–40, 42–43, 45–47, 57, 77–80, 94–95, 128–129, 134–135, 168–170, 176–177, 183–184; reducible, 5–6, 33–37, 57, 60–62 Vieth, David, 243n40 Virgil, 143 Voluntarism, 2–4, 23–30, 51–52, 54–56; and aesthetics, 8, 30–32, 83–86, 94–96, 105; and apologetic writing, 28, 48–56, 63–64, 168–170; constructivist aspect of, 26–27, 66–67, 139–141; covenantal tradition of, 4, 27–28, 49, 52, 55, 62–63, 70, 80–82,

259 139–140; and Epicureanism, 32, 55–56, 58, 75–77; and invention, 19, 25–26, 128–129, 131–133, 157–158, 208; and morality, 24–25, 77–82, 109–110, 136–137, 173; and new science, 5, 7, 24; politics of, 64–66; utopian aspect of, 26, 56–59

Wagner, Roy, 218n22 Walpole, Horace, 95 Watt, Ian, 16, 17, 20, 210 Weinbrot, Howard, 217n19 Welsted, Leonard, 72 Whiston, William, 40, 49, 63, 64, 65, 70 Williams, Abigail, 229n10 Williams, Harold, 241n13 Williams, Kathleen, 242n37 Womersley, David, 70, 145 Woolhouse, Roger, 114 Worden, Blair, 215n1 Yolton, John, 114

aCknowl edgments

I would like to thank Gary Wihl, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, for granting me an early leave that allowed me to draft Chapters 2 and 4 before I took on the duties of department chair. The following friends and colleagues generously read and responded to my work, making this a much better book. I am deeply grateful to: Scott Black, Joe Conway, David Fairer, Lynn Festa, Colin Jager, Ethan Knapp, Jonathan Koch, Jonathan Kramnick, Joe Loewenstein, Michael McKeon, Kate Parker, Samantha Pergadia, John Richetti, Courtney Weiss Smith, Abram Van Engen, and Abigail Zitin. I would also like to thank the members of the Department of English at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the members of the Mellon Vertical Seminar on the History of Ideas at Washington University, and the members of the Eighteenth-Century Interdisciplinary Salon, who helped me with work in progress I shared. Writing this book has been challenging and humbling. The debt I owe to the colleagues who took time to read and comment on the entire manuscript is daunting to think about. Helen Deutsch and Sean Silver have helped me not only to revise but to reenvision this book. I am deeply grateful for their dedication to the process of peer review. I owe thanks as well to Jerry Singerman, my editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press, who not only selected these wonderful (and initially anonymous) readers but worked with me through the confusing early months of COVID-19. An earlier version of Chapter 6 was published in ELH. I would like to thank the editors for permission to include it here.