The Religious Innatism Debate in Early Modern Britain: Intellectual Change Beyond Locke [1st ed. 2021] 303084322X, 9783030843229

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The Religious Innatism Debate in Early Modern Britain Intellectual Change Beyond Locke R. J. W. Mills

The Religious Innatism Debate in Early Modern Britain “A superb study of ideas about the psychological grounds of religious belief and its atheistic shadow in early modern Britain. Drawing on an astonishing array of texts, Mills navigates the territory with insight and subtlety, and shows beyond doubt that fierce debates about the particularities of humanity’s innate religious knowledge were a crucial feature of English and Scottish intellectual life in this period.” —Dr. Angus Gowland, Reader in Intellectual History, University College London. [email protected] “With this impressively erudite and lucid book, Mills recovers a vitally important tradition in European thought that has hitherto been neglected. By debunking the shibboleth that the doctrine of innate religious ideas was consigned to oblivion by Locke, he places Enlightenment intellectual culture in a whole new light.” —Dr. Niall O’Flaherty, Senior Lecturer in the History of European Political Thought, King’s College London. niall.o’[email protected] “Why do humans believe in God? Are religious beliefs natural to humanity and held in all societies? It used to be argued that John Locke’s philosophy radically changed how intellectuals answered these questions. In this learned and lucid book, however, R J W Mills shows that Locke’s contribution has been misunderstood. The concept of innate religious ideas fell from fashion, but writers after Locke continued to argue that humans were predisposed to religion and that there was universal consent to the existence of God. Drawing on a huge range of contemporary texts, Mills guides us through a lively debate – in which Locke was one participant among many.” —Dr. Alasdair Raffe, Senior Lecturer in History, University of Edinburgh. [email protected]

R. J. W. Mills

The Religious Innatism Debate in Early Modern Britain Intellectual Change Beyond Locke

R. J. W. Mills London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-84322-9 ISBN 978-3-030-84323-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84323-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In memoriam Christine Wallwork and John Mills

Acknowledgements

This essay has its origins in two chapters of my doctoral thesis. Having lain dormant for several years, its revival was aided by the insightful, incisive commentary of Mark Goldie, Alasdair Raffe, Sarah Hutton, and Kerenza Davis. I am indebted to Diego Lucci, Angus Gowland, and Niall O’Flaherty for helping to improve the piece further, and to Giovanni Gellera and Stewart Duncan for their scholarly generosity in sharing unpublished papers. I am grateful to my doctoral supervisor Richard Serjeantson for his guidance and exemplary character as an enthusiastic yet judicious scholar, and for considerably improving a late draft. I am much obliged to Odile Panetta for help with several Latin translations. The errors of translation, fact, and interpretation that remain, despite my colleagues’ heroic efforts, are my responsibility alone.

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Contents

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Scene-Setting, Historiography, and Argument

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Religious Innatism as a Mid-Seventeenth-Century Commonplace

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Anti-Innatism c.1650–c.1690

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Locke Against Innatism

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The Innatism Debate c.1690–c.1710

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Declining Discussion of Religious Innatism c.1710–c.1750

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Conclusion

Index

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CHAPTER 1

Scene-Setting, Historiography, and Argument

Abstract The claim that humanity’s basic religious beliefs stemmed from innate ideas or innate dispositions to form those ideas was a commonplace belief in most strands of Christianity in seventeenth-century England and Scotland. It is an equally commonplace view of commentary on the period that religious innatism was abandoned by the early eighteenth century, and that this abandonment was the result of the forceful arguments of John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689). The introduction sets up the historiographical and conceptual parameters for the fresh look the author takes in the purported decline and fall of religious innatism between c.1650 and c.1740. The Locke-centred approach to the topic is challenged, and the multicausal, multivocal character of early modern Britain’s debate over religious innatism is emphasised. Keywords Innate ideas · Innate prolepses · John Locke · Cartesianism · Platonism · Human nature

The opening pages of the popular catechism the Whole Duty of Man (1658) taught many young Britons about man’s nature and relationship to God. Going through more than eighty editions in the seven decades

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. J. W. Mills, The Religious Innatism Debate in Early Modern Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84323-6_1

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following publication, the book was arguably the most influential religious text—aside from Scripture itself—of the seventeenth century.1 Its opening pages declared that the soul of man had been impressed with the knowledge of natural law, including both the existence of and the need to worship God, and emphasised that this knowledge was accessible by the “light of nature” and the dictates of “natural conscience.” The Whole Duty of Man supported this claim with two commonplace appeals. The first was to the consensus gentium: the argument that if all peoples believed something to be true, such as that God exists, that meant that it was true. The second was to Romans 2:14–15: “for when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shows the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another.”2 The sheer prominence of the work indicates that belief in the natural knowledge of God was common. From around the same time, however, a debate developed within English and Scottish intellectual and religious culture about the origins of humanity’s universally held religious notions. As summarised by Eustace Budgell in the Spectator in May 1712, the debate revolved around the merits of three potentially rivalrous theories: that “the idea of a God is innate”; that God’s existence was a “truth so very obvious that it is discovered by the first exertion of reason”; or that the idea of God was delivered “through all ages by a tradition from the first man.”3 The possible origin of humanity’s basic religious beliefs in innate ideas lodged in the soul remained a contentious issue between the 1650s and the 1730s. In the entry on “Innate Ideas” in his popular Lexicum technicum (expanded edition, 1710), the Boyle Lecturer John Harris noted that “one can hardly oppose them without censure.”4 Archibald Campbell complained that within Scotland, following the publication of his 1 Obviously, the Whole Duty of Man was not theologically acceptable to all readers. See Raffe (2010, pp. 582–583) for the hostile attitudes of Scottish Presbyterians. 2 [Allestree] (1658, p. 2). See also Hammond (1646, 1–5), which went through fourteen editions. Green (2000, pp. 594, 626). 3 [Budgell] (1712). Budgell did not claim a victor amongst the three theories but held that they all supported the claim that all humanity believed in the existence of God. 4 Harris (1710), Entry on “Innate Ideas.” Volume II was actually an expansion of the first edition published in 1704.

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inauguration lecture as Professor of Divinity and Ecclesiastical History at the University of St. Andrews in 1733, “the clamour is very loud upon my representing mankind void of all innate ideas.”5 Precisely the opposite complaint could also be heard. The Scots-Irish philosopher Francis Hutcheson believed that Lord Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) had been maltreated by those who have a “horror at innate ideas.”6 To some cultural observers, the battle had one clear outcome: by the 1730s, Voltaire and David Hume could both claim that support for innate ideas had disappeared, at least amongst the learned.7 Yet the precise character and extent of the abandonment of religious innatism is not clear. This story usually revolves around the influence exerted by John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689).8 But it is not hard to find evidence suggesting Locke’s influence was not all-powerful. The London Journal in 1732 confidently asserted that “if we have no innate ideas, we have, with Mr Locke’s leave, natural ideas, or ideas of right and wrong, which naturally grow up with us: in this sense we are all taught of God; and these ideas, all men of all countries, and of all ages, agree in.”9 That the London Journal would very much not have had Locke’s leave on their claim, epitomises so much of the confused and potentially confusing character of the debate surveyed below. Similarly, in his Enquiry into the Morals of the Ancients (1735), the Anglican clergyman George England politely disagreed with “so great a master” as Locke on the existence of innate religious ideas. He opined that Locke’s anti-innatist arguments “are not universally agreed to” on the issue and, pace Locke, the near universal manifestation of religious belief still needed to be explained. England posited three possible sources for the origin of religion: “delivered by tradition to most nations;” the result of “immediate revelation of the deity;” or the outcome of “natural observation … and reflection.” In terms of the latter theory, England was ambivalent about the denial of innate religious ideas, noting the Lockean argument of the origin of religion from “natural observation … and reflection” essentially 5 Campbell (1739, p. 184). On Campbell and religious innatism see Mills (2015). 6 Hutcheson (1725, p. vii). 7 Voltaire (1733, p. 100); Hume (1739–1740, i.iii.14.6). 8 Locke’s Essay was published in December 1689, but the titlepage reads 1690. 9 Anon (1732).

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“approaches to innate ideas.”10 The judgements of The Spectator, London Journal and George England all hint at the weakness of that key shibboleth of British Enlightenment studies: that Locke disposed once and for all the doctrine of religious innatism. What follows is a fresh look at the doctrine of religious innatism’s purported decline and fall from a central position in natural theology and apologetics to a second-rate, infrequently used argument. While the significance of Locke’s Essay’s is clear, an untempered sense of its importance can lead to blanket statements about English and Scottish intellectual and religious culture pre- and post-publication. I want to explore one such “before and after Locke” claim: that post-1690 the doctrine of religious innatism, and especially innate religious ideas, was more or less abandoned within English and Scottish religious writing. But while Locke’s Essay played a major role, we should not ignore the intense and multivocal character of the debate over innate religious knowledge from c.1650 to c.1740. As we shall see, other philosophical texts and cultural and religious developments can lay claim to comparable influence, not least because the status of religious innatism was a topic that appeared across a variety of genres and debates. There are other reasons to be cautious about overstating the role of Locke. The argument from innate religious ideas declined in prominence in natural theology from the late seventeenth century, but several causes can be identified that explain this and not all of them are to do with Locke directly. Moreover, if Locke’s Essay was central to the decline of religious innatism, this cannot explain the continued use of the argument from the consensus gentium, the explosion of which was central to Locke’s critique. Similarly, we find continued use of religious innatism in its cognitive dispositional, rather than innate ideas form, not least because the former married up quite smoothly with Locke’s own account of the origin of religious ideas. More strikingly, a new form of religious innatism quickly emerged out of the ashes of the doctrine of innate religious ideas, associated with Lord Shaftesbury’s and Francis Hutcheson’s internal sense theories. These conclusions stem from the systematic reading of thousands of usages of concepts such as “innate,” “connate,” “prolepsis,” “anticipations,” and many others relating to both religious innatism and the argument from universal consent between 1620 and 1740. In examining

10 England (1735, p. 46).

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usages of such language—sometimes deployed in highly specialised treatises, but equally often deployed in works intended for wider audiences—I am attempting to recover common ways of thinking within English and Scottish learned culture.11 The investigative power of easily searchable OCR and full text databases offers opportunities to scholars interested in intellectual change that far exceed, at least in terms of time efficiency if not of analytical reach, the investigative powers of earlier generations of scholars. The inevitable tendency of such methods is to shift the focus from canonical authors to intellectual milieus. The shift from quality to quantity, however, need not borrow from the obfuscating jargon of quantitative social science to give it the allure of credibility.12 The story of the rise and decline of religious innatism in early modern English and Scottish intellectual culture has thus far been told only in a partial fashion. Aside from the fixation upon Locke, examinations of seventeenth-century English theories of innate religious ideas or principles have often focused on the works of those sometimes named “Cambridge Platonists” and “Latitudinarians,” and on the reception of Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) in England and Scotland.13 This stems from the understandable endeavour to identify plausible targets for the anti-innatist critique found in Book I of Locke’s Essay.14 It often results from sustained interest in the argument that Restoration-era “latitude-men” were leading players in the development of a postsectarian, rational Christianity in which the propositions and duties of true religion were easily intelligible to a faculty of reason imbued with natural aids.15 Thus Edward Fowler’s defence of “certain moderate divines of the Church of England” (whom historians have subsequently termed the 11 In this attempt, I have been inspired by the works of Keith Thomas. See especially Thomas (1983) and Thomas (2018). 12 For some examples see Sangiacomo (2019) and Sangiacomo and Beers (2020). 13 Samet (2019). 14 The following list is just an indicative selection: Armstrong (1969); Greenlee (1972); Barnes (1972); Rogers (1979); Kim (2003); Carey (2004); and Rickless (2007). 15 Rivers (1991, pp. 59–66 and pp. 25–88 more generally); Harrison (1990, pp. 27– 60); Spellman (1993, pp. 81–84); and Hutton (2015, pp. 136–156). The utility of the category of “latitudinarianism” has been challenged by Spurr (1988) and Levitin (2015, pp. 14–16, 126–138). I acknowledge this argument and use the categorisations here as terms of convenience to indicate a known group of theologians, bound together more so by family and professional ties and some philosophical overlap, rather than by a distinct set of uniquely shared doctrines.

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Latitudinarians) included the argument that there was nothing in scripture that went against the “innate and natural notions of our minds” and or which “offered violence” to our understanding.16 As we shall see, focus on “Cambridge Platonism,” Cartesianism and Locke’s Essay does not sufficiently cover the emergence, status and decline of religious innatism. Prior to the mid-seventeenth century, the principal locus of religious innatism was discussion of the inherent contents of conscience.17 By the mid-seventeenth century a new deployment of religious innatism had taken over from casuistry, to be found in the overlapping genres of natural theology and anti-atheist apologetics. The works of the “Cambridge Platonists” and “Latitudinarians” form some of the most prominent seventeenth-century examples of such writings, but they should not be taken as containing the sum of seventeenth-century English religious innatism. Indeed, the narrow attribution of religious innatism to these two groups leads to an underestimation of the significance of the perceived atheist threat against Christianity to English and Scottish discussions of the epistemology of religious belief.18 Similarly, approaches that focus solely on the arguments of Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke (or Malebranche, Leibniz, and Berkeley, for that matter) are liable to misattribute changes in the commonplace attitudes of the educated elite to philosophical debate itself.19 A full appreciation of the changing status of religious innatism has to examine how and why it was deployed and criticised across English and Scottish intellectual culture, rather than being limited to a focus on the peaks of the great minds of early modern philosophy. In this, I am partially reiterating, but also modifying and expanding one of the central theses of John Yolton’s John Locke and the Way of Ideas (1956). Yolton’s study remains the classic treatment of religious innatism in wider seventeenth-century English intellectual culture.20 Critical of the tendency of early twentieth-century scholarship to reduce the intention 16 Fowler (1670, p. 94). 17 See especially Greene (1991a); Greene (1991b) and Greene (1997). 18 And to its possible ignoring as an issue, e.g. Clarke (2011). 19 For a characteristic summary of the latter approach see Schmaltz (2006). I appreciate that the inevitable trade-off here is that studies like mine fail to grapple with the complexity of elite philosophical argument. 20 Yolton (1956, pp. 26–48, before Locke’s Essay and pp. 48–71 after Locke’s Essay). See also Carey (2006) and Marshall (1994, pp. 30–32).

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behind Locke’s anti-innatism to disproving the arguments of a few specific targets, Yolton stressed “just how prevalent [religious innatism] was” amongst Locke’s “contemporaries and immediate predecessors.”21 Yolton also charted a shift over the course of the seventeenth century from a “naïve” form of moral and religious innatism to a “dispositional” form by the time of Locke’s Essay. The “naïve” form held that God had implanted the soul or conscience of man with moral and religious ideas and principles and that we become aware of these, without effort, upon reaching maturity. This Yolton associated especially with early modern casuistry and writings on the conscience, and with more metaphorical language deployed in sermons.22 The “dispositional” form, emerging out of a need to defend innatism, held that such knowledge was “implicit in the soul and merely required experience to elicit awareness of it.”23 Yolton linked this argument especially to the Cambridge theologians Henry More and Nathaniel Culverwell, and to the physician and natural philosopher Walter Charleton. Yolton’s distinction certainly has salience, but his account is only lightly embedded in early modern intellectual culture, downplays the variety of opinions within “dispositional” innatism and is framed to best understand Locke. As such, I would like to largely set aside Yolton’s explanatory dichotomy of the “naïve” and “dispositional” versions of religious innatism and instead root the debates about religious innatism more firmly within their rich intellectual and religious contexts. During the first half of the century, the most likely location of religious innatist arguments was indeed, as Yolton claimed, works of casuistry. As the century progressed, however, a distinction around about the natural origins of religion between the doctrine of innate ideas, associated with Platonic and Cartesian thought, and the doctrine of innate propensities or prolepses, associated with Epicurean and Stoic thought.24 Importantly, the Platonic, Cartesian, and Epicurean strands of innatism were all comparatively new in the seventeenth century. They provided attractive alternatives to the established scholastic depiction of the soul as a tabula rasa but also, as we will see, useful grounding for the newly energised 21 Yolton (1956, p. 29). 22 One of the most common places to find “naïve innatists” is in sermon literature.

Here we often find preachers deploy arguments about knowledge of God being stamped on the soul not to make a philosophical point, but one of practical divinity. 23 Yolton (1956, p. 40). 24 Horowitz (1974) and Doty (1976).

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genre of anti-atheist apologetics.25 Similarly, the Aristotelian theory of perception was challenged by the materialist conceptions of the natural world associated with the new science.26 Both the Platonic/Cartesian and Epicurean/Stoic accounts argued for the existence of what is often termed “natural religion,” understood as meaning the religious beliefs and behaviours that result from the normal functioning of human nature. The doctrine of innate religious ideas dealt with specific units of knowledge lodged in the mind, that came to consciousness upon the maturation of the individual’s reasoning faculty. Relevant nouns in this case are recovery, recollection, reminiscence—it is an inward looking, for some, a passive process. Innate ideas were associated, more often, with Platonic and Cartesian philosophy. Innate prolepses or anticipations,by contrast, referred to cognitive predispositions or powers to actively form certain notions upon engagement with the world. Here the relevant nouns are application, discovery, utilisation—it is an active process, in which the tools of the mind are fixed, in certain scenarios and upon certain experiences, to form specific notions. Innate propensities were associated, more often, with Epicurean and Stoic philosophy. This distinction is a subtle one, but it mattered to many—and more for political and cultural reasons, than for issues of philosophical plausibility. It was the appeal to innate ideas, and not innate cognitive predispositions, that was the primary target of anti-innatist arguments in the second half of the century. They were successful, but the argument that human nature contained an innate predisposition to develop religious belief remained in force, but in new garb, into the eighteenth century. The larger significance of the changing contours of the debate over religious innatism in Britain is that it calls into question the views (a) that English and Scottish religious writers and theologians by the mid-eighteenth century had drastically different understandings of the inherently religious qualities of human nature compared to their counterparts a hundred years earlier and (b) that they did so because they were all good Lockeans and proponents of enlightened empiricism. The decline in the appeal to Platonic or Cartesian doctrines of innate religious ideas should not be taken as reflective of a wider decline in belief

25 Cf. The brief mention at Yolton (1956, pp. 35–36). 26 The Aristotelian tradition in Britain, however, maintained a coherence and vibrancy

throughout the period covered here. See Sgarbi (2013).

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in human nature’s inherent religiosity. Religion seemed as natural in 1740 as it did in 1650, it was only what counted as the functioning of human nature that had changed. Religious innatism declined because of its diminished status and utility as an argument deployed in apologetic and natural theological texts. The related or underlying beliefs—that religion is natural to humans, that this is demonstrated by the universality of religion in past and present human societies, and that atheistic societies or individual atheists are exceptions that prove the rule rather than providing evidence that religion was not natural—remained perusasive. Only the philosophical superstructure has changed. Or, put differently, the purported triumph of anti-innatist empiricism did not usher in a new understanding of human nature in which religiosity was somehow exogenous to humans, but the abandonment of the specifically Cartesian and Platonic versions of religious innatism. The idea that the “religious self” of the seventeenth century had been replaced by the “rational self” of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment simply does not map onto the evidence accumulated below.27 All of this raises a sceptical note about the common judgement that Locke’s “rejection of innate ideas [was] one of the hallmarks of the Enlightenment” and a singular turning point in the creation of the Enlightenment’s notions of the relationship between religion and human nature.28

References Allestree, Richard. 1658. The Whole Duty of Man. London. Anon. 1732. London Journal, 12 August. Armstrong, Robert L. 1969. Cambridge Platonists and Locke on Innate Ideas. Journal of the History of Ideas. 30:187–202. Barnes, Jonathan. 1972. Mr. Locke’s Darling Notion. The Philosophical Quarterly. 22:193–214. Brown, Stuart. 1996. Introduction. In British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Stuart Brown, 1–14. London: Routledge. Budgell, Eustace. 1712. The Spectator, 27 May. Campbell, Archibald. 1739. The Necessity of Revelation. London. Carey, Daniel. 2004. Locke, Shaftesbury, and Innateness. Locke Studies. 4:13–45. 27 The most important proponent of this view is Roy Porter, see Porter (2000, Ch. 3) and Porter (2003). See also Shaw (1997) and Martin and Barresi (2000). 28 The quote is from Brown (1996, p. 11). See also Kontler (2019). Many more texts could be cited.

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Carey, Daniel. 2006. Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clarke, Desmond M. 2011. The Epistemology of Religious Belief. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, ed. Desmond M. Clarke and Catherine Wilson, 548–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doty, Ralph. 1976. Eno¯emata, Prol¯epsis, and Common Notions. Southwestern Journal of Philosophy. 7:143–148. England, George. 1735. An Inquiry into the Morals of the Ancients. London. Fowler, Edward. 1670. The Principles and Practices of Certain Moderate Divines of the Church of England. London. Green, Ian M. 2000. Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greene, Robert A. 1991a. Synderesis, the Spark of Conscience, in the English Renaissance. Journal of the History of Ideas. 52:195–219. Greene, Robert A. 1991b. Whichcote, the Candle of the Lord, and Synderesis. Journal of the History of Ideas. 52:617–44. Greene, Robert A. 1997. Instinct of Nature: Natural Law, Synderesis, and the Moral Sense. Journal of the History of Ideas. 58:173–98. Greenlee, Douglas. 1972. Locke and the Controversy over Innate Ideas. Journal of the History of Ideas. 33:251–64. Hammond, Henry. 1646. The Practical Catechism. London. Harris, John. 1710. Lexicon Technicum, Vol. II. London. Harrison, Peter. 1990. ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horowitz, Mary Cline. 1974. The Stoic Synthesis of the Idea of Natural law in Man: Four Themes. Journal of the History of Ideas. 35:3–16. Hume, David. 1739–1740. A Treatise of Human Nature. 3 vols. London. Hutcheson, Francis. 1725. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. London. Hutton, Sarah. 2015. British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kim, Halla. 2003. Locke on Innatism. Locke Studies. 3:15–39. Kontler, László. 2019. Inventing ‘Humanity’: Early Modern Perspectives. In Changes in the Image of Man from the Enlightenment to the Age of Romanticism: Philosophical and Scientific Receptions of (Physical) Anthropology in the 18–19th centuries, ed. Dezs˝ o Gurka, 15–42. Budapest: Gondolat. Levitin, Dmitri. 2015. Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c. 1640–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marshall, John. 1994. John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, Raymond and Barresi, John. 2000. Naturalization of the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge.

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Mills, R. J. W. 2015. Archibald Campbell’s Necessity of Revelation (1739)—The Science of Human Nature’s First Study of Religion. History of European Ideas. 41:728–746. Porter, Roy. 2000. The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment. New York, NY: Norton. Porter, Roy. 2003. Reason in the Age of Flesh. London: Penguin. Raffe, Alasdair. 2010. Presbyterians and Episcopalians: The Formation of Confessional Cultures in Scotland, 1660–1715. English Historical Review. 125:570–598. Rickless, Samuel C. 2007. Locke’s Polemic against Nativism. In The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s ‘Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Lex Newman, 33–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rivers, Isabel. 1991–2000. Reason, Grace, and Sentiment. A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England 1660–1780. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rogers, G. A. J. 1979. Locke, Newton, and the Cambridge Platonists on Innate Ideas. Journal of the History of Ideas. 40:191–205. Samet, Jerry. 2019. The Historical Controversies Surrounding Innateness. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum 2019/entries/innateness-history. Accessed 10 February 2021. Sangiacomo, Andrea. 2019. Modelling the History of Early Modern Natural Philosophy: The Fate of the Art-Nature Distinction in the Dutch Universities. British Journal for the History of Philosophy. 27:46–74. Sangiacomo, Andrea and Beers, Daan. 2020. Divide et Impera: Modelling the Relationship between Canonical and Noncanonical Authors in the Early Modern Natural Philosophy Network. HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science. 10:365–413. Schmaltz, Tad. 2006. The Science of the Mind. In The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Donald Rutherford, 136–139. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shaw, Jane. 1997. Religious Experience and the Formation of the Early Enlightenment Self. In Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter, 61–71. London: Routledge. Sgarbi, Marco. 2013. The Aristotelian Tradition and the Rise of British Empiricism: Logic and Epistemology in the British Isles (1570–1689). London: Springer. Spellman, W. M. 1993. The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660– 1700. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Spurr, John. 1988. ‘Latitudinarianism’ and the Restoration Church. The Historical Journal. 31:61–82. Thomas, Keith. 1983. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800. London: Penguin Books.

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Thomas, Keith. 2018. In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England. London: Yale University Press. Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de. 1733. Letters Concerning the English Nation. London. Yolton, John. 1956. John Locke and the Way of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

CHAPTER 2

Religious Innatism as a Mid-Seventeenth-Century Commonplace

Abstract The appeal to innate religious notions or innate disposition to form those notions was a commonplace, deployed in a variety of contexts. This chapter pays particular attention in demonstrating the ubiquity of religious innatism in seventeenth-century English and Scottish religious thought, the philosophical and religious sources of religious innatism, and the principal contexts motivating its deployment. The most significant was the use of religious innatism in anti-atheist apologetics. A distinction can be drawn between the Platonic and Cartesian doctrine of innate ideas, and the Epicurean and Stoic doctrine of innate prolepses. These two philosophical traditions grew in standing in English and Scottish religious writing in the mid-century, joining the already established genre of casuistry. Several illustrative texts of these various traditions are summarized. It is argued that criticism of innate ideas did not entail criticism of religious innatism in its entirety. Keywords Innate ideas · Innate prolepses · Stoicism · Epicureanism · Platonism · Cartesianism

The belief that humans possessed innate religious ideas or principles, or religious prolepses or predispositions, was a commonplace amongst seventeenth-century English and Scottish religious thinkers. Religious innatism served myriad purposes in early modern religious writing. It © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. J. W. Mills, The Religious Innatism Debate in Early Modern Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84323-6_2

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formed part of the anthropocentric understanding that man was an animal religiosum (or animal capax religionis ) as much as an animal rationale, and overrode the old scholastic standard, nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu (there was nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses).1 The appeal to religious innatism was part of the search for natural proofs of the existence of a supreme being and was heavily utilised in works of apologetics and natural theology. The fact that humans were framed to believe in God was taken as an argument for the existence of that God. Thus the Principal of Edinburgh University Robert Leighton lectured in the 1650s that the “indelible character” of religion engraved on the soul was evidence against atheists who claimed religion was a man-made creation.2 It was inconceivable that such a universal phenomenon could be the creation of politicians exploiting fear of the unknown. Religious innatism also informed discussions of the scandal of particular revelation—how to rebut the sneer, deployed by scoffers and freethinkers, that a purportedly good God only condescended to impart revelation to specific groups at specific times, leaving huge swathes of humanity damned through no fault of their own. The innateness of basic religious notions was evidence that God had not left humankind without natural signs, underpinning the claim, to quote from Volume II of John Scott’s popular The Christian Life (1681–1696), that God did not “expect that they [who never knew of Christianity] should live by principles which they never heard of, or have not sufficient reason to believe.”3 The fact that natural law was understood via the assistance of innate knowledge helped explain what morality was practiced in the “Patriarchal Age” between the Flood and Moses’s receiving revelation on Mount Sinai,4 as well as underpinning attempts at proselytisation in the New World.5 Similarly, innate religious aids could be treated as one element amongst many in natural theological works encouraging, in James Dalrymple, Viscount Stair’s phrase, the “contemplation of [God] in his imitable excellency.”6 1 See Mills (2019). The tag was falsely attributed to Aristotle. See Cranefield (1970). 2 Leighton (1693, pp. 42–43). See also Mackenzie (1663, pp. 4–8). 3 Scott (1687, p. 2). 4 Taylor (1675, p. ii). See also Cave (1676, pp. ii–iii). 5 Eliot (1659, Sig. A4v ). 6 Dalrymple (1695, p. iii, 261).

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The principal motivation, however, behind the mid-century growth of the deployment of religious innatism was refuting atheism, both practical (living as if there was no god) and speculative (believing that there was no god).7 The starting point for our discussion is the first group of antiatheist publications in English that offered natural theological arguments for the existence and attributes of God in response to a mesh of concerns that, together, increased fears over atheism.8 Influenced by several factors, Christian fears over unbelief reached unprecedented heights in England during the mid-seventeenth century. In the background was the evergrowing awareness of diversity of belief and behaviour resulting from increases in information about the extra-European world,9 while closer to home the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had broken up any confident sense of religious coherence. Lucretius’ poem De rerum natura had provided the intellectual challenge of an alternative cosmography, one in which religion was explained in psychological terms as originating in fear.10 Similarly, Thomas Hobbes’s philosophical writings served to offer another powerful, persuasive alternative to Christian orthodoxy—not least because of Hobbes’s denial that we could have an idea of God.11 The collapse of religious and political authority during the Civil Wars gave rise to religious diversity.12 Fears of atheism came to ahead in England and Scotland the 1640s and 1650s. In the most recent, and most sustained discussion of anti-atheist apologetics in early modern England, Kenneth Sheppard has argued for a “set 7 Most seventeenth-century theologians denied that it was possible to be a “speculative atheist,” given human nature’s inbuilt religious knowledge. For surveys see Berman (1988, pp. 1–47); and Mori (2021). I am grateful to Diego Lucci for directing me to Mori’s work. 8 There were antecedent works of anti-atheist apologetics published in England prior to the mid-seventeenth century. See, for example, Fotherby (1622). But the volume of natural theological works increased considerably around the 1650s. Also, I am not claiming that natural theology of the sort that characterised these works did not have continental European antecedents or that there were not works published in England intimately bound up with continental natural theology. See, for example, Barlow (1637). I am grateful to Richard Serjeantson for encouraging me to clarify this point. 9 See, for example, Kors (1990, pp. 135–177). 10 On the impact of Epicureanism see Greenblatt (2011); Wilson (2008, pp. 1–38);

and Duncan and LoLordo (forthcoming). 11 Mintz (1962); Parkin (2007); and Sheppard (2015). 12 Hughes (2004); Mills (2016).

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of broad argumentative continuities” throughout the long seventeenth century.13 The argument from natural religious knowledge was one such constantly deployed proof. It was usually coupled with the argument from the consensus gentium (or universal consent), which argued that the fact that all societies throughout human history believed in god (or gods) was proof for the existence of God. The Bishop of St David’s William Lucy, arguing against Hobbes’s account of religion in Chapter XII of Leviathan (1651), retorted that the “seed of religion” was not fear but an “innate principle” in human nature as demonstrated by the universal consent in the existence of God, which also demonstrated that religion was as natural to man as reason.14 While the two proofs usually came as a pair, it was possible to argue for universal consent without an appeal to innate religious knowledge—the sheer evidence of design in the universe might be sufficient to convince all that god or gods existed.15 Further, the consensus gentium argument was often bound up with the consensus sapientium argument—that is, the truth of something was proved by the consensus of the pagan and Christian philosophers alike. The two arguments were frequently conflated: the consensus gentium was proved by the additional fact that all the wise believed it was a persuasive argument. But again, appeal to the consensus sapientium for the universality of religion did not necessarily tie a theologian to explicit belief in innate religious knowledge.16 The relationship between the rise of anti-atheist apologetics and actually-existing atheism is sometimes doubted.17 Evidence of real atheism in early modern Europe is said to be in short supply, at least until the eighteenth century. Various alternative explanations for the increase in anti-atheist works are offered. “Atheist” was rather a term of abuse used with great looseness in religious controversies, slung mostly at purported heretics. Anti-atheist apologetics is sometimes viewed as an exercise in reassurance. When Independent minister Matthew Barker reiterated in his Natural Theology (1674) that atheists’ immoral behaviour had clouded over their innate notions, it could be argued he was offering

13 Sheppard (2015, p. 65). 14 Lucy (1663, p. 91). See also p. 116. 15 On the universal consent argument see Edwards (1967) and Reid (2015). 16 See, for example, Isaac Barrow’s sermon entitled “The Being of God Proved from

Universal Consent” in Barrow (1683, vol. II pp. 114–127). 17 See Hunter (1985) and Kors (1990, pp. 32–34).

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a message that jointly confirmed the faithful in their own moral standing and warned them of the dangers of vice—rather than responding to a real social phenomenon.18 Apologetics staked out the boundaries of the religious community and identified those on the outside of that boundary as monstrous and dangerous. J. G. A. Pocock has argued that anti-atheist apologetics was also one of the means of ideological control used by the Anglican elite in Restoration England to re-assert the social order and their place within it.19 Certainly, in the hands of High Church theologian Thomas Pierce, man’s natural religiosity meant that “he must certainly be a monster … who is so destitute of reason, as wholly to be void of religion too.” Thus Hobbes, the supposed atheist in Pierce’s sights, could be called the “Monster of Malmesbury.”20 But as we shall see, anti-atheist apologetics was a genre to which all strands of British Christianity could contribute and not one limited to powerful figures in the Anglican church exerting ideological control. We should take seriously arguments for the existence of atheism as a contributing cause to increased deployment of religious innatism. Michael Hunter has recently encouraged historians of cultural change to consider the “elusive oral dimension to the intellectual life of the day.”21 We might not immediately dismiss oral testimony of someone complaining that the coffeehouse they visited was full of patrons expressing atheist views. One significant consequence of taking reported conservations seriously, for Hunter, is that Restoration-era “atheism” and “deism” are real phenomena informing real intellectual change, and not just imaginary bogeymen hiding under theologians’ beds. Alec Ryrie, similarly, has recently argued for the emergence of the emotional conditions in early modern England in which unbelief came to thrive.22 Unbelief has always existed within Christianity, but its growth in this period was an important if unintended consequence of the turmoil caused by the Reformation. Criticism inspired by anger towards Catholic authority extended in some cases to critical attitudes towards all religion. Likewise, the breakdown of

18 E.g. Barker (1674, pp. 41–42, 49, 54, 55–56). 19 Pocock (1985) and Pocock (1988). 20 Pierce (1679). See also Wilkins (1675, p. 292); Anon (1680a, p. 6); Anon (1680b) and Charnock (1856, vol. I p. 30). 21 Hunter (2020, p. 167). 22 Ryrie (2019).

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traditional authority encouraged immense anxiety amongst many believers about their possibly incorrect relationship with a possibly non-existent deity. To Ryrie, widespread fears about what religion is true, if any, came before any systematic philosophical challenge—and could just as plausibly contribute to the rise of anti-atheist apologetics. The beginning of our study at c.1650 places us at the start of a dramatic growth in the Scottish and especially English natural theological texts. Natural theological arguments had long been part of the Christian tradition, but the theologians and philosophers discussed here participated in a moment of concentrated defence of Christianity within England and Scotland against perceived real atheism. In the hierarchy of apologetics, the demonstration of the existence and attributes of God was intended to be made prior to proving the truth of the Christian religion in ways that could persuade the non-Christian scornful of scripture and patristics—though natural theological arguments also had the additional roles of protecting or confirming the Christian in their belief and of serving as an aid to devotion. The dominant position amongst the Church Fathers was that humans had an innate knowledge or predisposition to knowledge of God impressed upon their souls and that the truth of this was demonstrated by the universality of belief in God. One could turn to well-known passages in, for example, Irenaeus’s Against Heresies (2.6.1), Arnobius’s Against the Pagans (1.33), Lactantius’ Institutes (1.2), Clement of Alexandria’s Miscellanies (2.4, 6.6), Eusebius’s Preparation of the Gospel (2.6), Iamblichus’ Of Mysteries (1.9), or Athanasius’s Against the Heathens (2.33). Or a preacher could to turn to the sources of scholasticism, such as Aquinas’s rejection of innate ideas in the Summa theologia (I.84.a.3) and De veritate (10, 12) in favour an account of the intellect’s predisposition to form the idea of God upon reflection on the world—what Aquinas termed the intellect’s “participation” in the “uncreated light” of the divine intellect.23 Yet while these writings no doubt framed early modern thinking, and were often quoted silently, they were rarely cited by natural theologians, apologists, and philosophers in search of authorities for religious innatism. One reason for this was that the atheist was not expected to be convinced by Christian sources, hence many pious authors instead turned to pagan thought and contemporary

23 On Aquinas see Hatfield (1997).

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philosophy. But it was also the case that reliance upon pagan authorities gave more strength to the point amongst Christian readers too, as it removed the charge of partiality. Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century apologists were principally concerned with practical or vulgar atheism. Preaching focused on the atheist’s sinful desire to live purely for worldly pleasure without reference to futurity. In these texts, the focus was primarily on the aetiology of atheistic behaviour and its danger to society and religion. The natural knowledge of religion was discussed in terms of man’s sinful falling away from God, rather than being deployed as an argument for the existence of that God. This common practice continued through the period covered here, such as when the Fellow of Corpus Christi John Spencer sermonised in June 1660 that worldly pleasure and suffering could “choke and smother the innate notions of a Deity in the minds of men.”24 Around the 1640s, however, anti-atheist apologetics turned to “speculative” or “learned” atheism. Apologists were still concerned with explaining atheism’s causes, but this increasingly vied for space with arguments for why atheism was wrong philosophically. The argument for the existence of God from the natural knowledge of God, and its normal correlate the universal consent of mankind, were regularly marshalled as two prongs as part of a wider battery of arguments. The two arguments informed speculative atheists that they were literally out of their minds and going against their nature as humans. This argument by abundance was the rhetorical strategy of confutatio, which was derived from Ciceronian oratorical method.25 On occasion—as with Henry More and Walter Charleton, both of whom are discussed below—religious innatism had a more important structural role in the order of anti-atheist arguments. But for most apologists, the natural knowledge of God was just one proof amongst many. The earlier version of the doctrine of religious innatism was informed by the thought of the Magisterial Reformers. Seventeenth-century English and Scottish Protestants could turn to Philip Melanchthon’s many writings for repeated iterations of the argument that knowledge of God was “innate in the human mind” and that because all peoples believed in

24 Spencer (1660, p. 2). See also Gauden (1659, p. 77); Smith (1668, pp. 36–37); and Hale (1695, pp. 73–74). 25 Sheppard (2015, pp. 48–56).

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a God “therefore this idea is true.”26 Natural law, covering both moral philosophy and the tenets of the Decalogue, was innate in human nature, because humans were created in the image of God.27 Melanchthon retained the use of the Scholastic conscience tradition, discussed more later on, which viewed the conscience as imbued with innate knowledge upon which other knowledge was built.28 John Calvin’s position in the Institutes of Christian Religion (1536) was similar, encapsulated in the nonconformist minister William Bates’s paraphrase that “the sense of the deity is indelibly stamped on the minds of men.”29 Use of Calvin’s phrasing of the “sense of a deity” was common, and not just amongst the Reformed.30 The sensus divinitatis inspired a belief in the existence of God upon experience of the beauty and orderliness of the natural world.31 As Robert Forbes, regent at King’s College, Aberdeen, put in his Theses philosophicae (1684), it was necessary for the sense of divinity to first form the “belief that God exists” before reasoned proofs provided “knowledge that God exists.”32 With Calvin’s sense of divinity came the doctrine that man was unavoidably accountable to his Creator and that there were no excuses for turning away from him. An important shift occurred, however, between Calvin’s influential account of the sensus divinitatis in the 1530s and the deployment of religious innatism by religious writers, theologians, and philosophers a century later.33 Calvin did not discuss man’s innate sense of God in terms of the rationality of that belief or the cognitive tools by which man came to knowledge of God. Calvin was uninterested in natural theology in the form of cosmological and design arguments for the existence and attributes of God. He did not develop his discussion of man’s natural

26 Quotes from Melanchthon’s Commentary upon Romans (1532) cited in Platt (1982, p. 24) but see pp. 10–33 more generally. 27 Methuen (2001). 28 Kärkkäinen (2012); Kusukawa (1995). 29 Bates (1676, p. 82) paraphrasing John Calvin’s Institutes of Christian Religion

(1536) i.iv.1. 30 E.g. Hale (1676, p. 30). 31 Helm (1998). 32 Forbes (1684, Section VI). Discussed in Gellera (2013, pp. 200–201). 33 The following paragraph stems from Helm (2004, esp. pp. 209–245). See also Grislis

(1971).

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knowledge of God as a proof for the existence of God. The sensus divinitatis taught man to conceive two things: that God exists and that it was man’s duty to worship him. The whole thrust of Calvin’s discussion tended towards man’s obligation to worship God and the inexcusability of their failure to do so, rather than serving as a proof. But for the religious writers and theologians writing in the mid-seventeenth century, the issue of religious innatism was raised more often as an argument for the existence of God. Man possessed a cognitive mechanism that produces belief in God. The very existence of this mechanism was taken as evidence that its product, belief in God, is true. It is in the context of mid-seventeenth-century anti-atheist apologetics that Calvin’s discussion of the sensus divinitatis in the Institutes was often repurposed as an innatist proof. The same shift happens in the move away from early modern casuistry to seventeenth-century natural theology. A similar emphasis was found in a large body of scholastic and humanist works discussing the topic of the conscience—the body of texts that best fit Yolton’s description of “naïve” innatism, alongside sermon literature.34 Indeed, prior to the popularisation of Cartesian and Platonist philosophy in the 1640s, the argument for the existence of the natural knowledge of God centred on the workings of conscience. These works set out the theory that this faculty of human nature had a two-fold structure consisting of “synderesis” (sometimes “synteresis”) and “syneidesis” (often “conscientia”). Synderesis was viewed as a collection of providentially given foundational moral and religious principles which were intuited in a non-deliberated fashion upon an individual reaching their intellectual maturity. It signified, as Robert Burton noted in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a “conservation of the knowledge of the law of God and nature, to know good or evil” held in the faculty of the understanding.35 While Herbert of Cherbury is discussed below in terms of the Stoic character of his religious innatism, he also described the “common notions” as having “mathematical certainty” and existing as the very grammar of thought and as the final judge of truth in a manner characteristic of the synderesis doctrine.36 These premises were true, fixed, and unalterable, in contrast to the judgements of practical understanding

34 Yolton (1956, pp. 30–33). See also Andrew (2001) and Daniel (2020). 35 Burton (1621, p. 42). 36 Herbert of Cherbury (1937, p. 135, p. 131).

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or discursive reason (“syneidesis”) which were contingent and introduced the likelihood of error in moral and religious reasoning. The relationship between the two parts of the conscience was syllogistic: the synderesis provided the major premise and the act of discursive reason provided the minor premise. Thus, to some theorists, the synderesis existed as the location of the “common notions” or “innate principles” of human nature, including the religious injunctions to believe in and worship a God. This understanding of conscience retained a prominence well into the seventeenth century, especially amongst theologians within the Church of England. The synderesis/syneidesis division was continued in influential works of casuistry such as Anglican theologians Robert Sanderson’s De obligatione conscientiae (1660) and Jeremy Taylor’s Ductor dubitantium (1660).37 As the divine Taylor summarised, the precise location of the conscience was not clear and was variously understood to be found in the “practical intellective faculty,” be a “habitual persuasion,” or as a “single operation and action” or as part of the faculty of reason.38 The conscience contained, as Taylor put it, “a collection of propositions, the belief of which makes it necessary to live well.”39 Similarly, in the middle decades of the century both Benjamin Whichcote and Nathaniel Culverwell adopted the terminology of the conscience tradition in their discussions of the light of nature.40 The view of conscience, in newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson’s phrase in 1691, as a “domestic judge, and a kind of familiar God” in the soul, remained popular in late seventeenth-century Anglican practical divinity.41 Tillotson’s predecessor as Archbishop, William Sancroft, held that all individuals had a soul “capable of learning; stamped and possessed with first principles and common notions which, deeply searched and duly improved and cultivated, might teach us much of righteousness.” Natural knowledge was, in Sancroft’s words, the “schola cordis in domo interiori, the school

37 Taylor (1660, vol. I p. 10) and Sanderson (1660). Cf. Yolton (1956, p. 33), Way of Ideas, 33. See also Scott (1995); Baker (1952, pp. 226–238); and Wood (1952). 38 Jeremy Taylor surveyed these in Taylor (1660, vol. I p. 6). 39 Taylor (1660, vol. I p. 9). 40 Greene (1991). 41 Tillotson (1691, p. 29). See also Hale (1677, p. 2) and, from without the Anglican Church, Baxter (1672, pp. 125–126).

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of the heart, God’s first school in the little world within us.”42 The innate fear of divine punishment, evident in the workings of conscience, was used by numerous authors to counteract the accusation—associated with Democritus, Epicurus and Hobbes’s Leviathan—that religion had its origin in fear alone.43 The casuists did not deny religion’s origin in fear but put it in a different light. The fact that all humanity’s consciences contain innate fears of divine judgement was taken as evidence that there exists a god to provide such judgement. Put differently, we are innately scared of God and are right to be so. It was common for apologists to accumulate authorities from various schools of ancient philosophy. This often took the form of the argument from the consensus sapientium: the agreement of the wise proved the truth of the agreed-upon claim. One anti-atheist apologist spoke of the “proleptical principle” and “idaea [of God] engraven in their souls” as agreed upon by “Socrates, Plato, Tully, Seneca, Epictetus, and other heathen worthies.”44 In Part II of his Court of the Gentiles (1670) the nonconformist minister Theophilus Gale could group together Platonic innatism as arguing for the same belief in the innate knowledge of natural law as Zeno’s “comprehensions,” Epicurus’ and the Stoics’ “anticipations,” Chrysippus’ “common principles” and Cicero’s “common notions.”45 But alongside such tendencies to conflate differing positions to aid one form of apologetic argument, we can also identify a prominent emphasis, growing as the century goes on, of distinguishing between the Epicurean/Stoic tradition of prolepses and the Platonic/Cartesian tradition of innate ideas. One major problem with Yolton’s account, then, is that it glosses these two traditions as both being representatives of a newly developed dispositional innatism, though they were actually regularly put in opposition to each other. The Epicurean and Stoic traditions offered numerous expositions, helpful to the Christian apologist, of basic religious beliefs as prolepses or natural anticipations or dispositions of the mind. In the Epicurean and Stoic picture of religious innatism, humans are equipped with a number of natural cognitive processes that aid the easy discovery of religious

42 Sancroft (1694, p. 65). 43 See Wojcik (1996). 44 J. M. (1672). The pagination of this work restarted at p. 76, and the citation is to the second set of pages numbered pp. 64–65. 45 Gale (1670, p. 293).

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truths upon interacting with the external world—most usually, that God exists, that God should be worshipped and that the soul is immortal. There is no innate knowledge fully formed in the mind at birth, but rather the capacity to form easily that knowledge as part of the normal process of human maturation. The truths assented to in such a fashion were often termed “common notions.” Noticeably, use of the terms “proleptic,” “prolepsis,” “proleptical” and so on in reference to natural religious notions entered English and Scottish vernacular religious writing in the 1650s and 1660s.46 So did “anticipations” and its variants, though noticeably with far less frequency. The most widely cited authors and passages were Cicero’s Epicurean Velleius and his Stoic Balbus in De natura deorum (1.43–5, 2.12)47 ; Cicero’s De legibus (1.8.24), his De republica via Lactantitus’ Institutes (6.8), and his Tusculanae disputationes (1.60); Seneca and especially his Epistle number 11748 ; and Epictetus, often via the Neoplatonist Simplicius’s Lemma 38 on Book 31 of Epictetus’ Encheiridion.49 As the Cambridge divine John Smith put it, the “Stoical philosophy requires a belief” that the existence of God and the immortality of the soul were the “prolepses of all religion.”50 Smith’s statement here was perhaps the first published English-language association of Stoicism with religious “prolepses.”By far, the most commonly cited ancient pagan authority for religious innatism was Cicero, who was taken as be part of the Stoic school of philosophy. The freethinker Anthony Collins later opined wryly, however, that the positioning of Cicero as an innatist involved misrepresenting Velleius and Balbus as Cicero’s mouthpieces, rather than the sceptic Cotta, because it was opportune to have Cicero’s authority supporting the divines’ apologist argument from innate prolepses.51 Epicureanism mainly served as a threat to orthodox Christianity. Lucretius’ expository poem De rerum natura contained both a rival

46 For characteristic examples see Ingelo (1660, p. 189); Sharrock (1673, p. 9); and Care (1683, pp. 64–65). 47 For a characteristic deployment of Cicero see Pelling (1696, pp. 76–77). 48 On Stoic religious innatism see Jackson-McCabe (2004). 49 John Smith used Epictetus, see Smith (1668, p. 60). On Epictetus see Carey (1997, pp. 51–58). 50 Smith (1668, p. 60). 51 Collins (1713, p. 138).

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cosmography to the scriptural one and an explanation of religion as resulting from fear of the unknown (esp. v.ii.1165–1196). But it was possible to extract from the sources of Epicurean thought, usually out of Cicero’s discussion, an account of religion as a natural prolepsis of the mind. This was usually joined with the apologetic spin that even the atheist Epicureans admitted that belief in God was natural to humans.52 The Epicurean claim about the religious disposition within human nature was given new impetus by the dissemination of the works of the French philosopher Pierre Gassendi and his English followers Walter Charleton, discussed below, and Thomas Stanley.53 Several influential articulations of humanity’s inherent religious prolepsis, including the influential articulations of Edward Stillingfleet and Ralph Cudworth, were framed in Stoic terminology.54 The most extensive analysis of religious innatism in a Stoic vein during the first half of the seventeenth century was Herbert of Cherbury’s De veritate (1624).55 Herbert maintained that the faculties of the mind could be divided into four, with the most important of these for religious notions being the mode of non-deliberative apprehension that Herbert termed “natural instinct.” This was the power of the mind that naturally, without reasoning, formed a number of what Herbert, using Stoic terminology, termed “common notions.” These were apprehensions necessary for human self-preservation and happiness and which the mind had been providentially arranged to develop. The common notions “must be deemed not so much the outcome of experience” and instead as the “principles without which we should have no experience at all.”56 One set of “common notions” were the five foundational religious tenets believed throughout the world: that there is a supreme God; that he ought to be worshipped; that religious practice is primarily about virtue and piety; that the individual is aware of their vices and need to repent; and that there

52 For characteristic examples see Stillingfleet (1662, pp. 365–366); Sharrock (1673, p. 9); and Howe (1675, pp. 19–20, 183). On Epicurean religious innatism see Sedley (2011). 53 See especially Stanley (1656–1660, vol. III pp. 105–275). 54 Cudworth (1678, Preface, p. 207, p. 444, p. 631, p. 634, p. 665, p. 691, p. 692

and p. 834); Stillingfleet (1662, pp. 367–374). 55 On Herbert see Hudson (2009, pp. 41–56); and Hutton (2015, pp. 103–113). 56 Herbert (1937, p. 126).

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will be rewards and punishments in a future life.57 Discovered beneath the evidence of diversity in religious belief and worship in the world, these “common notions” were “held universally” and “whatever is believed by universal consent must be true.”58 While not initially in widespread circulation, Herbert’s De veritate became better known following publication of a third edition in 1645 and a pirated one in 1656. The book was “much valued by learned men” according to Anthony Wood.59 Herbert was the only recent philosopher that Locke named in Book I of the Essay.60 Before then Herbert’s argument about common religious notions was engaged with sympathetically by Nathaniel Culverwell; George Rust, one of Henry More’s students, and Bishop of Dunmore from 1667; and Anglican clergyman Joseph Glanvill. We will return to Culverwell shortly. In both his posthumously published Discourse on Truth (1677) and Discourse on the Use of Reason in Matters of Religion (1683), Rush echoed Herbert’s argument that the “principles of natural instinct” or “common notions” were the “foundation of all discourse and argumentation” and were “certain and infallible truths.”61 Glanvill’s list of the fundamentals of religion in his Reason and Religion (1676) were very similar to those of Herbert.62 Perhaps more surprisingly, another sympathetic reader of De veritate was the ejected presbyterian minister Richard Baxter. In his lengthy disquisition on Herbert’s text in his More Reasons of the Christian Religion (1672), the lengthiest English-language treatment of Herbert published before Locke’s in Book I of the Essay, Baxter criticised Herbert’s theology from a Calvinist stance on many issues relating to “the eternal logos, wisdom or word of God Incarnate.”63 Yet on Herbert’s five natural religious tenets Baxter was in near full agreement—Herbert’s truths were 57 The religious “common notions” were repeated by Herbert in all of his writings. For discussions see Harrison (1990, pp. 65–73); Johnson (1994); Bedford (1979); and Hutton (1996). 58 Herbert (1937, p. 116). 59 This followed publication of a third edition in 1645 and a pirated one in 1656.

Wood (1813–1820, vol. III p. 240). For the reception of Herbert’s writings during the seventeenth century see Serjeantson (2001); Hutton (1996) and Hutton (2015, pp. 109– 113). 60 Locke (1690), 1.3.15. 61 Rust and Glanvill (1682, p. 179). 62 Serjeantson (2001, p. 226). 63 See Bedford (1979, pp. 247–248); Wallace (2011, pp. 173–174).

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“notitiae communes without which a man is scarce a man.”64 Similarly, Baxter accepted Herbert’s view of the existence of a “natural instinct,” which Baxter termed a “knowing faculty” or “knowing disposition.”65 Baxter did not agree with Herbert’s fourth notion, that the view that crimes should be expiated by repentance was universal, but, equally, added numerous other religious common notions to Herbert’s list.66 Characteristic of much criticism of Herbert in this period, Baxter wanted to re-assert the subordination of the “common notions” to revelation.67 They were the very basis of religious thought, but were best understood as the foundations upon which much more important knowledge was to be built and were not the ultimate judge of religious matters as Herbert had maintained.68 Similarly, Baxter suggested (as did the Oxford divine Thomas Manningham) that while Herbert had argued successfully that religion involved a set of “common notions,” he had not explained which historical religion’s set of rites and worship were the correct ones.69 The competing form of religious innatism to the Stoic and Epicurean was the Platonic and subsequently Cartesian theory of innate ideas. This was taken to posit the existence of latent knowledge, already present in the mind, but which was recovered only by a mature intellect going through the process of reasoning upon itself. The natural law theorist and Anglican clergyman Richard Cumberland was exaggerating when he opined in 1672 that the Platonist “supposition of innate ideas” had been “rejected by the generality of philosophers.”70 Around the same time, the Scottish nonconformist minister Robert Ferguson could identify the argument over the innate idea of God as being the subject of a multinational

64 Baxter (1672, p. 119, pp. 123–124). 65 Baxter (1672, pp. 127–128). 66 Baxter (1672, pp. 123–124). 67 Baxter (1672, p. 77). 68 Baxter (1672, p. 129). 69 Baxter (1672, p. 113). Manningham (1681, p. 61). Baxter also used De veritate as an

authority for the existence of “common principles and notitiae,” see Baxter (1674, p. 129); and for the universal belief in the immortality of the soul, see Baxter (1684, p. 40). Elsewhere Baxter positioned Herbert as someone who did not “believe our supernatural revelations of Christianity.” See Baxter (1683, p. 34). 70 Cumberland (2007, p. 252).

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dispute in which the innatist position had many learned defenders—not least in England.71 Moreover, across the thousands of texts surveyed for this essay the use of the language of “innate” religious notions was more common than the “proleptical” equivalent, with the former more prominent in less erudite works while the latter were often the preserve of philosophical treatises. However, the commonality of “innatist” language was not always bound up with the more specific arguments contained within Platonic or Cartesian thought, but rather was a commonplace way of describing a characteristic of human nature. Across the devotional, apologetic, and controversial genres, the appeal to the authority of Platonic innate religious ideas was made often.72 The Platonic corpus could be mined for authoritative passages demonstrating humanity’s innate tendency to believe in the immortality of the soul; the innate knowledge of natural law lodged in the conscience, including the existence of God; universal consent of all peoples on the existence of a deity regardless of superficial differences of belief; and that this universality demonstrated that the theory of the political origins of religion was a fiction. Yet this often involved extrapolating from Plato’s actual claims to fit the demands of seventeenth-century natural theology and apologetics. The Oxford Platonist Thomas Jackson, writing in 1625, claimed that Plato’s doctrine of reminiscence, while a “gross error” in terms of how it contradicted scriptural truth, pointed towards the reality of man’s fallen nature and the desire to return to the full knowledge possessed by Adam. Our souls do have some enduring “relics or fragments of universal truth” and all our acquired knowledge “proceeds from knowledge pre-existent … implanted and unapprehended.” These are “divine impressions” from which we can “discover so much of God’s image … renewed in us.”73 Theophilus Gale’s treatment of Plato in Part IV of The Court of the Gentiles (1677) is also very instructive here. Gale was expressly synthesising Plato’s thought in a way that strengthened “reformed philosophy.”74 In a chapter entitled “Of Atheism, and the Existence of a Deity,” Gale repeatedly “improved,” drew “forth Plato’s

71 Ferguson (1675, p. 41). 72 E.g. Smith (1668, p. 109); Eliot (1659, Sig. A4v ); Coke (1660, p. 83); Keith (1684,

p. 205); Bray (1697, p. 70). 73 Jackson (1625, pp. 89–92). On Jackson see Hutton (1978). 74 Gale (1677, Title-page).

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mind thus,” and brought “forth the force of [a] Platonic argument” in ways that tied Plato to reformed commonplaces about the innate idea of God lodged in the soul and demonstrated by the consensus gentium.75 Similarly, in his The First Fruits of Reason (1686), the popular and idiosyncratic Church of England clergyman Anthony Horneck did not agree with the “Platonic notion, that all our knowledge is nothing but reminiscence” (my italics) but held that in Platonist language that “religion may justly be called a remembrance of things … engraven upon our hearts.”76 Firm commitment to Platonist or Neoplatonist thought could cause controversy. Central here was the doctrine of reminiscence, in which all knowledge was held latently in a pre-existing soul and subsequently remembered. Plato’s Phaedro was often cited, though seventeenthcentury religious writers also found Platonic innatism in Christianised form in texts such as Origen’s On First Principles (c. 220–225).77 The pre-existence theory held that souls of men originally existed in a community able to, in Rhodri Lewis’ phrase, “partake of life in communion with God.”78 Having fallen away from God, many souls were attached to terrestrial bodies, which served as vehicles that both housed and prevented the soul returning to its previous incorporeal state. The fallen, now materially imprisoned soul retained some of its original pre-bodily character, including knowledge of God. However, while pre-existence theorists argued for the existence of innate religious ideas, there are no clean alignments here. Many defenders of innate religious knowledge distinguished their position from the more outlandish Platonic doctrines of pre-existence and reminiscence.79 Similarly, some proponents of preexistence of the soul denied innate religious knowledge and vice versa.80 Theologians could also view Platonic innatism as a topic within the realms of speculative theology only—that is, to be debated and discussed, but not relied upon for apologetic purposes. More prominent was the charge, discussed in the next chapter, that the Christian Platonist account of

75 Gale (1677, pp. 215–237). 76 Horneck (1686, pp. 37–38). 77 For example, Greville (1640); More (1647); More (1659); Rust (1661); and Hallywell (1668). See also Scott (1994). 78 Lewis (2006, p. 269). 79 E.g. Warren (1667, pp. 31–32); Lowde (1694, pp. 52–53). 80 E.g. Glanvill (1662, pp. 88–90).

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innate ideas was a fantastical theory drawn from pagan philosophy which distorted primitive Christianity by inspiring inward-looking fanaticism. By contrast, the Cartesian account of innate ideas initially had a high status within certain strands of English religious writing. Two of the English natural theological tradition’s first works relied on it: Walter Charleton’s The Darknes of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature (1652) and Henry More’s An Antidote Against Atheism (1652).81 Both were published at the highpoint of the English reception of Cartesian innatism. More would come to challenge Cartesianism in later texts, though Charleton remained committed to Cartesian innatist arguments. Both used the argument from innate religious ideas to prove the existence of God and to argue against the Hobbesian denial that the mind could have knowledge of immaterial substances; both set up innatism as the basis for subsequent natural theological arguments based on the argument from design.82 In Charleton’s case, this was avowed Cartesianism. Charleton is known as the most prominent early English proponent of the Christian Epicureanism set out by Pierre Gassendi, and as a significant natural philosopher in his own right.83 But in his Darknes of Atheism Dispelled Charleton forged together Cartesian innatism with Gassendi’s natural philosophy in a way that Gassendi, who forcefully attacked Descartes’s views on innate ideas, would not have accepted.84 (Charleton also stated his agreement “with Plato” on the “innate dictates” of the conscience, but this was a passing citation of a pagan authority).85 Having accepted the Cartesian argument for the reliability of our faculties outlined in the first Meditation, Charleton then offered his “demonstration of the existence of God” built on humanity’s innately held notion of God. This demonstration he had “wholly collected out of the incomparable metaphysics of … Renatus Des Cartes” and was “transcribe[d] and

81 More’s book was published in December 1652, but the titlepage reads 1653. 82 Charleton (1652, p. 20); More (1652, p. 6). 83 Kargon (1964); Osler (1979); and Fleitmann (1986, pp. 245–246). 84 Charleton (1652, p. 20). On Gassendi’s criticism of Descartes’ innatism see Osler

(1994, pp. 159–163); and Carey (1997, p. 47) Charleton had a track record of adding innatist arguments to the non-innatist theories of French authors, as he did this also in his History of the Passions (1674), a partial translation of Jean François Senault’s De L’Usage des Passions (1641). See Yolton (1956), p. 41 fn. 1. 85 Charleton (1652, p. 4).

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accommodate[d] to our present scope.”86 Having proved the existence of God and demonstrated the reliability of the faculties demonstrated on Cartesian grounds, Charleton proceeded to detail the attributes of God through the medium of Gassendi’s natural philosophy. Reflective of his fusing together these two antagonistic sources, Charleton’s terminology was somewhat loose.87 Descartes’s argument was favoured because of its self-sufficiency: it relied upon the “proleptical impresses,” peculiarly Epicurean-Gassendian wording, of the notion of a deity.88 But Charleton’s summary of the Cartesian ontological argument serves as a perfect summary of this strand of religious innatism. Charleton held that he “never drew [his idea of God] in through the windows of my senses” nor “was it ever modelled, or coined by me, in the laboratory of my imagination.” Instead, the idea of God “must be primitively implanted in, and congenial to my very essence,” which Charleton claimed was comparable to a consciousness of his notion of his own self. God has “imprinted this idea of himself upon my soul, that it might remain as an indelible mark or signature, whereupon when I reflect my cogitation” Charleton immediately understood that God exists and that he is God’s creation.89 Charleton would again deploy—in a dialogue between Lucretius, Athanasius, and Isodicastes in his The Immortality of the Soul (1657)—Cartesian innatism with an Epicurean hue. Here the issue was whether the mind could have knowledge of “immaterial objects,” such as the soul. Humans could be confident in their knowledge of the incorporeal substances “since Descartes has irrefutably demonstrated” that the existence of God and the immortal soul had been shown to be “proleptical and innate in the mind of man” (my italics) and, moreover, more “clear and distinct” than any corporeal objects.90 In the late 1640s and early 1650s Henry More was the philosopher most associated with the promotion and spread of Cartesian thought

86 Charleton (1652, Sig. b4V ). 87 See Lewis (2001). 88 Charleton (1652, Sig. b4V–R ). 89 Charleton (1652, p. 20). 90 Walter Charleton, The Immortality of the Soul Demonstrated by the Light of Nature

(London, 1657), 119.

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in England.91 Book I of Henry More’s Antidote was often read as a Cartesian exercise, though More claimed intellectual independence.92 In truth, More’s argument bore as much resemblance to the Platonic theory of reminiscence as to Descartes’ innatism—the idea of God being an example of the “reminders” of ideas which an “active sagacity in the soul” accesses through a process of “quick recollection” upon the prompts of sense experience.93 As with Charleton, religious innatism served two purposes for More: as a proof of the existence of God and as a proof that the human mind could hold knowledge about immaterial substances. This process involved the forming of the “full and clear conception” of knowledge that was “but imperfectly hinted to her [i.e. the mind] from external occasions.”94 The existence of this natural belief in God was proved by the “universal acknowledgement” of mankind: both the belief in God and the need to practice religious worship were maintained by all peoples.95 The evidence of religious diversity did not disprove the existence of innate religious ideas, only that “mankind is in a lapsed condition” in which our natural notions can easily become clouded over with error.96 There existed an “indelible idea of a being absolutely perfect in the mind of man.”97 One of the attributes of perfection is existence, therefore the being conceived of is “necessarily existent.”98 More shared with Charleton the view that the existence of an innate idea of God which was “natural, necessary, and essential to the soul of man” could be used against the atheistic charge—recently set out in Hobbes’ writings—that the idea of immaterial substance was beyond the comprehension of the human mind, not least because we had no sense experience of such a substance.99 Responding to the expected retort that this proof was to

91 On More’s changing views of Cartesianism see Gabbey (1982) and Gabbey (1995). 92 For example, William Molyneux, “Introduction” in Descartes (1680), Sig. a3r . See

Gabbey (1982, pp. 202–203) and Henry (1986, p. 189). 93 More (1652, p. 13). On More’s innatism more generally see Lichtenstein (1962, pp. 148–154); Rivers (1991–2000, vol. I pp. 45–46); and Sheppard (2015, pp. 139–166). 94 More (1652, p. 14). 95 More (1652, p. 33). 96 More (1652, p. 35). 97 More (1652, p. 6). 98 More (1652, p. 9). 99 More (1652, p. 19).

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“dress up a notion out of my fancy,” More argued that no individual could reason “without recource to settled notions deciphered in his own mind.”100 More was frequently cited as the leading English philosophical authority for the existence of innate religious knowledge. He was described by many as being, in the Anglican clergyman John Norris’s phrase, one of the “great improvers of learning” in recent years.101 More was also a best-selling author. His first biographer, Richard Ward, recorded the view from the London-based bookseller Richard Chiswell that “for twenty Years together, after the Return of King Charles the Second” More’s books “ruled all the Booksellers in London.”102 More’s influence has been largely seen as that which the Antidote’s second Book had on the growing English natural theological tradition, as evidenced by the use of the work in John Ray’s Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691).103 But More was also frequently presented as the leading English authority for the existence of the natural knowledge of God. This was true of both More’s adherents and critics. In his summary list of authors in the continent-wide debate over the innate idea of God, the sceptical Robert Ferguson viewed More’s Antidote as the principal English-language text defending the innate knowledge of God.104 Similarly, John Webster dedicated a lengthy passage of his The Diplsaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677) to rebuking More’s notion that the idea of an immaterial supreme being was an “easy” one, demonstrated by universal consent.105 In his Platonism Unveil’d (1700), Matthieu Souverain would describe Henry More as one of the Platonist “visionaries” whose “mystical theology” had “brought disorder and confusion into both the speculative part of religion and the duties of Christian piety.”106 But More’s innatism was received positively by many. In his dialogues Firmianus and Dubitantius (1674) Thomas Good, the Master of Balliol College Oxford, cited More for his view that it was the “instinct of 100 More (1652, p. 9). 101 Norris (1690, p. 74). 102 Ward (2000, p. 101). 103 For some interesting discussion see Mandelbrote (2007). 104 Ferguson (1675, p. 41). 105 Webster (1677, pp. 198–201). 106 Souverain (1700, p. 26). See also, for example, Flavel (1685, pp. 33–34).

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nature” to believe in an infinitely perfect God.107 When Damaris Masham defended innatism to John Locke in 1688, it was to More’s notion of the “active sagacity of the soul” that she turned.108 Other authors shared Ferguson’s ranking of More alongside Descartes on the issue of the innate idea of God. John Norris, notably sympathetic to More’s philosophy, described the ontological and innate idea proofs for the existence of God provided by the More and Descartes as having an “authority in this matter [that] claims a peculiar deference, because they are men that philosophize with a free and unaddicted genius, and write not as they read, but as they think.”109 Likewise, in his Origines sacrae (1662), Edward Stillingfleet ranked More’s proofs in the Antidote alongside Descartes’s Meditations, as the best modern exposition of the argument from the innate idea of God.110 We should not let More’s prominence lead us into thinking that religious innatism was the preserve of “Cambridge Platonists” and “Latitudinarians.” The description of human nature as having in-built religious knowledge was used for natural theological and apologetic purposes just as frequently by Puritans, Restoration nonconformists, Quakers, and Calvinists within the Anglican Church. The existence of innate religious ideas was appealed to by Quaker religious writers such as George Keith during his early years, Thomas Ellwood and Robert Barclay.111 Noticeably given the supposed associations between Quaker enthusiasm and Locke’s attack on innatism, this deployment of innatism did not serve as foundation of the Quaker notion of inner light. Barclay, for example, accepted the Cartesian argument for the innate idea of God but distinguished it from the “supernatural ideas” that are only “stirred up by some supernatural operation of God” affecting the “spiritual senses.” The supernatural idea of God, though dormant in all humanity, was only known by the godly, whereas the “natural idea of God” contended for by Descartes was known by “Ungodly as to Godly men.”112 The Quaker William Penn, similarly, distinguished between the “Light of Christ,”

107 Good (1674, p. 4, p. 26). 108 Damaris Cudworth Masham to John Locke 7 April 1688, Locke (1976–1989, vol.

III). 109 Norris (1689, p. 14). 110 Stillingfleet (1662, p. 400). 111 See, for example, Ellwood (1676, p. 117); Keith (1685, pp. 28–29). 112 Barclay (1686, pp. 13–15).

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which served as a capacity for knowing, and the existence of “innate notions or inward knowledge we have of God.”113 Most Quaker religious writers were quite in line with the mainstream when it came to the innate knowledge of God as proved by the consensus gentium and the consensus sapientium.114 But as with all the constellations identified in this essay, exceptions can be found: Edmund Elys, a defender if not an actual member of the Quakers, explicitly grounded the Quaker notion of the light of conscience upon innate ideas “written in the heart.”115 In the writings of Reformed theologians, the existence of innate religious knowledge ran alongside the doctrines of depravity and inexcusability.116 Within the Restoration Anglican Church, Robert South frequently sermonised on how the “seeds of moral honesty sown in [man’s] heart,” as discovered by the “innate light in every man,” meant there was no “ignorantia iuris [e.g. right of ignorance] … to give excuse to sin.”117 Without the Anglican Church, John Owen maintained in Calvinist vein that the existence of God is made “known unto us by the innate principles of our nature” and that the “mind does assent unto the principles of God’s being and authority antecedently unto any actual exercise of the discursive faculty of reason.”118 But Owen was clear that “no innate notions of our minds, no doctrines of the law” were capable of teaching the truths of the Gospel in the absence of the Holy Spirit.119 The natural knowledge of God promulgated through the conscience was also part of the Puritan and Presbyterian tradition, and a central theme in the casuistical works of William Ames, William Perkins, and Samuel Rutherford.120 Generally speaking, nonconformist theologians appealed to early modern authorities over ancient pagans and church fathers. Most frequently, the claim in Calvin’s Institutes that the “human mind [was]

113 Penn (1698, p. 55). See also p. 12. 114 Penn (1673, pp. 92–93) and Penn (1685, p. 16). 115 Elys (1695, p. 2). 116 Hampton (2008, pp. 1–38). 117 South (1692, pp. 556–557). I am taking my classification of South as a Reformed

theologian from Hampton (2008). 118 Owen (1677), p. 134, and pp. 130–39 more generally. See also Owen (1659, pp. 42–43, p. 47); and Owen (1680, p. 28, p. 30, p. 215, p. 303). 119 Owen (1682, p. 64). See, similarly, Owen (1671, esp. p. 146, pp. 151–152). 120 Tully (1988, p. 19). See also Dixon (2011).

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naturally endued with the knowledge of God” was echoed and paraphrased by prominent dissenting ministers in the Restoration,121 though equally common were citations in the Calvinist tradition of arguments of Huguenot texts such as Moses Amyraut’s Traité des religions (1631).122 Indeed, the principal contemporary continental sources in England for religious innatism came from the French natural theological tradition, as opposed to from Dutch Arminian or Remonstrant theology. Dissenting and Church of England theologians alike appealed to Philip du Plessis-Mornay’s Traité de la Verité de la Religion Chriétienne (1581; five English editions by 1646) for the argument that the consensus gentium demonstrated that the existence of God was a natural datum implanted in the mind. Theophilus Gale’s source for his own statement of religious innatism was the Huguenot David Derodon’s L’athéisme convaincu (1659, English translation 1676), which opened with a list of nine proofs of the existence of God which included innate knowledge demonstrated by the consensus gentium.123 The Jansenist Pierre Nicole’s “Discourse … l’existence de Dieu et l’immortalité de l’âme,” one of his Essais de morale (1672, first translated into English, 1677) described the “general apprehension of a deity” as a “kind of intuition,” the removal of which required doing violence to human nature.124 Locke translated Nicole’s essay in the 1670s, but abandoned possible publication upon receiving news of the existing translation project.125 The reason for the prevalence of French Huguenot and Jansenist authors seems to have been the greater volume of French anti-atheist apologetics.126 Reflecting the cultural ties between Scotland and the Low Countries, innatist Dutch authors are more frequently cited in works published north of the border. John Brown, a Scottish Covenanter in exile in the Netherlands, relied upon Gijsbert Voetius’s De Atheismo (1639) and Johannes Hoornbeek’s Summa controversiarium religionis (1653) in his criticism of the dangers of the Quaker Robert Barclay’s purported denial of what Brown termed

121 E.g. Charnock (1856, vol. I p. 35); Bates (1676, p. 82). 122 Bates (1676, pp. 78–79); Charnock (1856, vol. I p. 36); Baxter (1672, pp. 111–

112). 123 Gale (1672–1677, vol. I p. 2) citing Derodon (1659, p. 4). 124 Nicole (1828, p. 5). 125 Nicole (1677–1680); Locke (2000). 126 On this tradition see Despland (1979, pp. 243–249).

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the “inbred, innate, and imprinted notions of a deity, and of his nature and attributes.”127 While I have been identifying some of the key influences on seventeenth-century English and Scottish innatism, making such a survey can be a challenging endeavour. As James Gibson opined more than a century ago that the doctrine of innate ideas was a “vague and confused theory.”128 We are in constant danger of creating artificially clear delineations between sorts of arguments that overlap and between types of philosophical or theological tradition that blur. Authors used “innate” and “connate” merely as synonyms for “natural” without any further explication of what this meant.129 Often innatist language was just used to indicate that something was common, as Locke did himself in his Second Treatise of Government (1690) when he described natural law was “writ in the hearts of all mankind” (II.11).130 Some authors elided any subtle differences between the various traditions and arguments to emphasise the shared idea that humans were naturally religious. Locke provides us with a good example of this practice in the Essay where he grouped together as essentially the same, “innate principles,” “primary notions,” and “common notions,” and then treated these as ultimately indistinguishable from naïve innatism.131 The linguistic diffusiveness of much of seventeenth-century arguments for innatism is in evidence, too, in Sir George Mackenzie’s avowedly neo-Stoic description of humanity’s innate religiosity proved by the consensus gentium as rooted, variously, in an inherent “impressa” of God on the soul, an innate “idea” of God, and an “innate instinct” to belief in God.132 Some theologians and lay religious writers, however, were willing to discern noteworthy differences between these positions. Numerous authors who were critical of Platonic religious innatism separated their attack on these theories from other forms of religious innatism. The

127 Brown (1678, p. 108). 128 Gibson (1917, p. 32). 129 E.g. Fowler (1670, p. 94, pp. 212–213, p. 220, p. 224). 130 Locke (1988, p. 274). On whether Locke contradicted himself see, for example,

Drury (1980). 131 Locke (1690, p. i.i.1). See similarly Wilkins (1675, p. 55); Hale (1677, p. 352); Annesley (1674, p. 234). 132 Mackenzie (1663, esp. pp. 5–6, p. 8).

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differences between various types of religious innatism can be teased out through an examination of Nathaniel Culverwell’s posthumous An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature (1652). Originally preached as a set of commonplaces at Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1646, Culverwell’s Discourse was a popular work which went through six editions by 1669.133 The Discourse described the faculty of understanding as a tabula rasa but one imbued with certain mechanisms that aided the development of knowledge; Culverwell maintained the existence of innate principles that aided the formation of religious beliefs but denied the existence of innate religious ideas. In arguing this, Culverwell’s Discourse offered a very clear example of the terminological murkiness of seventeenth century discussions of the natural knowledge of religion. In explaining the powers of the faculty of the understanding, Culverwell noted that there existed “some clear and undelible principles” of thought “stamped and printed upon the being of man.”134 These principles are exercised in the process of interpreting information derived from the senses. On the basis of these “first and alphabetical notions” we are able to bring forth a “numerous sparkling posterity of secondary notions.”135 Thus the mind contains a set of innate rational processes—here Culverwell quotes Seneca’s description of these as “praesumptiones ”—which analyse sense information to form more developed, sophisticated conclusions about the law of nature.136 These processes act as the intellectual “lamp” lodged in the soul, able to guide the process of coming to knowledge of the divine law.137 Culverwell’s most succinct examination of how individuals come to knowledge of the deity came in his posthumously published short theological dissertation Spiritual Opticks; or, A Glasse Discovering the Weaknesse and Imperfection of a Christians Knowledge in this Life (1651). He set out the three alternative means (“glasses”) through which one could come to knowledge of God: those of scripture, of learning and of nature. The last means was a “common and obvious glass presented to every one’s view, and there are some glimmerings of common light, a 133 Green (2000, p. 611). 134 Culverwell (2001, p. 58). 135 Culverwell (2001, p. 58). 136 Culverwell (2001, p. 59). 137 Culverwell (2001, p. 65).

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lumen natura diffused amongst all, by which they may see into it.”138 The lumen natura was to be understood as a faculty or as a means of understanding truths about the deity. It describes the process by which individuals came to knowledge of God and nature, and not any ideas innate in their minds. This positioned the light of nature as a means to developing knowledge of God, as opposed to a set of ideas about God which we naturally hold.139 Culverwell’s Discourse was not only characteristic of the diffusiveness of the terminology surrounding religious innatism, but also of an underlying separation of Platonic and Stoic innatism. When we examine the position Culverwell took in his Discourse on Platonism and Herbert of Cherbury, we can clarify the difference here between a religious innatism based on the cognitive powers of the faculty of the understanding and a religious innatism based on ingrained knowledge in the understanding. Most likely with Robert Greville’s Nature of Truth (1640) in mind, Culverwell rejected the two interrelated Platonic doctrines of the pre-existence of the soul and the theory of “Platonic remembrance.”140 The deaf and the blind do not have notions of sounds or colours, proving that these notions are not innate. Were the Platonist to retort that “some outward objects must jog and waken these drowsy and slumbering notions” then they are admitting that knowledge has its “foundation in sensitives.”141 The Platonist cannot explain the diversity of opinions on matters upon which the “generality of men” have observed the same things.142 Culverwell directed his critique of Platonic epistemology directly at the “connate notion of a deity.”143 If the innate idea of a god exist, why did the Apostle Paul appeal not to this idea but to the natural world to convert the heathens? Culverwell rejects the view that innate religious ideas are latent knowledge in the mind that could be recovered through internal reflection. By contrast, Culverwell was respectful of Herbert’s arguments about “natural instincts.”144 He viewed Herbert’s De veritate as advocating 138 Culverwell (1651, p. 14). 139 Culverwell (1651, p. 17). 140 Culverwell (2001, p. 95). 141 Culverwell (2001, p. 95). 142 Culverwell (2001, p. 95). 143 Culverwell (2001, p. 92). 144 Culverwell (2001, p. 93).

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a position somewhere between the Platonic doctrine of an innate idea of God and the argument that humans come to knowledge of God in a “discoursive” manner (i.e. through reason alone).145 Culverwell’s Discourse can be seen as continuing Herbert’s arguments about the “natural instinct” being the faculty of the mind which contained the principles by which all other thought was processed and arranged. Culverwell aimed to make Herbert’s theories more intelligible, for they “deserved a little clearing.” He shared with Herbert the belief in the existence of “an innate power of the soul that is fitted and fashioned” to receive common religious notions.146 The powers of the understanding (or natural instincts) were defended by an appeal to universal consent: all peoples come to these common notions through the exercising of their “first principles” in experiencing the world: Culverwell claimed that he had “never heard of a nation apostatizing from common notions, from these first principles.”147 These “common notions” are not the result of innate knowledge, but are the necessary result of the workings of the faculty of the understanding upon engaging with the world.148 We find a similar rejection of innate religious ideas but acceptance of innate religious prolepses in the Scottish nonconformist minister Robert Ferguson’s Sober Inquiry into the Nature, Measure, and Principle of Moral Virtue (1673) and The Interest of Reason in Religion (1675).149 Like Culverwell, Ferguson sometimes appears as a proto-Lockean in literature contextualising Locke’s Essay.150 Ferguson, however, and like Culverwell whom he clearly read, was critical of innate religious ideas but argued for the existence of innate aids to religious belief, using innatist language and the appeal to the consensus gentium. In Sober Inquiry and Interest of Reason, Ferguson wanted to defend the existence of a universally known, obliging natural law against the voluntarist conception of morality he associated with Hobbes and Samuel Parker. But he also wanted to argue against those “lazy Protestants” who “keep men off from Christ” through their belief that “acquired habits, natural dispositions, innate abilities, 145 Culverwell (2001, p. 93). 146 Culverwell (2001, p. 95). See also p. 93. 147 Culverwell (2001, p. 85). 148 A very similar position was presented in Wilkins (1675, pp. 57–61). 149 Ferguson (1673) and Ferguson (1675). 150 Yolton (1956, pp. 42–43); Ashcraft (1986, pp. 54–64); Carey (1997).

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and moral virtues,” shorn of grace, are sufficient to “live acceptably to God.”151 The resulting balancing act meant Ferguson defended a form of religious innatism, while also stressing the light of nature’s insufficiency. He rejected both forms of the doctrine of innate ideas without ceremony. In Sober Inquiry, Ferguson denied the existence of “congenite notions,” not least because of their association with the fantastical doctrine of “Platonick preexistence” and the claim that “all knowledge is reminiscency.”152 Similarly, in Interest of Reason, Ferguson dismissed the “Cartesian argument” for the innate idea of God as “little better than a sophism” and claimed that “I know no ideas formally innate.”153 Innate ideas rejected, in both texts Ferguson proceeded to detail in Stoic phrasing how human nature possessed “sparks and seeds,” “inducements and media” of the knowledge of natural law that could be “matured and improved.”154 Upon reaching rational maturity, the soul would inevitably develop a “natural sagacity” for forming basic religious notions.155 These notions result from “proleptical principles,” which our reason acknowledges without “discourse or previous ratiocination.”156 They were “common notions,” proved by the “universal assent of mankind,” and which Ferguson, who firmly rejected the Platonic and Cartesian doctrines of innate ideas, termed “ingraftnotions and universal characters wrought into the essential composition of our nature.”157 The existence and potential knowability of natural law established, Ferguson turned to demonstrating the insufficiency of “right reason” to establish full religious knowledge. Ferguson expressly argued that “mankind in all ages and places [had] subscribed to the being of God” and viewed this consent as an unchallengeable proof.158 But universal consent exists only on some aspects of natural law and not all. Reliance upon the argument from universal consent to understand the content of 151 Ferguson (1673, Preface, p. 3, p. 18). 152 Ferguson (1673, pp. 57–58). 153 Ferguson (1675, p. 41). 154 Ferguson (1673, p. 15) and Ferguson (1675, p. 38). 155 Ferguson (1675, p. 41). 156 Ferguson (1675, p. 23, p. 26). 157 Ferguson (1673, pp. 59–60). 158 Ferguson (1675, p. 52).

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natural law will wreck upon the rocks of evident moral diversity. Similarly, “right reason” is able to intuit much natural law, but not all natural laws are intuitive and many require deduction. Further, even with pained effort, we are liable to come up short. Following the Fall, our “adulterate reason” is a weak tool: whereas Adam’s reason was a “sufficient instrumental conveyance” of full knowledge of natural law, now we find the “only sure, universal, perfect system of natural law [in] the Decalogue of Moses.”159 Finally, regardless of any cognitive aids to understanding natural law, it is only through the Gospel that we learn of the “instituted duties” and articles of faith which make up the “whole fabric of Christianity.”160 In this preceding section I have approached the topic of the status of religious innatism within seventeenth-century English and Scottish intellectual culture by drawing conclusions from the mass collation of passages discussing, deploying, or appealing to the doctrine. Several stand out as being of particular importance. Appeals to innate religious ideas and dispositions grew in the 1640s and 1650s in English and Scottish vernacular works of natural theology, anti-atheist apologetics and works on the relationship between reason and religion. These genres replaced casuistical writings as the principal locus of religious innatist claims, though the doctrine of the innate knowledge held in the conscience retained prominence in works of practical divinity. Discussion of religious innatism in either form was not limited to the “Cambridge Platonists” and “Latitudinarians,” but could be deployed, pretty much, across the whole continuum of Christian thought in seventeenth-century England and Scotland. The fact that religious innatism was commonplace indicates its malleability and utility as a claim about human nature for so many philosophers and theologians who would otherwise disagree on much. Culverwell or More or Rust could appeal, against Calvinist “sectarians,” to religious innatism as evidence of the positive ability of reason to come true natural religious knowledge. But this did not prevent those very same Reformed theologians from appealing to religious innatism as evidence that no-one had a right to be excused for their moral failings. In one sense, then, religious innatism was such a commonplace that it existed beneath the world of religious controversy and polemic. Different

159 Ferguson (1675, p. 28); Ferguson (1673, p. 82). 160 Ferguson (1673, p. 6).

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religious tendencies appealed to different authorities—ancient, patristic, scholastic, Reformed, Arminian and so on—but they did so to argue roughly the same thing. Platonic innatism could prove persuasive to the leading Laudian theologian Thomas Jackson, the radical Puritan Robert Greville, the “Cambridge Platonist” Henry More, the nonconformist minister Theophilus Gale and the idiosyncratic German-born evangelical loosely affiliated with the Anglicanism Anthony Horneck. A similar list could be written of writers appealing to Stoic prolepses. Amongst more learned philosophical treatises, the distinction was often made between these two forms of religious innatism: the Platonic/Cartesian appeal to innate ideas and the Epicurean/Stoic appeal to innate prolepses. We should view both of these traditions as fashionable philosophies that gained prominence in vernacular English and Scottish religious writing in the 1640s and 1650s and much of what takes place from the mid-century onwards involved the teasing out of the implications of these versions of religious innatism. We have seen with the examples of Culverwell and Ferguson, the subtle distinction between innate ideas and innate prolepses was of central importance to religious thinkers trying to offer persuasive accounts of how we come to our foundational religious notions. In the following section we shall see that (a) there was a parallel emergence of criticism of religious innatism from the 1640s and 1650s in response to the new, fashionable philosophies but that (b) it focused more on the failings of Platonic and Cartesian innatism rather than on the Epicurean/Stoic equivalent.

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Norris, John. 1689. Reason and Religion, or, the Grounds and Measures of Devotion. London. Norris, John. 1690. Reflections upon the Conduct of Human Life with Reference to the Study of Learning and Knowledge. London. Osler, Margaret J. 1979. Descartes and Charleton on Nature and God. Journal of the History of Ideas. 40:445–456. Osler, Margaret J. 1994. Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Owen, John. 1659. Of the Divine Originall, Authority, Self-Evidencing Light, and Power of the Scriptures. Oxford. Owen, John. 1671. Exercitations Concerning the Name, Original, Nature, Use, and Continuance of a Day of Sacred Rest. London. Owen, John. 1677. The Reason of Faith. London. Owen, John. 1680. A Continuation of the Exposition of the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews. London. Owen, John. 1682. A Discourse of the Work of the Holy Spirit in Prayer. London. Parkin, Jon. 2007. Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England, 1640–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pelling, Edward. 1696. A Discourse Concerning the Existence of God. London. Penn, William. 1673. The Invalidity of John Faldo’s Vindication of his book, called Quakerism no Christianity. London. Penn, William. 1685. A Defence of the Duke of Buckingham’s Book of Religion and Worship. London. Penn, William. 1698. A Defence of a Paper, Entitled, Gospel-Truths, second edition. London. Pierce, Thomas. 1679. A Decad of Caveats to the People of England of General Use in All Times. London. Platt, John. 1982. Reformed Thought and Scholasticism: The Arguments for the Existence of God in Dutch Theology, 1575–1650. Leiden, NL: Brill. Pocock, J. G. A. 1985. Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England. In L’Età dei lumi: studi storici sul Settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi, 2:525–562. Napoli: Jovene. Pocock. J. G. A. 1988. ‘Post-Puritan England and the Problem of Enlightenment’. In Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. Perez Zagorin, 91–111. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Reid, Jasper. 2015. The Common Consent Argument from Herbert to Hume. Journal of the History of Philosophy. 53:401–433. Rust, George. 1661. Letter of Resolution concerning Origen. London. Rust, George and Glanvill, Joseph. 1682. Two Choice and Useful Treatises. London.

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CHAPTER 3

Anti-Innatism c.1650–c.1690

Abstract Arguments against innatism developed concurrently with proreligious innatist claims. Most important here were: (1) writings within the natural law tradition, most importantly those of Richard Cumberland and Thomas Hobbes; (2) polemical works attacking the purported fanatical and enthusiastic elements of Platonic and Cartesian notions of innate ideas, associated most significantly with Samuel Parker; and (3) more positive accounts of the benefits of the new experimental philosophy for understanding God’s creation, with correlate suggestions that religious innatism was less persuasive than the argument from design. The chapter also discusses how Socinianism, Remonstrant theology and the argument from tradition were of comparably minimal influence in the arguments against innatism. Keywords Natural law · Religious fanaticism · Experimental philosophy · Joseph Glanvill · Thomas Hobbes · Robert Boyle

Arguments against religious innatism were far less common in this period than arguments in favour of it. But anti-innatist positions were prominent in texts contributing to three overlapping debates: (1) modern natural law writings, from John Selden’s De jure naturali et gentium (1640) onwards, that dispensed with innatism as an unhelpful and inadequate basis for © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. J. W. Mills, The Religious Innatism Debate in Early Modern Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84323-6_3

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morality; (2) polemical works hostile to Platonic corruptions of primitive Christianity and which associationed Platonism and Cartesianism with fanaticism; and (3) that branch of natural theology, built on recent advances in natural philosophy, that viewed the argument from design as supremely capable to proving the existence and attributes of God. The argument that “the doctrine of innate ideas was rapidly becoming untenable” during the Restoration, however, is unpersuasive.1 The near ubiquity of claims in favour of religious innatism help explain the frequent criticism of innate ideas or anticipations. We could instead see the emergence of anti-innatist arguments as being a reaction to the concurrent rise to prominence of innatism in much apologetic writing from the 1650s onwards. But before we turn to consider these significant developments, we should note the existence of theological traditions and arguments that do not seem to have had a comparably important role. The reception of Socinianism in England did not provide the challenge to the natural knowledge of religion that might be expected from a reading of Socinus’ own arguments on natural religion.2 Socinus positioned man as a species with no natural framing towards religion other than a reasoning faculty that could interpret scripture. He stressed that Christianity was a religion of action in which individuals have the free will and reasoning ability to make conscious and independent ethical and religious decisions. Religious belief, then, was not an inherent tendency built into the soul, but a voluntary and conscious choice resulting from consideration of scripture. All religion owed itself to original revelation passed on through scripture. The anthropological evidence of recent travel literature pointed to the existence of atheist societies—the argument from universal consent did not hold. As Socinus summarised, “religion is by no means something natural.”3 There are reasons to be cautious, however, about the significance of Socinus’ claims within the subject covered here. In rejecting both religious innatism and the argument from universal consent, Socinus’ doctrines were one step removed from most strands of English and Scottish Protestantism. Indeed, Socinus’ stark position on natural religion was

1 Spurr (1988, p. 573). 2 On the latter see Mortimer (2009) and Mortimer (2010, pp. 2–3, pp. 17–18). 3 Socinus (1656, vol. I p. 273). See also vol. I, pp. 537–539.

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too much for his own supporters and many English Socinians found appeals to religious innatism a useful tool for their anti-trinitarianism. Thus, in his A Confession of Faith Touching the Holy Trinity (1648) John Biddle, the most influential mid-century English Socinian, argued that the doctrine of the trinity “thwarts the common notion that all men have of God.”4 His successor in importance, Stephen Nye, made the very same claim in his Observations of the Four Letters of Dr. John Wallis, concerning the Trinity (1691).5 As it did with every other theological position, religious innatism proved useful to Socinians wishing to paint opinions they rejected as unnatural and therefore wrong. Moreover, as Sarah Mortimer has shown, Socinian literature proved stimulating reading for many between the 1630s and 1660, but often in a piecemeal fashion and focused more on issues relating to civil theology than to Socinus’s conception of human nature.6 The denial of innate ideas was more prominent in the United Provinces. But while Dutch theology provided a body of texts for any English or Scottish reader with anti-nativist inclinations, these were rarely cited in published discussion of natural religion. Rejection of innatism was not a characteristic of all Remonstrant theology, with Jacob Arminius claiming that man was an animal religiosum with natural religious knowledge. Several Remonstrant theologians were prominent anti-nativists, but their arguments gained little traction in England and Scotland. Conrad Vorstius’s denial of religious innatism in his Tractatus theologicus de Deo (1606) was rarely mentioned in England. While Gilbert Burnet claimed that moderate theologians in mid-seventeenth-century England “read Episcopius much,” they did not reiterate Simon Episcopius’ expressly anti-nativist claim, made in his Institutiones theologicae (1650), that the soul was a tabula rasa and that religious belief must be freely chosen.7 Hugo Grotius’s distinctive version of Christianity, set out in his De veritate (1627) shared similarities with Socinus’ position. There was no natural knowledge of God and people learn true religion through reading scripture. Humans are individuals with free will and the capacity to make choices about their religion; they are not framed by their nature to believe

4 Biddle (1648), Preface. 5 Nye (1691, p. 4). 6 Mortimer (2010). 7 Burnet (1725, vol. I p. 188). Mortimer (2010, pp. 214–215).

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certain religious tenets.8 Also rarely mentioned was the rejection of innate religious notions found in Book II of Franco Burgersdijk’s student textbook Institutiones metaphysicae (1640).9 Remonstrant theology, like Socinianism, was more concerned with the relationship between human nature and religion for reasons to do with the relationship between church and state, than for reasons of apologetics. Of similarly limited importance, at least until the 1690s, was the argument for the origin of true religious notions resulting from revelation or the transmission of tradition alone. Thinkers making this claim usually stressed the predominance of disagreement, not consensus, on religious matters. The most learned contribution was Selden’s De jure naturali et gentium. Selden had argued that the consensus gentium argument could not stand the weight of evidence of moral and religious diversity. Instead, the knowledge of the tenets of natural law that were known solely by the Hebrews stemmed from transmission of Noachite tradition, though Selden also wrote passingly of man’s “active intellect” being able to discern natural law.10 In his Of Government and Obedience (1654), the royalist John Hall of Richmond argued that diversity of religious belief, as much within as between societies, was the inevitable consequence of the propensities of individual human fears. For peoples without access to scripture or reliable tradition, religion consisted in beliefs and behaviours resulting from inevitable concern about future rewards and punishments. The precise character of these expectations, however, differed from individual to individual, according to their individual passions and opinions. As Hall put it, from “the diversity of understanding, follows the diversity of religions.” The only true religion was the one found in revelation, since appealing to religious innatism founded religion on the weak grounds of humanity’s “differing but altogether imperfect” intellects.11 The physician and philosopher Richard Burthogge argued in 1675 against the view that the universality of common religious notions was the result of innate religious ideas and claimed them to be “the main and substantial

8 Compare Mortimer (2014) and Miller (1999–2000). 9 Burgersdijk (1640), II:iv.ii. See also Gellera (2016). 10 Selden (1640), I.6 and especially I.7. See also Sommerville (1984). 11 Hall (1654, p. 216.)

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points of the first tradition and consequently retained in all the following” religions.12 The argument from tradition had little wider purchase because of its negative connotations with the atheist argument that religion was a man-made creation. We can find the occasional philosophical engagement, such as Culverwell’s chapter of his Discourse, entitled “How the Law of Nature is Discovered? Not by Tradition,” directed at Selden.13 But usually the argument prompted criticism from a variety of religious thinkers contributing to the fields of natural theology and anti-atheist apologetics, who all wished to ground religion in something more secure. In his Antidote, Henry More had dismissed the argument from tradition as clearly unable to account for the universal consent in the existence of God.14 In his influential anti-atheist sermon The Wisdom of Being Religious (1664), the Arminian John Tillotson dismissed the idea that belief in God was “transmitted from hand to hand” given universal consent in belief in God amongst societies both civilised and “rude and barbarous.”15 The High Churchman Edward Pelling, in his Discourse concerning the Existence of God (1696), could just as freely dismiss the argument from tradition as being useless in arguments against atheists, because it presumed the truth of Christianity, and because it was not a “sufficient cause” for explaining universal consent.16 The connotations of the argument from tradition would begin to shift from negative to positive in the 1690s and 1700s, as deism and freethinking replaced atheism as the main threat to Christianity. But for the several decades before then, however, the argument from tradition, as exemplified by Tillotson’s sermon, was primarily viewed as one of the canon of atheist arguments and associated with the accusation that religion was a “mere state engine and a politic device.”17 Selden’s re-grounding of natural law on the tradition known and transmitted by the progeny of Noah was one of several contributions to the seventeenth-century debate on knowledge of natural law that were critical 12 Burthogge (1675, pp. 340–341). 13 Culverwell (2001, pp. 65–70). 14 More (1652, p. 32). 15 Tillotson (1664, p. 21). 16 Pelling (1696, p. 82). See pp. 82–86. 17 Tillotson (1664, p. 21).

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of innatism. While Selden seems to have had little influence on the larger cultural standing of innatism, Thomas Hobbes became the greatest single philosophical threat to the innate knowledge of religion and natural law prior to Locke’s Essay. In his contribution to the Objections to Descartes’ philosophy, Hobbes boldly averred that “we do not have an idea of God, or of the soul” and, likewise, “we do not have an idea of substance.”18 This position was reiterated across his oeuvre. In Leviathan, for example, Hobbes provided detailed discussions of the impossibility of knowledge of incorporeal substances and of the origin of religion in the passion of fear. The origin of all knowledge was found in sense experience. Hobbes rejected accounts of knowledge of non-experienced phenomena as, literally, non-sense. Whatever we can think of “is finite.” We can have “no idea or conception of anything we call infinite,” with use of “infinite” only demonstrating that we do not know the boundaries of the things we described as “finite.” We have no positive idea of God and, thus, when we say that say that God is infinite this is “not to make us conceive him … but that we may honour him.”19 As Hobbes has Primus say in the opening dialogue of his Historia ecclesiastica (1688), “beyond his work, his sacred laws and his name to be feared, men cannot know anything about the Deity.”20 We can call God an incorporeal being if we choose, but this just indicates our reverence towards him, not a fact about him. As we have seen with Henry More and Walter Charleton, many natural theologians and lay religious writers used Platonic and Cartesian innatism to explain precisely how humans did have knowledge of an incorporeal God. The most significant and explicit deployment of innatism as a direct response to Hobbes could be found in Ralph Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678).21 He used innatism against what he termed the “first atheistic argument, that there is no idea of God” and against the accusation that, instead, God was the creation of either fear or priestcraft and scheming politicians. Cudworth held that 18 Descartes (1985, vol. II p. 130). 19 Hobbes (1996, p. 23). 20 Hobbes (2008, p. 307). I am sidestepping the question of whether Hobbes believed that God was a corporeal being or whether this was esoteric atheism, because this did not factor into his challenge to innate religious ideas. But see the contrasting accounts of Curley (1995); Leijenhorst (2004); and Cromartie (2008). 21 Duncan (forthcoming).

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humanity’s “natural prolepsis” to believe in the existence of God was a “sufficient confutation” of Hobbes’s argument. This “sense of a deity” urges itself “more immediately upon us” and comes before “ratiocination in us.”22 Cudworth accumulated a variety of ancient authorities to support this claim, including Sextus Empiricus, Plato, Dio Chrysostom and, surprisingly given his usually associations with the soul as a tabula rasa, Aristotle. For many, however, Cudworth’s efforts were characteristic of a flawed approach. Many theologians and philosophers, especially those sceptical of Platonism, believed Hobbes offered a challenge which could not be answered by merely reiterating an appeal to innate religious knowledge. Richard Cumberland’s (1632–1718) setting aside of innatism in De legibus naturae (1672)—widely cited in the debate that followed—is a good example of the re-assessment in the face of Hobbes. Cumberland politely dismissed the relevance of Selden’s argument about the knowledge of natural law “by tradition only,” as failing to obligate anyone but the Hebrews themselves.23 The “supposition of innate ideas,” likewise, played no useful purpose in explaining the origin of knowledge of an obligating natural law because the doctrine could never “be proved against the Epicureans”—including Hobbes.24 The task of outlining a secure and valid theory of natural law could only be achieved through arguments based on the exercise of right reason and clear propositions developed into arguments in a mathematical manner. Cumberland deliberately did not maintain that Platonic innatism was false, only that it did not serve the concerns of contemporary moral philosophy. “Such reasoning” as the Platonists offered, as Jon Parkin puts it, “argued past the empirical claims of writers like Hobbes.”25 By the 1690s, Cumberland would be one of the principal authorities on innatism and natural law. Two major and interrelated themes of Restoration anti-innatism were that innatism encouraged enthusiasm, fanaticism, and heresy and that experimental philosophy was the only secure route to natural philosophical (and therefore natural theological) knowledge. A particularly illustrative example of the accusation of fanaticism appeared in the one-time

22 Cudworth (1678, pp. 633–634). See also G. A. J. Rogers (1996). 23 Cumberland (2007, p. 250). 24 Cumberland (2007, pp. 252–253). See also pp. 248–249. 25 Parkin (1999, p. 91).

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parliamentarian chaplain and physician John Webster’s The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677), a work which offered naturalistic explanations of witchcraft and which received the imprimatur of the Royal Society. Webster bristled at More’s claim that whatever he termed a “common notion” must be true and whoever denied the purported notion’s truth was denying their “own faculties.” This was both a poor argument—such common notions did not exist—but also an exertion of power in which More determined the boundaries of right and wrong on the basis of what More thought was natural. In terms of the idea of God, to Webster, More had indeed dressed up a “melancholy figment” of his fancy as an unchallengeable truth that we can have an idea of immaterial spirit. The latter Webster strenuously denied. Such inwardlooking innatism served to “idolise humane abilities and carnal reason” at the expense of the hard work involved in finding out the “true notions and knowledge of natural things.” Webster did not hold back: More’s purported self-evident idea of God was mere “phantastry and imaginary enthusiasm.”26 While Webster was forthright in his criticism, his accusations paled in comparison to the most consistent and virulent critic of Platonic and Cartesian innatism during the Restoration: the Oxford divine, and briefly Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Parker.27 We will see later the high standing of Parker’s anti-innatism in the period after 1690. But even by the mid1670s Robert Ferguson was positioning Parker one of the most significant English-language, anti-innatist contributors to the European debate over innate ideas. Ferguson even plagiarised Parker in setting out his own anti-innatist statement, which accused Descartes of actively denigrating the argument from design.28 Parker’s attack was primarily on the innate ideas variant of religious innatism and, in particular, on what he viewed as being the fantastical speculation of Cartesian and Platonic innatism. In his Tentamina physico-theologica de Deo (1665), Parker attacked the innatism set out in Descartes’s third Meditation. He did so in response to the utilisation of Descartes’s argument in the recent publications of Henry More, Walter Charleton and Edward Stillingfleet. Heavily indebted to Pierre Gassendi’s own attacks on Cartesian thought, Parker argued

26 Webster (1677, pp. 198–201). 27 Levitin (2014, pp. 28–75), and Parkin (1999, pp. 121–125). 28 Ferguson (1675, p. 41, p. 46). Glanvill (1675, pp. 32–33).

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that to maintain that knowledge was acquired without sensation was an act of fanaticism. He demonstrated a tremendous hostility towards the use of innatist metaphors in philosophical prose, seeing this speculative thought as clouding over clear reasoning and argument. The aggression towards innatists was continued when Parker published an expansion of the Tentamina in 1678 under the title of Disputationes de Deo. Here he increased the level of ad hominem attack directed towards Descartes.29 In his Free and Impartial Censure of Platonick Philosophie (1666) and his Account of the Nature and Extent of the Divine Dominion and Goodness (1667), Parker attacked the Platonic variant of innate ideas alongside the related doctrine of anamnesis and the pre-existence of the soul, doctrines which Parker described as the foundations of Plato’s “natural theology.”30 As with the Tentamina, Parker attacked those Platonist principles which encouraged unmoored “speculations about theological matters.”31 The theories of pre-existence and reminiscence were metaphysical missteps and the result of the Platonic method of resolving “knowledge into its first and fundamental principles” and rejecting the “testimony and judgement of sense.” Experiential knowledge was merely secondary; the truth of something was judged instead by “a conformity to their archetypal ideas.”32 The problem with such theories was that they had no empirical evidence: they were instances of “speculative fanaticism,” involving detached theorising and the purposeful abandonment of the evidence of human experience, and leading to heresies born of lively imaginations.33 Moreover, because it discussed matters that it was impossible to have information about, Platonist natural theology was (in phrasing that echoed Hobbes’s discussion about the reach of human reason in Leviathan) literally “non-sense.”34 Parker ratcheted up the accusations even further when he maintained that it was the Platonic method of thinking that had corrupted primitive Christianity. Platonism involved an unjustified willingness to speculate in a pseudo-authoritative fashion on matters which we can know nothing 29 Levitin (2014). 30 Parker (1666, pp. 3–4, p. 40). 31 Parker (1666, p. 47). 32 Parker (1666, pp. 53–54). 33 Parker (1666, p. 67). 34 Parker (1666, p. 76).

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about. Indeed, Parker noted, the first “Apostolical notion” of heresy was holding views on things humans knew nothing about—contemporary Platonists, then, were heretics bent on corrupting true religion.35 Aligning himself with “the mechanical and experimental philosophy” associated with the recently founded Royal Society, Parker maintained that only through the faculty of the understanding apprehending the data of sense experience could individuals come to understand basic religious notions.36 From the 1660s onwards the appeal to intuitively known first principles in natural philosophy was gradually being replaced by a hypothesis-driven, probabilistic method, and a shift to observation and experiment. To some natural theologians, such as the nonconformist Matthew Barker, the privileging of “curious enquiries into natural causes” and viewing natural philosophy as the principal source for true religious knowledge had led many to “have choaked the innate notices of a deity within their hearts.”37 But many proponents of the new science positioned themselves as providing better evidence and arguments for natural theology. Walter Charleton attacked Plato’s doctrine of reminiscence as a “hypochondriack conceit,” which ignored the hard truth that man is a “poor ignorant thing, sent to school in the world [and who] must sweat in the exploration and pursuit of each single verity.”38 Robert Hooke would criticise the ancients’ approach to natural philosophy partly because they were “much inclined to a belief of implanted notions” which they followed instead of studying nature industriously.39 As Thomas Sprat put it in his manifesto The History of the Royal Society of London (1667), the natural philosopher examined the “plain and undigested objects of his senses, without considering them as they are joined into common notions.”40 Robert Boyle distinguished between the “new” or “mechanical philosophy,” built upon the foundations of “reason and experience” and practiced by the “Virtuosi” and the old system of the “School-Philosophers” based

35 Parker (1666, p. 90). 36 Parker (1666, p. 45). 37 Barker (1674, p. 54). 38 Charleton (1654, p. 208). 39 Hooke (1705, p. 4). 40 Sprat (1667, p. 334).

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on “abstracted reasons” and musing primarily upon the mind’s “congenit or common notions and ideas.”41 Boyle’s assessment did not apply to all “School-Philosophers.” Thinkers in the late Aristotelian tradition could, as was the case with physician Richard Burthogge’s Organum vetus & novum (1678), criticise the focus on “connatural and ingrafted notions” as maintaining that “contemplation of our own minds” was more important “than observation of the world and experience.”42 The need to balance defences of new approaches to natural philosophy and the production of apologetic works could lead to writers placing strikingly different emphasis on innate knowledge in different works. A good example is the output of Anglican clergyman and defender of the new science Joseph Glanvill. In his Vanity of Dogmatising (1661), Glanvill warned against “confidence in opinions.” He wrote in stridently sceptical terms of how we come “into the world like the unformed cub.” What notions we believe to be result of “universal light” are merely what we were “baptised into” during our early education; purportedly selfevident truths are often just notions “circumscribed by the confines of our belief, and the doctrines we were brought up in.”43 In his Lux orientalis (1662), by contrast, Glanvill held for the existence of “congenite implicit principles” in the soul. He did so as evidence, against Hobbes, that we do have conceptions which are not and which could not be received by “external sense.”44 But in his defence of the Royal Society and the new science, Plus ultra (1668), Glanvill averred that natural philosophy “must not be the work of the mind turned in upon itself” and philosophers could not rely upon any “native store” of notions.45 What happened next to Glanvill is instructive. Plus ultra drew the ire of diverse critics who charged Glanvill and the Royal Society, nervous about its fledging reputation, with encouraging worldliness, atheism, and materialism.46 Glanvill appended to Philosophia pia (1671), his defence of the “religious temper and tendencies” of the Royal Society’s “experimental philosophy,” an essay “A Recommendation and Defence of Reason in the 41 Boyle (1690, pp. 4–5). 42 Burthogge (1678, pp. 55–56). 43 Glanvill (1661, pp. 128–29). 44 Glanvill (1662, pp. 22–23). 45 Glanvill (1668, p. 52). 46 Lewis (2007, p. 196).

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Affairs of Religion,” previously published the year before. In the latter Glanvill retreated into a now-orthodox account of the faculty of reason being imbued with basic religious notions held “independent of other principles and deductions; commanding a sudden assent; and acknowledged by all sober mankind.”47 In his endeavour to refute accusations that the Society’s experimental method was fostering atheism and materialism, Glanvill moved away from his earlier scepticism and allowed for a strong innate component to the workings of reason. The controversy caused by Glanvill’s implicit initial abandonment of religious innatism helps us understand the respectful attitude towards innatism adopted by Boyle (1672–1691), the leading natural philosopher of the age. Boyle mentioned the topic of human nature’s innate aids to religious belief in relation to two larger themes. The first was his stress on the need for intellectual humility in the pursuit of knowledge of God, the insufficiency of innate knowledge and the benefits of experimental philosophy in opening the mind up to God. In his dialogue A Discourse of Things Above Reason (1681), Boyle had Sophronius claim that God “furnished man either with certain innate ideas or models and principles, or with a faculty of power and disposition to easily frame them.” But, as his interlocutor Eugenius noted, these innate aids do not provide us with “perfect knowledge” of things “above reason” and that on such subjects we should “speak but with a peculiar wariness and modest diffidence.”48 Boyle repeatedly recommended humility when confronting our weak faculties, such as in his Of the High Veneration Man’s Intellect Owes to God (1685).49 Likewise, in his The Christian Virtuoso (1690), he stated that religious knowledge stemming from “innate notions and sentiments” should be “highly prized,” yet the study of scripture offered proofs of the existence and attributes of God “far more excellent and complete” than innate ideas ever could.50 Our “congenite” or “easily and early acquired” notions are “but very few in comparison of those that are requisite to judge aright … in natural philosophy or theology.”51

47 Glanvill (1671, pp. 161–162). 48 Boyle (1681, pp. 85–86). 49 Boyle (1685). 50 Boyle (1690, p. 77). 51 Boyle (1690, pp. 112–113). See also pp. 103–104.

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The second and more common context in which Boyle discussed innate ideas was in terms of their utility as a proof for the existence of God. He frequently examined the truth and apologetic usefulness of religious innatism and he was subtly sceptical of its persuasiveness. This involved gently challenging the innatist proof’s sufficiency. In one of his first publications, Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy (1663), Boyle noted that, regardless of “any such innate belief or persuasion of a God as is supposed connatural to man,” the “study of physiology” provides sufficient proof of the existence of God.52 In his manuscript treatise on atheism, written throughout the late 1670s and 1680s, Boyle reclassified the innatist proof for the existence of God as a sub-category of the argument from design, thereby quietly but firmly diminishing its importance.53 In his late A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things (1688), Boyle emphasised that his defence of studying final causes did not aim to “weaken the argument drawn from the inbred notion of God,” but to argue that there were no good reasons “why we should give up any other strong argument” for the existence and attributes of God.54 The Cartesians wrongly claimed for the sufficient of our innate idea of God for proving the existence and attributes of God. It was clear, Boyle argued, that God had enabled man to “know his wisdom and goodness” by contemplating “without, upon the world, as within, upon the mind.”55 Boyle was not, however, a polemicist trying to encourage the removal of innatism from the gamut of proofs. He repeatedly advocated retaining the use of an innate idea of God primarily because the argument served an apologetic purpose as part of the cumulative argument strategy prominent in Restoration natural theology. Boyle wished to avoid controversy given that “diverse learned men have acquiesced” in the Cartesian “innate idea” of God.56 He was not like the former Glasgow University regent George Sinclair who asserted that the argument from innate ideas was

52 Boyle (1663, p. 102). 53 E.g. Royal Society, Boyle Papers vol. 2. fol. 58r , Boyle Papers Project https://www.

bbk.ac.uk/boyle/papers/volume-2/volume-2-fol.57v-58r [Accessed on 12 June 2021]. 54 Boyle (1688, p. 35). 55 Boyle (1688, p. 36). 56 Boyle (1688, p. 36).

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one of many “absurd and dangerous” Cartesian arguments that directed attention away from the argument from design and which should be abandoned.57 Boyle’s ecumenical attitude was in evidence again in the main conclusion to his unpublished manuscript treatise De diversitate religionum. Underneath all the evidence of the varieties of belief and practice in “disparate religions” of the world, all peoples are “definitely agreed, that there is some true religion.” This universal consent was evidence of “the very voice of nature, or, if you prefer, an innate precept of mankind” (my italics).58 Boyle’s recalling of religious innatism from the forefront of proofs was a characteristic move in natural theology in the decades after 1690. Boyle’s successors, however, were more forthright. In passage of his The Wisdom of God (1691) entitled “the Cartesian hypothesis considered and censured,” John Ray, reiterating Boyle’s defence of studying final causes, held that the demonstration of the existence of God from “the innate idea” of God was an “obscure” argument neither “satisfying many of the learned themselves, and being too subtle and metaphysical to be apprehended by vulgar capacities.”59 Ray’s position on innate religious aids, however, is indicative of our theme that denial of the Cartesian argument from innate ideas did not mean denial of all innatist reasoning. He claimed humans had an “innate prolepsis” of God’s prudence prompted by the evident design in nature. This prolepsis, however, did not have the status as a proof for Ray, but served as a description of human reasoning.60 Between c.1650 and c.1690 publications articulating pro-innatist positions greatly outnumbered those asserting the contrary. The two broad positions gained momentum as a topic of religious and philosophical debate at the same time. Religious innatism became the mainstream position, and anti-innatism emerged in reaction. The anti-innatist argument did not achieve a position of strength until the very end of the century. Some of its proponents, such as Cumberland and Boyle were circumspect in their criticism, whereas others, like Webster and Parker, stood out for their strident controversialism. The appeal to the innate idea of God or innate prolepsis to form that idea were utilised

57 Sinclair (1685), Sig. A5v –A6r . 58 Boyle (1999–2000, vol. xiv, pp. 263–264). 59 Ray (1691, p. 23). 60 Ray (1693, e.g. p. 133).

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across the whole continuum of Christian thought and across a variety of popular genres, while anti-innatist positions commonly appeared in three narrower contexts. These were natural law treatises sceptical about the persuasiveness of grounding knowledge of the law of nature in the “common notions” of humankind; criticism of Platonism and Cartesian innatism, because of its associations with religious “enthusiasm” and “fanaticism”; and works promoting the new experimental science, which viewed innatism as misdirecting attention away from study of the natural world. Thus, while Locke’s Essay served to contribute something innovative to the late seventeenth-century debate, there was a sizeable, sophisticated, and insurgent challenge to innatism already formed during the previous decades.

References Barker, Matthew. 1674. Natural Theology. London. Biddle, John. 1648. A Confession of Faith Touching the Holy Trinity. London. Boyle, Robert. 1663. Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy. Oxford. Boyle, Robert. 1681. A Discourse of Things Above Reason. London. Boyle, Robert. 1685. Of the High Veneration Man’s Intellect Owes to God. Oxford. Boyle, Robert. 1688. A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things. London. Boyle, Robert. 1690. The Christian Virtuoso. London. Boyle, Robert. 1999–2000. De diversitate religionum. In Robert Boyle, The Works of Robert Boyle, 14 vols., ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, XIV:237–265. London: Pickering & Chatto. Burgersdijk, Franco. 1640. Institutiones metaphysicae. Leiden. Burnet, Gilbert. 1725. History of His Own Time, 3 vols. London. Burthogge, Richard. 1675. Cavsa dei, or, An Apology for God. London. Burthogge, Richard. 1678. Organum vetus & novum. London. Charleton, Walter. 1654. Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana. London. Cromartie, Alan. 2008. The God of Thomas Hobbes. The Historical Journal. 51:857–879. Cudworth, Ralph. 1678. The True Intellectual System of the Universe. London. Culverwell, Nathaniel. 2001 [1646]. An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, ed. Robert A. Greene and Hugh MacCallum. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Cumberland, Richard. 2007 [1672/1727]. Treatise of the Law of Nature, trans. John Maxwell, ed. Jon Parkin. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.

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Curley, Edwin. 1995. Hobbes Versus Descartes. In Descartes and His Contemporaries: Meditations, Objections and Replies, ed. Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene, 97–109. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Descartes, René. 1985. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols, ed. John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duncan, Stewart. Forthcoming. Cudworth as a Critic of Hobbes. In A Companion to Hobbes, ed. Marcus Adams. Oxford: Blackwell. Ferguson, Robert. 1675. The Interest of Reason in Religion. London. Gellera, Giovanni. 2016. The Epistemology of Sense from Calvin to Hutcheson. Journal of Scottish Thought. 7:148–170. Glanvill, Joseph. 1661. The Vanity of Dogmatizing. London. Glanvill, Joseph. 1662. Lux orientalis. London. Glanvill, Joseph. 1668. Plus ultra: Or, the Progress and Advancement of Knowledge Since the Days of Aristotle. London. Glanvill, Joseph. 1671. Philosophia Pia; or, a Discourse of the Religious Temper, and Tendencies of the Experimental Philosophy which is Profest by the Royal Society. London. Glanvill, Joseph. 1675. An Account of Mr Ferguson, His Commonplace Book in Two Letters. London. Hall, John, of Richmond. 1654. Of Government and Obedience as They Stand Directed and Determined by Scripture and Reason. London. Hobbes, Thomas. 1996 [1651]. Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, student edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobbes, Thomas. 2008 [1688]. Historia ecclesiastica, ed. Patricia Springborg, Patricia Stablein and Paul Wilson. Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur. Hooke, Robert. 1705. The Present State of Natural Philosophy, and where it is deficient. In Robert Hooke, The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, ed. R. Waller, 3–7. London, 1705. Leijenhorst, Cees. 2004. Hobbes’ Corporeal Deity. Rivista Di Storia Della Filosofia. 59:73–95. Levitin, Dmitri. 2014. Rethinking English Physico-Theology: Samuel Parker’s Tentamina de Deo (1665). Early Science and Medicine. 19:28–75. Lewis, Rhodri. 2007. Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, Jon. 1999–2000. Innate Ideas in Stoicism and Grotius. Grotiana. 20– 21:143–162. More, Henry. 1652. An Antidote against Atheism. London. Mortimer, Sarah. 2009. Human Liberty and Human Nature in the Works of Faustus Socinus and His Readers. Journal of the History of Ideas. 70:191–211. Mortimer, Sarah. 2010. Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Mortimer, Sarah. 2014. De veritate: Christianity and Human Nature. Grotiana. 35:75–94. Nye, Stephen. 1691. Observations of the Four Letters of Dr. John Wallis, Concerning the Trinity. London. Parker, Samuel. 1666. Free and Impartial Censure of Platonick Philosophie. Oxford. Parkin, Jon. 1999. Science, Religion, and Politics in Restoration England: Richard Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae. Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society. Pelling, Edward. 1696. A Discourse Concerning the Existence of God. London. Ray, John. 1691. The Wisdom of God. London. Ray, John. 1693. Three Physico-Theological Discourses. London. Rogers, G. A. J. 1996. Innate Ideas and the Ancient Philosophy in Cudworth’s Epistemology. In “Mind Senior to the World”: Stoicismo e origenismo nella filosofia platonica del Seicento inglese, ed. Marialuisa Baldi, 149–161. Milan: Franco Angeli. Selden, John. 1640. De jure naturali et gentium. London. Sinclair, George. 1685. Satan’s Invisible World Discovered. Edinburgh. Socinus, Faustus. 1656. Opera omnia, 2 vols. Amsterdam. Sommerville, J.P. 1984. John Selden, the Law of Nature, and the Origins of Government. Historical Journal. 27:437–447. Sprat, Thomas. 1667. The History of the Royal Society of London. London. Spurr, John. 1988. ‘Rational Religion’ in Restoration England. Journal of the History of Ideas. 49:563–585. Tillotson, John. 1664. The Wisdom of Being Religious. London. Webster, John. 1677. The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft. London.

CHAPTER 4

Locke Against Innatism

Abstract This short chapter summarizes the relevant material from Book I of John Locke’s Essay. It stresses: the centrality of Locke’s explosion of the argument from the consensus gentium; Locke’s sense that the idea of God is formed by a “natural propensity” of the mind, which aligned him with the Stoic tradition; but his equally prominent stress on the difficulty for the majority of people to form true religious notions. The chapter uses a debate between an anonymous critic of Locke, Catharine Trotter Cockburn and Locke himself to tease out the subtle difference between Locke’s own position and religious innatist doctrines he attacked. Most notably, Locke’s rejection of the argument from universal consent set him apart from most other critics of innatism. Keywords John Locke · Essay concerning Human Understanding · Consensus gentium · Consensus sapientium · Catharine Cockburn

John Locke entered the fray with the publication of his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689). His attack on contemporary explanations for the origins of religious ideas centred on the lack of evidence for the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. J. W. Mills, The Religious Innatism Debate in Early Modern Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84323-6_4

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existence of innate ideas and propositions (what Locke terms “principles”).1 His refutation of the existence of innate religious (or “practical”) knowledge appeared in second half of Book I of the Essay.2 Locke examined two key religious notions often taken to be latent in the mind: the existence of God and the necessity of worshipping that God. The universal consent and “conformity of action” that should be expected to result from innate religious ideas and principles was not evident in the anthropological testimony of humankind.3 Therefore innate knowledge did not exist. Indeed, one significant consequence of his rebuttal of the doctrine of innate religious ideas and claims about the weakness of human reason was that, for Locke, speculative atheism was a very real possibility.4 Numerous works of travel literature, alongside the gods of pagan antiquity and contemporary theological disputes, demonstrated that diversity not universality was the norm when it came to religious notions and behaviours.5 Locke particularly criticised the fallacious character of the appeal to universal consent on the grounds that it conflated both polytheistic and monotheistic popular religions as demonstrating the universal belief in the theist’s God. But from here, Locke complicated his stance on religious notions. Far more than the axioms of logic (“speculative principles”), moral and religious “principles require reasoning and discourse, and some exercise of the mind, to discover the certainty of their truth.”6 This process was not easy given that “all reasoning is search, and casting about, and requires pains and application.”7 But there was one exception: the existence of God. This principle was “self-evident,” the “most natural discovery of human reason” and analogous to a mathematical certainty. The discoveries of natural reason involved one of two trains of reasoning: the argument from design, wherein the “visible marks of extraordinary

1 I am not going to recount all of Locke’s arguments against innatism in Book I of the Essay and refer readers to back to the items in Ch. 1 fn. 14. 2 Locke (1690), i.iii.1. 3 Locke (1690), i.iii.3. I owe this phrasing to Carey (2006). 4 Numao (2013). 5 Talbot (2010). 6 Locke (1690), i.iii.1. 7 Locke (1690), i.i.10.

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wisdom and power … in all the works of creation” demonstrate the existence of God; and the anthropological argument, where the individual extrapolates back “infallibly” from the creation of their own being to a first creator—or, “an eternal, most powerful, and most knowing being.”8 The proposition that God exists was one of the very few things that humans could be sure about. Locke went so far as to describe the belief in the existence of an absolutely perfect being as resulting in part from the “natural propensity” of the mind.9 In arguing that the existence of God was a self-evident notion that was formed by a natural propensity of the understanding but only upon consideration of the evident design in the world, Locke appeared to align himself with the cognitive predisposition argument while jointly rejecting the innate religious ideas position. Indeed, some scholars have even argued that Locke’s Essay contained a weak form of innatism in the Stoic tradition.10 Locke’s position was dissimilar to most of his contemporaries, however, because he believed that the self-evidence of God’s existence only emerged following a concerted act of reasoned consideration. Most importantly, the evidence of religious diversity suggested that most people did not actually undertake this concerted act. Locke’s explanation here focused on the absolute responsibility of the individual when it came to developing true religious notions. Throughout Book I of the Essay, Locke maintained a dichotomy between the “wise and considerate,” who gain their “true notions” of God through the “exercise of their reason,” and the “lazy and inconsiderate,” who take their notions from “chance … common tradition and vulgar conceptions.” While he rejected the persuasiveness of the consensus gentium argument, Locke here accepted the reality of the consensus sapientium (agreement of the wise, pagan and Christian alike) as to God’s existence, which he took to prove that the idea was “acquired by thought and meditation.” Fundamental religious ideas were the inevitable result of a process of reasoned reflection, and in the case of the idea of God, quite straight forward reasoning, but most of humankind lazily received their religious notions from tradition and custom. Humans born into non-theistic societies could not excuse themselves as products of their circumstances for their failure to realise

8 Locke (1690), i.i.9, iv.x.6. 9 Locke (1690), i.iv.11. 10 See, for example, Atherton (1998) and Boeri (2012), esp. p. 196.

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that there existed only one true God.11 Locke stressed the absolute responsibility of the individual to escape, in John Dunn’s nice phrase, the “credal chains” of their upbringing.12 But he did so in a way that raised the scandal of only the wise being able to form true religious notions—something that was picked up by Locke’s critics in the decades to come. The difference between Locke’s position and commonplace religious innatism, especially of the Stoic sort, can seem slight. And many commentators in the debates that followed saw nothing of consequence riding on such subtleties. But an examination of one reply, the tripartite Remarks upon an Essay concerning Human Understanding (1697–1699), helps bring out the fine distinction between the two stances.13 In the third set of Remarks (1699), the anonymous author (whom it has recently been shown was most likely not Thomas Burnet) maintained that the conscience was an innate power with the “natural sagacity to distinguish moral good and evil” which worked prior to “all external laws and all ratiocination.”14 In the marginalia he made on his copy of the Remarks, Locke described such a supposed power as a “foundation for enthusiasm”—allowing whatever an individual intuited was true, to be taken as true. The author of the Remarks maintained that Locke, by denying innate ideas and principles, offered no means for individuals to judge moral and religious matters. In his marginal notes Locke in turn wrote that he “never denied such a power [to make judgements] to be innate, but that which I denied was that any ideas or connection of ideas was innate.”15 To Locke, the Remarks ’ author had confused innate “principle” with innate “power”; he had denied the existence of the former but not the later. For the author of the Remarks, by contrast, without any innate moral or religious principles to judge, in Locke’s account conscience was a blind power. It was unclear on Locke’s account how moral and religious distinctions were made. 11 Locke (1690), i.iv.12. 12 Dunn (1983, p. 123). 13 The Remarks had traditionally been attributed to Thomas Burnet. This has been

challenged and a different author proposed, the clergyman Richard Willis, by Walmsley, Craig and Burrows (2016). 14 “Burnet” (1989, p. 63). Though I do not want to attribute these texts to Thomas Burnet, I have used this edition because of its usefulness in bringing the Remarks and Locke’s manuscript replies together. 15 “Burnet” (1989, p. 65).

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We can unpick this further by examining Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s response to the Remarks, entitled A Defence of Mr. Lock’s Essay of Human Understanding (1702). She stressed the similarity between the positions of the author of the Remarks and of Locke. Locke had argued that there are no principles “originally imprinted in the mind” but did propose that we had an “innate power or capacity in the soul for knowing those truths.” In summary, Cockburn maintained, nativist philosophers like the author of the Remarks argued for “nothing different from Mr. Locke.” Yet to the innatist this was a fundamentally unconvincing argument: without innate knowledge the power of the mind was blind in its judgement-making. When Locke and Cockburn opined, in Cockburn’s phrase, that the “power of distinguishing in moral things” was the “consequence of a previous ratiocination” the problem of infinite regress was made clear: when, why and how did the first (“previous”) moral distinction occur?16 To his critics, Locke’s confutation of religious innatism unleashed the spectres of relativism and atheism. Locke’s legacy to the debate over religious innatism included not only the most concerted critique of innate ideas, but also arguments strengthening the view that true religion was passed down by tradition only. In the Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), Locke was explicitly sceptical about the ability of natural reason to develop full knowledge of natural religion.17 Christianity was necessary as Jesus revealed two truths unattainable, Locke maintained, by natural reason alone: the existence of an afterlife with rewards and punishments and God’s mercy to the repentant. The history of pagan societies demonstrated that “it is too hard a thing for unassisted reason” of both the vulgar and the learned to come to knowledge of basic religious truths.18 Locke here also dealt with the scandal of reasoning ability: the Gospel was the necessary dissemination of true religion in a form intelligible to the multitude. In this Locke differed strikingly from the most of the critiques of innatism summarised previously. Cumberland, Webster, Parker, Glanvill, and Boyle’s challenges 16 Cockburn (2006, pp. 74–75). 17 Locke was also sceptical about unassisted reason’s ability to learn true morality,

though he held that the truths of morality were demonstratable. See Locke (1690) iv.iii.18–20. Key here is that morality and religion had different levels of proof. Morality could be demonstrated, in principle. All theology above the existence of God, by contrast, fell within the realms of mere probability. Lucci (2021, p. 9). 18 Locke (1695, p. 265).

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were based on an assessment of the strengths of the Platonic and Cartesian arguments, the “fanatical” uses to which they were put and experimental philosophy’s potential to provide superior arguments. Unlike Locke, they all utilised the argument from universal consent to demonstrate that religious tenets were easily apprehended. Unlike Locke, they did not see the argument of the singular necessity of revelation as a solid grounding for religion.

References Atherton, Margaret. 1998. Locke and the Issue over Innateness. In Locke, ed. Vere Chappell, 48–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boeri, Marcelo D. 2012. Innateness, Universal Reason, and Self-Preservation: Making Room for Stoicism in John Locke. In Oikeiosis and the Natural Bases of Morality. From Classical Stoicism to Modern Philosophy, ed. Alejandro G. Vigo, 193–226. New York, NY: Olms. Burnet, Thomas. 1989 [1697–1699]. Remarks on John Locke … with Locke’s Replies, ed. George Watson. Doncaster: Brynmill. Carey, Daniel. 2006. Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cockburn, Catharine Cockburn. 2006. A Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding. In Catharine Trotter Cockburn: Philosophical Writings, ed. Patricia Sheridan, 35–85. Plymouth: NBN International. Dunn, John. 1983. From Applied Theology to Social Analysis: The Break between John Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment. In Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, 119–135. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Locke, John. 1690. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London. Locke, John. 1695. The Reasonableness of Christianity. London. Lucci, Diego. 2021. John Locke’s Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Numao, J.K. 2013. Locke on Atheism. History of Political Thought. 34:252–272. Talbot, Ann. 2010. The Great Ocean of Knowledge: The Influence of Travel Literature on the Work of John Locke. Leiden, NL: Brill. Walmsley, J. C., Craig, Hugh, and Burrows, John. 2016. The Authorship of the Remarks upon an Essay Concerning Human Understanding. EighteenthCentury Thought. 6:205–243.

CHAPTER 5

The Innatism Debate c.1690–c.1710

Abstract This chapter surveys the lively debate over innatism between c.1690 and c.1710. It recounts some of the key aspects of the immediate reception of Locke’s Essay, but it also stresses that the debate was a multivocal one in which Locke was often not an important player. Similarly, Locke’s Essay was subject to penetrating criticism that claimed the arguments of Book I amounted to very little. Several other figures and lesser known episodes in the debate over religious innatism are surveyed, with the authority of German natural law theorist Samuel Pufendorf and the argument from tradition theorist William Nicholls of particular importance. It is argued that the bulk of debate centred on the Platonic and Cartesian doctrines of innate ideas, and not on the Epicurean and Stoic doctrines of innate prolepses. The decline of Cartesianisn in the universities is charted. Keywords William Nicholls · Samuel Pufendorf · Argument from tradition · John Edwards · John Locke · Anti-innatism

Discussion over religious innatism within English and Scottish moral philosophy and natural theology between 1690 and 1740 was by no means driven forward by Locke’s Essay alone. This was a multivocal dispute in which the Essay was a prominent, but not the only prominent © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. J. W. Mills, The Religious Innatism Debate in Early Modern Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84323-6_5

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voice.1 Some even dismissed Locke’s contribution as old wine in new bottles. To non-juring clergyman and polemicist George Hickes, Locke had said nothing new that would not have been “heard or read in the University, upon the trite question, commonly disputed on in the schools, An dantur innatae ideae?”2 To others, the “philosophical debate” over innate ideas was entirely irrelevant to works of popular divinity or moral pedagogy.3 Others accused Locke as wrongly conflating the two very different nativist traditions of Stoic prolepses and Platonic innatism. Thomas Wise, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, defended Cudworth’s True Intellectual System in this fashion.4 Thomas Halyburton, Professor of Divinity at the University of St Andrews, while himself ambivalent about the persuasiveness of Locke’s account, recorded that many readers held Locke’s claim that the idea of God was the “natural propensity” of our thoughts agreed with what “the more judicious intend” by the appeal to innate ideas.5 Worse, one anonymous author held that either Locke attacked a “giant of straw dressed up by others” or claimed victory over a fiction of his own creation.6 Notably, Wynne’s popular Abridgement of Locke’s Essay did not include a summary of Book I because the supposition of innate ideas was, Wynne claimed, “needless” and not worth the student reader’s attention.7 By contrast, numerous other philosophers and theologians were quick to praise Locke’s Essay and especially Book I.8 Richard Burthogge, who in the 1670s had denied innate ideas and anticipations and viewed purported common notions as the results of early education subsequently forgotten, updated his Organum vetus et novem to include a new dedication to Locke celebrating the Essay’s success.9 In newspapers and journals the

1 The most thorough account of this debate I know of can be found in Pahlan (2009). See also Yolton (1956, esp. pp. 47–64). 2 Carroll (1709) Sig. C2r. 3 Cockburn (1696, p. 24). 4 Wise (1706). 5 Halyburton (1714, p. 38). 6 Philalethes (1739, p. 2). 7 Wynne (1700), Sig. a3v. 8 See, for example, Bold (1699, p. 1); Sergeant (1697, p. 119). Levitin (2010). On

Locke’s reception more generally Sell (1997). 9 Burthogge (1678, pp. 56–57); Burthogge (1694), Sig. A3r–A4r.

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Essay was described as a well-known and respected treatise, and Locke as one of the “modern heroes in philosophy.”10 Locke’s anti-nativist critique was incorporated into many of the most notable reference works of the early eighteenth century, such as Boyle Lecturer John Harris’s Lexicon technicum and Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia (1728).11 The entry on “innate principles or ideas” in Nathan Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum (1730) noted that “this doctrine has been sufficiently confuted by Mr. Locke.”12 Despite formal study of the Essay being proscribed at Oxford in 1703, Locke’s work became a staple of the university curriculum first at Cambridge and belatedly at Oxford.13 The uptake of Locke in Scottish universities is less clear, and some scholars have been sceptical about whether the Essay was much in use prior to the 1720s.14 The most conclusive evidence about the status of Locke’s Essay was the work’s publishing history. Six editions of the Essay were printed between 1690 and 1710, and another seven were printed between 1715–1716 and 1748. That said, it was only with the pirated sixth edition of 1710 that the Essay was published in a cheaper, easier-to-use octavo format—the previous edition had been unwieldy, expensive folio volumes. Similarly, many readers, especially students, would have utilised John Wynne’s Abridgment of Locke’s Essay (1696, eight editions by 1744), shorn of Book I.15 But while Locke had his early supporters, he was also subject to immediate, often vociferous criticism. James Tyrrell noted to Locke with glee in February 1690 that England’s divines were “much scandalised that so sweet and easy part of their sermons: as that of the laws written in the heart” had been “rendered false and useless,” or so Tyrrell thought, by the Essay.16 Locke’s doubters claimed that his book, in the words of 10 Anon (1691), (1693), (1694), and (1701). New State of Europe Both as to Publick Transactions and Learning, 23 May 1701. See also Athenian Gazette or Casuistical Mercury, 27 September 1691; Athenian Gazette or Casuistical Mercury, 18 February 1693; Gentleman’s Journal, May 1694. 11 Harris (1710), entry “Innate Ideas”; Chambers (1728, vol. ii, pp. 4–5, p. 26, and pp. 280–281). 12 Bailey (1730), entry “Innate Principles or Ideas”. 13 Gascoigne (1989, p. 8, p. 128); Yolton (1986). 14 See the discussion below of Cartesianism in the Scottish universities. 15 Goldie (2005). 16 James Tyrrell to John Locke, 18 February 1690, in Locke (1976–1989), V.

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one contributor, had undermined the “basis for morality, the certainty of revealed religion, and the immortality of the soul of man.”17 Locke had not yet outlined a convincing alternative explanation of how these notions were formed and was charged with denying the existence of universally intelligible laws of nature and raising the spectre of moral relativism. Tyrrell reported this sentiment amongst “some thinking men at Oxford” to Locke by summer 1690.18 Anglican clergyman and sometime Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Henry Lee’s Anti-Scepticism (1702) maintained that Locke had argued that there were “no such immutable laws of nature” and that moral and religious notions originated solely in “custom, education, or human laws.”19 Locke left the learning of religion up to pure chance. His critics rejected the idea that “ratiocination” alone, shorn of innate ideas that formed the building blocks of reasoning, could led to true religious notions.20 Without what Edward Stillingfleet termed a “criterion of truth,” such as had been previously provided by innate ideas, we had no way of deciding between notions.21 Noticeably, however, in his reposts to Locke, Stillingfleet did not stress the argument from the innate idea of God—averring that he would “not meddle with innate ideas,” but would stress that “some persons of note” had used the argument and that Locke was trying to overturn it.22 Indeed, Stillingfleet had removed an emphasis on religious innatism in the aborted second version of his Origines sacrae, posthumously published in 1701 appended to the original text, where he was also now critical of Descartes’ innatism.23 Locke’s critics claimed he had contradicted himself in arguing that some principles of natural law were self-evident, while also stressing that moral diversity fundamentally overturned the argument from universal consent.24 His latter claims about religious diversity were depicted as the result of a naive faith in the inadequate anthropological researches of 17 “Burnet” (1989, p. 43, p. 58). 18 James Tyrrell to John Locke, 30 June 1690, in Locke (1976–1989), V. 19 Lee (1702, pp. 51–52, p. 54, p. 60). See also Adriaenssen (2011). 20 “Burnet” (1989, p. 60). 21 Stillingfleet (1698, p. 117). See pp. 117–127 more generally. 22 Stillingfleet (1698, p. 90). 23 Stillingfleet (1836, vol. ii, pp. 410–411). 24 Norris (1690, pp. 4–5, pp. 14–15); Lee (1702, pp. 14–15).

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travellers.25 Amongst the charges against the Essay in his An Account of Mr. Locke’s Religion (1700), the non-juring High Church clergyman and Master of St John’s College, Cambridge, John Milner went through the citations in the Essay to demonstrate that Locke had systematically exaggerated the content of reports of purported atheism—while also rebuking Locke for his deceitful misrepresentation of Herbert of Cherbury, the only thinker mentioned in Book I, as a naïve innatist.26 Locke’s critics charged him with a distorted representation of the doctrine of innate ideas, while ending up repeating the same claim about the self-evident character of the idea of God as the doctrine he was criticising.27 While Locke was the recipient of much flak from defenders of religious innatism in the 1690s and 1700s, we should not frame this solely as a controversy between Locke and his critics. Locke’s Essay was an intervention in a well-established debate, which extended to broadsides and newspaper items, in which the anti-innatist case already had prominent and sophisticated proponents.28 In February 1693 the Athenian Gazette ran a lengthy article that defended the existence of an innate idea of God. The authorities for the defence were the commonplace Henry More’s Antidote and Edward Stillingfleet’s Origines sacrae. The two leading critics of innatism were, according to the newspaper, Samuel Parker and John Turner. We met Parker above. Turner’s position as a prominent antiinnatist is less familiar. He was a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge and subsequently the Hospitaller of St Thomas’ in Southwark. In his Discourse Concerning the Messias (1685) Turner attacked the “Platonic fancy” of “inbred notions”—a theory, Turner claimed, not believed by “any before Descartes” other than by the Platonists themselves. The argument from innate ideas was a “precarious” and “needless” basis for natural theology, which directed attention away from the experiential data derived from the natural world and towards the solipsistic practice of internal reflection.29 We come to our idea of God, rather, by “gradual

25 Anstruther (1701, p. 23). 26 Milner (1700, pp. 3–8 [travel literature] and pp. 154–167 [defence of Herbert]). 27 Anstruther (1701, p. 23). 28 See, for example, the broadside of the youthful Brampton Gurdon, later a Boyle Lecturer, entitled “Idea Dei non est innata,” which criticised Platonic innatism. Gurdon (1696). 29 Turner (1685, pp. 95–97).

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and painful ratiocination.”30 It was no surprise that Turner would subsequently reproduce passages from Locke’s Essay that argued against the innate idea of God—though he also used Robert Ferguson’s arguments (themselves plagiarised from Parker) in The Interest of Reason in Religion (1675) to the same extent.31 Turner’s attack on the ideas variant of innatism related to its unreliability as a basis for natural theology. This did not mean that Turner was sceptical about the powers of natural reason. In his work of mythography, An Attempt Towards an Explanation of the Theology and Mythology of the Ancient Pagans (1687), Turner argued for the consensus saptientium and explained away the diversity of pagan religions as being evidence of the inevitable modification of the philosophers’ natural religion to fit the limited capabilities of the multitude. But amongst the “pious and exemplary” heathen, the “human conversation [about] the principles of natural religion does not seem to be … very desperate.”32 Moreover, the debate over religious innatism in the 1690s and 1700s could proceed without Locke playing a central role. In his 1692 Boyle Lectures, discussed further below, Richard Bentley denied that the argument from the innate idea of God should be used as a proof in anti-atheist apologetics. Bentley’s argument had possibly been inspired by a reading of Locke’s Essay, but he did not refer to him.33 His Lectures prompted the then deist Charles Gildon to pen a letter to Bentley rejecting the trustworthiness of the travel literature used to disprove the innate idea of God, and re-asserting that the idea was one easily formed (though not innate) and universally held. The letter was published in the posthumous collection of another deist Charles Blount’s writings, The Oracles of Reason (1693).34 In 1698 Josiah King, chaplain to the Earl of Anglesey, published a paragraph-by-paragraph refutation of the Oracles. Reading Gildon (whom King confused for Blount) as arguing in favour of innate ideas, which 30 Turner (1685, p. 94). 31 Turner (1698, pp. 7–8); Ferguson (1675, p. 41). 32 Turner (1687), Sig. A5v. 33 It seems very likely that Bentley had been influenced in his anti-innatism by John Locke’s Essay, which he had probably been reading in the build-up to his sermons and had discussed with John Evelyn. See Jacob and Guerlac (1969, p. 316). Bentley may have been encouraged in this regard by John Evelyn who had chosen him as the First Lecturer: Darley (2006, p. 280). 34 Blount (1693, p. 178).

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Gildon did not, King set about to disprove their existence. Respectfully distancing himself from Bishop Stillingfleet’s arguments for religious innatism, King quoted at length the German geographer Bernhardus Varenius’s essay “Brevis informatio de diversis gentium religionibus” (“A Brief Outline of the Various Religions of the Pagans,” 1649) to demonstrate the existence of atheistic societies. King noted that “what Mr. Lock hath written on this subject I have not read” and took Varenius to be sufficient authority to confute “Mr. Blount’s whole hypothesis of natural religion … whose principal foundation” was of a God “knowable by innate ideas.”35 Similarly, controversy flared up over Cartesian innatism in the 1690s, without reference to Locke. One spark was the publication of French Franciscan Antoine Le Grand’s An Entire Body of Philosophy According to the Principles of the Famous Renate Des Cartes (1694). Resident in England since 1656, Le Grand’s many Latin works expounding Descartes’ philosophy were popular during the Restoration. He also published an Apologia pro Renato Des-Cartes contra Samuelem Parkerum (1679), against Parker’s Tentamina.36 Le Grand’s defence of the Cartesian innate idea of God in the Apologia prompted, in turn, the eponymously named son of Parker to defend his father’s anti-Cartesianism in one of his Six Philosophical Essays (1700), though in a polite fashion unlike his father.37 Parker junior encouraged the Cartesians to “forget innate ideas for a moment” (obliviscere aliquantisper innatarum idearum), go out into their gardens and “hold up to the senses and to the mind a single flower,” for this will declare with “silent eloquence” that “God exists.”38 More in line with Parker senior’s approach were the vehement challenges by the Blackloist and neo-Aristotelian John Sergeant.39 Sergeant is well-known as a critic of Locke, though he agreed with Locke’s confutation of innate ideas. But in several works, he also took Cartesian philosophy to task. Sergeant’s most fulsome criticism can be found in the Preface to his The Method to Science (1696). The Cartesian method— exemplified by Descartes, Antoine Le Grand and, most ridiculously to 35 King (1698, pp. 177–178); Varnesius (1673, p. 238). 36 Hutton (2015, p. 67). 37 Parker (1700, pp. 113–128). 38 Parker (1700, p. 127). 39 Sergeant (1698, pp. 108–111); Sergeant (1699).

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Sergeant’s mind, Malebranche’s Search After Truth (1674)—resembled “fanaticism” and brought a “kind of enthusiasm into philosophy.”40 Most philosophers and theologians are sure that we learn about the wisdom of God through observation of “things in nature,” and are “uncertain whether God or our whimsical fancies gave us our [non-experiential] ideas.”41 The Cartesians, by contrast, “slight the instruction of nature,” “scorn to be behold[en] to their senses” and believe they are “inspired with heaven implanted ideas.”42 The Cartesians “retire their thoughts into the inward recesses of their mind, embellished and gilded with these shining innate ideas.”43 In doing so, they made “all their thoughts run upon nothing but spiritual conceits and innate ideas and having a spiritual communication with God … [in] an unintelligible manner.”44 What was perhaps most significant about the spat between the aged neo-Aristotelian Sergeant (b. 1622) and the aged Cartesian Le Grand (b. 1629) is that it was the last gasp of energetic debate over Cartesian innatism. By the end of the 1690s, the popularity of Le Grand’s works had disappeared, Sergeant’s intellectual influence had petered out and mention of Cartesianism was an increasingly rare occurrence, at least in terms of published debate over innatism. Locke’s Essay was not the only significant source of anti-innatist arguments imbibed by students. Two anti-nativist texts were also prominent in the Scottish universities. The textbooks of Gerard de Vries, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Utrecht, became widely used—including being coursebooks at both Glasgow and Edinburgh. In many of de Vries’ Exercitationes rationales de deo (1685), the student would learn, in a series of refutations of Descartes, that their ideas of God should be proved “non ex ideae innatae intuitu, sed e creaturarum contemplatione” (not from an intuition of innate ideas, but from the contemplation of created things). De Vries work also included a lengthy “Diatribe de ideis rerum innatis” (Diatribe on the innate ideas

40 Sergeant (1696), Preface. 41 Sergeant (1696), Preface. 42 Sergeant (1696), Preface. 43 Sergeant (1696), Preface. 44 Sergeant (1696, p. 424).

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of things) demonstrating the inaccuracy and irrelevance of the Cartesian position.45 De Vries was well-known for his systematic criticism of Cartesian innatism. His arguments prompted the non-juring clergyman Edmund Elys to publish a short Latin essay appended to his Refutation of Some of the False Conceits in Mr. Locke’s Essay concerning Humane Understanding (1697). It was as much de Vries as Locke, whom Elys rebuked when defending religious innatism.46 Secondly, Samuel Pufendorf’s incredibly influential De jure naturae et gentium (1672), its student abridgement De officio hominis et civis (1672), and the latter’s translation into English as The Whole Duty of Man (1691) were used by English and Scottish universities and dissenting academies from the 1690s onwards.47 Pufendorf described innate ideas as a philosophically unjustified speculation and maintained that the natural sagacity of reason was sufficient in learning the law of nature. Like Locke, and quite possibly influencing Locke, Pufendorf held that the testimony of human history pointed towards moral and religious diversity, not uniformity of underlying belief. Both de Vries and Pufendorf were used, for example, by George Carmichael and his successor Francis Hutcheson at the University of Glasgow to challenge innate ideas.48 More generally, Pufendorf’s name was deployed as an authority for rejecting innatism and this was more to do with his standing as a natural law theorist than as reflecting the extent and sophistication of his discussion of innate ideas. That said, the changing of the guard in the Scottish universities from Cartesian innatism to a Lockean and especially Pufendorfian antiinnatism far from being a smooth process. Cartesianism was central to Scottish university curricula for much of the last third of the seventeenth century, though with some differences in weighting between institutions.49 According to Giovanni Gellera, most Scottish regents were “unequivocal” in rejecting Locke’s Essay, including its anti-innatism, for 45 De Vries (1685, p. 56). See also de Vries (1690). 46 Elys (1697, pp. 26–30). Elys was concerned, however, about the esteem in which

Locke’s Essay was held in at Oxford, where he had previously been a Fellow at Balliol College. See Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Tanner 23, fol. 77, Edmund Elys to Nicholas Martin 15 September 1697. 47 Rivers (1991–2000, vol. ii, p. 161); Ahnert and McGill (2020, pp. 84–85). 48 Carmichael (2002, p. 227, pp. 246–27 and p. 382); Hutcheson (2006, p. 141). See

also Carey (2006, pp. 169–170). 49 Gellera (2015, 2017a, b); Raffe (2015); and Ahnert and McGill (2020).

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going against both their established Reformed scholasticism and their newer Cartesianism.50 The Scottish regents mentioned Locke occasionally in published graduation theses during the height of the debate over innatism, c.1690 to c.1710, and most argued against Locke’s antiinnatism.51 Characteristic of the dominant position of Cartesian thought by the 1680s was the young King’s College Aberdeen regent George Skene’s Positiones aliquot philosophicae (1688), which confidently proved in Cartesian fashion the existence of God from our innate idea of God.52 Similarly, another regent of King’s College, George Fraser’s 1691 theses summarised Descartes’s Meditations, including its innatist arguments.53 Cartesian innatism remained central to Scottish pedagogy into the early eighteenth century, not least because, as for More and Charleton previously in England, Descartes’ theory of knowledge could serve as the foundations upon which natural philosophical studies could be built. Cartesian was criticised in some quarters in the late century, but only into the early eighteenth century did anti-Cartesianism take firm hold in the Scottish universities. In Aberdeen, Robert Forbes, preaching in 1684, was one of the earliest critics of Cartesian innatism.54 In the early 1690s Alexander Cunningham, regent at the University of St Andrews, praised Locke’s “keen intellect and shrewd judgement” in his “many arguments against innate ideas,” but remained ultimately sceptical of Locke’s alternative arguments for the existence of God.55 Things had changed substantially by the 1720s, with the victory of Newtonianism but not necessarily Lockean thought.56 To the Irish journalist and former radical Whig student at Glasgow James Arbuckle, writing in the Dublin Weekly Journal in June 1725, Pufendorf had “been made the grand instructor in morals” within the universities. It was Pufendorf’s influence that resulted in the “fear of innate ideas” and of anything that seemed similar to

50 Gellera (2017b, p. 222). 51 Gellera (2017b, p. 223) discussing More (1691), Part III, Loudon (1697), Part XII;

and Peacock (1711), Part V. See also Shepherd (1975, p. 86, pp. 120–21, pp. 125–26, and pp. 146–147). 52 Skene (1688), Part II. 53 Fraser (1691), Part IV. 54 Gellera (2013). 55 Cunningham (1692), Section III quoted in Ahnert and McGill (2020, p. 84). 56 Shepherd (1982).

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innatism, such as Shaftesbury’s philosophy of natural affections (of which Arbuckle was a proponent).57 While de Vries and Pufendorf’s works became widely used in universities, they were not frequently mentioned in the post-1690 debate on religious innatism. By contrast, Pufendorf’s own authority against innatism, Cumberland, was frequently cited.58 The latter’s De legibus naturae, as noted above, was one of the principal anti-innatist texts of the later seventeenth century. Cumberland’s standing received a further boost when Locke’s Whig associate James Tyrrell (1642–1718) published an epitome of Cumberland’s work under the title A Brief Disquisition of the Law of Nature (1692).59 Like Parker’s earlier translation, Tyrrell both simplified Cumberland’s learned Latin treatise and supplemented it with additional material—namely, arguments derived from Locke’s Essay in the battle against innate knowledge. And, like Parker, Tyrrell directed his attention, in a new section added to his translation, to contemporary Christian Platonic innatism and its claim that a benevolent god would not have left his creatures without the means to arrive at a knowledge of him. Tyrrell reproduced Locke’s position in the Essay that humanity’s reasoning capability was sufficient to reach fundamental moral and religious knowledge.60 The fact that individuals did not was because of their lazy credulity, and willingness to follow custom and socially accepted norms rather than taking individual responsibility for seeking out knowledge of religion.61 From the 1690s onwards the view that the only source of true religious ideas were those moments of divine revelation recorded in scripture, subsequently transmitted via education and custom, grew in prominence. The argument from tradition had greater purchase in an age when the threat of “deism” was growing in the minds of apologists.62 During the height of the debate over innatism, the argument was associated frequently with the High Church clergyman William Nicholls (1664–1712), set out in Part II of his five-part A Conference with a 57 Arbuckle (1729, vol. I, p. 79). 58 Pufendorf (1729, p. 133). 59 Tyrrell (1692). 60 Tyrrell (1692, p. 195, p. 196). 61 Tyrrell (1692, p. 198). 62 For a sceptical treatment of the extent of deism see Barnett (2004).

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Theist (1697).63 Nicholls’s work was widely recommended and regularly discussed, on both sides of the Tweed, as one of the leading works of anti-atheist and anti-deist apologetic.64 He was the most regularly cited authority for the argument that tradition, first revealed by God to Adam, was the only source of knowledge of natural and divine law. As we have seen, this was not a new argument against religious innatism, though during the mid-century it had little wider purchase. By the end of the century, however, the confidence in natural religion, exhibited by Henry More’s passing dismissal of the argument from tradition, had been replaced by something more sceptical and arguments like Nicholls were more alluring. The subtitle of Part II of the Conference proclaimed Nicholls’ intention to show the “defects of natural religion” and the “necessity of divine inspiration.” The theist (or deist) of Nicholls’ title, Philologus, was representative of an increasing infidelity Nicholls detected amongst the English gentry. Philologus attacks Christianity by showing “the sufficiency of natural religion in general towards the worship of God, and a good life.”65 In response, Nicholls’ mouthpiece Credentius sets how to show that the deist story of an “ancient universality of pure natural religion” was a “philosophical romance,” built on the weak foundations of innate ideas and self-sufficient reason.66 The old dominant theory of “moral notices connate with the soul” had been “exploded by learned men.”67 As was the argument from the consensus sapientium. Surveying the theological notions of heathen worthies, Credentius opined sardonically that these “great oracles of reason and brave natural-religion men” were always somewhat mistaken in their “common notions of the deity.”68 Innatism had been replaced by the view, which Nicholls associated with Hobbes, Parker, and Pufendorf, that the origin of our “moral notions [were] the

63 Nicholls (1696–1703). I have used the 2nd edition, Nicholls (1699), of Part II of the Conference. 64 See, for example, Halyburton (1714, p. 41 [pagination re-starts with Chapter XIV]); Stackhouse (1729, pp. 34–35); and Du Pin (1720, p. 335). 65 Nicholls (1699, p. 4). 66 Nicholls (1699, p. 31). See also pp. 21–32 more generally and p. 35. 67 Nicholls (1699, p. 33). 68 Nicholls (1699, p. 58).

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deductions of right reason.”69 The problem was that, Credentius insisted, the new argument from right reason was just as vulnerable to the counterargument of evident moral and religious diversity as the claim we know natural law from our connate notions. For Credentius (and Nicholls), only revelation explained the origin of true morals and religion. Nicholls was frequently cited in the debate over the origin of our moral and religious notions in the 1690s and 1700s as the leading proponent of the argument from tradition. To James Lowde, writing in his Moral Essays (1699), Nicholls’ evident “heat [in] opposing deism proceeds too far” and resulted in depriving “ourselves of any advantage that may accrue to us … in the defence of our common cause of religion” resulting from appeals to “rational deduction or natural inscription.”70 Nicholls was regularly paired with Locke in the debate of the 1690s and 1700s as being guilty of, in Henry Lee’s phrasing, “running into another extreme” of limiting religious knowledge to “original revelation” alone.71 Locke and Nicholls had argued, in Thomas Beconsall’s wording, “against a law of nature” and that religion had “no other original but revelation, and no other means of conveyance and preservation but oral tradition.”72 No fan of innate ideas, which he believed encouraged the “extravagancies of enthusiasm,” Beconsall defended the idea that the “faculty of thinking … reasons in a fixed determinate way.”73 To their critics, Locke and Nicholls’ supposed replacement for both innate ideas and right reason, the appeal to tradition, raised the scandals of particular revelation and of the possibility that only those possessing, as Beconsall put it, “a skilful tutor [or] a polished education” could know true religion.74 While Locke and Nicholls were especially prominent, defenders of religious innatism positioned themselves as coming under tremendous weight of fire from a variety of positions. Anglican clergyman and one-time fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, James Lowde’s qualified defence of the existence of “native properties and qualifications of the soul” in his Discourse Concerning the Nature of Man (1694) dealt with the 69 Nicholls (1699, p. 33). 70 Lowde (1699, p. 126, p. 128). 71 Lee (1702, Sig. B1r–v ). 72 Beconsall (1698, p. 44). On Becconsall see Goldie (2008). 73 Beconsall (1698, p. 76, p. 6). 74 Beconsall (1698, p. 8).

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critics of the narrow doctrine of innate ideas one by one: Parker, Cumberland, Tyrrell, Locke, and Norris.75 The inclusion of Norris in Lowde’s list might seem out of place, given Norris’s approval of Descartes’ and Henry More’s innatism. But Lowde was provoked by Norris’ dismissal of the naïve version of innate ideas as “mere jargon and unintelligible cant.”76 To Lowde’s mind, these authors were all attacking a straw man. Even when replying in his Moral Essays (1699) to Locke’s dismissive remarks about Lowde’s Discourse added to the second edition of Locke’s Essay (1694),77 Lowde still only treated Locke as one of many authors attacking innate dispositions to moral and religious knowledge—a list that now extended to the claim in French protestant theologian Pierre Chauvin’s De naturali religione (1693) that the belief in the innate knowledge of natural law was clearly false,78 Nicholls, and Beconsall.79 Lowde was especially scornful of Samuel Parker’s view that experiential observation should be the “great rule and measure of truth.”80 The Calvinist-minded Anglican clergyman John Edwards (1637–1716) was another prominent defender of religious innatism battling against a variety of targets. He somewhat contradictorily viewed innate religious knowledge as both the “foundation of religion and the standard of truth” and a “speculative” doctrine that good Christians need not challenge.81 Edwards deployed religious innatism for myriad commonplace apologetic purposes, such as refuting atheism or explaining the absence of written law between the Noachite period and Moses’ receipt of revelation on Mount Sinai.82 But he also saw religious innatism as one of the key battle grounds in the religious controversies of the 1690s and 1700s, and defend natural religious knowledge against a variety of critics. Edwards accused Socinus’ denials of the persuasiveness of both

75 Lowde (1694). See p. 83, Sig. A1, pp. 54–58 (Parker), pp. 68–76 (Cumberland), pp. 76–79 (Tyrrell), pp. 81–83 (Locke and Norris) and pp. 83–84 (Locke). 76 Norris (1690, p. 20). 77 Locke (1694, Sig. B5v–B6r). 78 Chauvin (1693, p. 331). 79 Lowde (1699), See pp. 1–43 and then pp. 43–47 (Malebranche) 49–64 (Beconsall), pp. 59–64 (Locke), pp 125–34 (Nicholls) and pp. 134–51 (Pierre Charron). 80 Lowde (1699, p. 54, p. 56). 81 Edwards (1697, pp. 122–123). 82 Edwards (1695, pp. 1–7, p. 5); Edwards (1699a, p. 150, p. 152).

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the argument from innate knowledge and from design as giving succour to atheists.83 Edwards repeatedly censured Locke’s arguments in Book I of the Essay, associating Locke’s denials of religious innatism with the heretic Socinus or suggesting Locke’s supposed arguments for the “precarious and arbitrary nature of morality” indicated that Locke was an “humbler imitator” of the atheist Hobbes.84 But at his July 1699 commencement sermon at the University of Cambridge, Edwards reeled off a list of authors who had recently denied that religion was “ingrafted in our very nature”: Selden, Cumberland, Parker, Tyrrell, Norris, Nicholls, and Locke.85 Edwards’ list in A Free Discourse Concerning Truth and Error (1701) of prominent anti-innatists included Socinus, Bishop John Pearson,86 Cumberland, Parker, Locke, Le Clerc, and Nicholls.87 In his widely used Theologia Reformata, Edwards expanded his defence of religious innatism to include further rebuttals of the Arminian theologians Conrad Vorstius and Simon Episcopius, emphasise the disagreement over innatism within the Socinian tradition, challenge the Boyle Lecturer Richard Bentley, and praise Cartesian and Ciceronian innatism.88 Locke’s Essay also prompted what was perhaps the most rigidly Platonic defence of innate ideas of the period, published by the prominent Anglican theologian William Sherlock. Sherlock was sermonising against Locke’s anti-innatism from 1697. His Discourse concerning the Happiness of Good Men (1704; 14 editions, 1776), including its forty-page defence of religious innate ideas predicated on our Adamic inheritance of connate knowledge, was in constant demand by the English reading public in the first half of the eighteenth century.89 Explicitly anti-Lockean, Sherlock’s account restated all the claims Locke had overturned in Book I of the Essay, rooted them in Platonic doctrines of reminiscence and the preexistence of souls, and accused Locke of increasing the plausibility of the 83 Edwards (1697, pp. 28–30). 84 Edwards (1697, pp. 122–123); Edwards (1699b, pp. 26–28). 85 Edwards (1699b, p. 2, p. 29), and then pp. 16–17 (Selden), p. 23 (Cumberland,

Parker, Tyrrell), p. 25 (Norris), p. 26 (Nicholls) and pp. 26–28 (Locke). 86 Pearson (1845, p. 32). 87 Edwards (1701, pp. 34–35 [Socinus, Pearson, Cumberland, Parker, Nicholls] and

p. 42 [Locke and Le Clerc]). On Le Clerc’s Lockean anti-innatism see Schuurman (2003, pp. 70–88). 88 Edwards (1713, vol. I, pp. 22–23). Stackhouse (1729, i). 89 Sherlock (1704, pp. 124–164).

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atheist’s claim that religion “is only the effect of education and superstitious fears.”90 Locke promised Anthony Collins he would, in private at least, “make us merry” in his ridicule of Sherlock’s defence of Christian Platonist innatism.91 But as Collins related, Sherlock also had his readers sympathetic to restatements of now-traditional arguments—especially amongst the clergy who “triumph” Sherlock’s “Digression” for its detailed refutation of Locke’s Essay.92 The volume of published discussion of religious innatism increased in England and Scotland in the 1690s and 1700s. The debate over the origin of religious notions, however, was just one of several religious controversies, alongside those over the doctrine of the trinity and over “deism” and freethinking. Noticeably, many defenders of innatism viewed their contributions as sallies in a culture war that they felt that they were losing against a growing constellation of enemies. In the writings of John Edwards, for example, we get a strong sense of an author believing themselves to be orthodox and under fire from a variety of heretical positions. But despite Edwards’ position of institutional and ecclesiastical authority, I am weary of stressing any straightforward alignment of the defenders of innatism as being concerned with defending Anglican orthodoxy. Religious innatism was too commonplace for this to cover all the story, though it certainly helps to explain many responses by established academics and divines. The preceding section has also served to challenge any narrow framing of Locke’s Essay as the cause of the debate and antiinnatism’s increased standing or, indeed, that Locke’s arguments were not subject to sustained, forceful, and often insightful criticism. Especially important here was the influence of Pufendorf in the Scottish universities and of Nicholls amongst the English reading public. This was a vociferous and complicated debate but, as we shall see in the next section, the energy dissipated from the 1710s onwards.

90 Sherlock (1704, p. 162). 91 John Locke to Anthony Collins 23 June 1704, Locke (1976–1989), vol. VIII. 92 Anthony Collins to John Locke, 20 June 1704, Locke (1976–1989), vol. VIII.

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References Adriaenssen, H.T. 2011. An Early Critic of Locke: The Anti-Scepticism of Henry Lee. Locke Studies. 11:17–47. Ahnert, Thomas, and Martha McGill. 2020. Scotland and the European Republic of Letters Around 1700. In Scottish Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Alexander Broadie, 73–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anon. 1691. Athenian Gazette or Casuistical Mercury, 27 September. Anon. 1693. Athenian Gazette or Casuistical Mercury, 18 February. Anon. 1694. The Gentleman’s Journal, May. Anon. 1701. New State of Europe Both as to Publick Transactions and Learning, 23 May. Anstruther, William. 1701. Essays Moral and Divine. Edinburgh. Arbuckle, James. 1729. A Collection of Letters and Essays on Several Subjects, 2 vols. London. Bailey, Nathan. 1730. Dictionarium Britannicum. London. Barnett, S.J. 2004. The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Beconsall, Thomas. 1698. The Grounds and Foundation of Natural Religion. London. Blount, Charles. 1693. Oracles of Reason. London. Bold, Samuel. 1699. Some Considerations on the Principal Objections and Arguments which have been Publish’d Against Mr. Locke’s Essay of Humane Understanding. London. Burnet, Thomas. 1989 [1697–1696]. Remarks on John Locke … with Locke’s Replies, ed. George Watson. Doncaster: Brynmill. Burthogge, Richard. 1678. Organum vetus & novum. London. Burthogge, Richard. 1694. An Essay Upon Reason and the Nature of Spirits. London. Carey, Daniel. 2006. Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carmichael, Gershom. 2002. Natural Rights on the Threshold of the Scottish Enlightenment: The Writings of Gershom Carmichael, ed. James Moore and Michael Silverthorne. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Carroll, William. 1709. Spinoza Reviv’d. London. Chambers, Ephraim. 1728. A Cyclopaedia, Or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 2 vols. London. Chauvin, Pierre. 1693. De naturali religione. Rotterdam. Cockburn, John. 1696. An Enquiry into the Nature, Necessity and Evidence of Christian Faith. London. Cunningham, Alexander. 1692. Theses philosophicae. Edinburgh. Darley, Gillian. 2006. John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity. London: Yale University Press.

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Du Pin, Louis Ellies. 1720. A Compleat Method of Studying Divinity. London. Edwards, John. 1695. Some Thoughts Concerning the Several Causes and Occasions of Atheism. London. Edwards, John. 1697. The Socinian Creed. London. Edwards, John. 1699a. Polpoikilos Sophia, A Compleat History or Survey of All the Dispensations and Methods of Religion. London. Edwards, John. 1699b. The Eternal and Intrinsick Reasons of Good and Evil. Cambridge. Edwards, John. 1701. A Free Discourse Concerning Truth and Error. London. Edwards, John. 1713. Theologia reformata, 2 vols. London. Elys, Edmund. 1697. Refutation of Some of the False Conceits in Mr. Locke’s Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. London. Ferguson, Robert. 1675. The Interest of Reason in Religion. London. Fraser, George. 1691. Positiones aliquot philosophicae. Aberdeen. Gascoigne, John. 1989. Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gellera, Giovanni. 2013. The Philosophy of Robert Forbes: A Scottish Scholastic Response to Cartesianism. Journal of Scottish Philosophy 11:191–211. Gellera, Giovanni. 2015. The Reception of Descartes in the Seventeenth-Century Scottish Universities: Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy (1650–1680). Journal of Scottish Philosophy. 13:179–201. Gellera, Giovanni. 2017a. The Scottish Faculties of Arts and Cartesianism (1650– 1700). In Histories of Universities, ed. Alexander Broadie, vol. XXIX/2, 166– 187. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gellera, Giovanni. 2017b. English Philosophers and Scottish Academic Philosophy (1660–1700). Journal of Scottish Philosophy. 15:213–231. Goldie, Mark. 2005. Printing History of Locke’s Writings 1686–1800. Locke Studies. 5:215–221. Goldie, Mark. 2008. John Locke, Thomas Beconsall, and Filial Rebellion. In Studies on Locke: Sources, Contemporaries and Legacy, ed. Sarah Hutton and Paul Schuurman, 127–142. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Gurdon, Brampton. 1696. Idea Dei non est innata. Cambridge. Halyburton, Thomas. 1714. Natural Religion Insufficient. Edinburgh. Harris, John. 1710. Lexicon technicum. Vol II. London. Hutcheson, Francis. 2006. Logic, Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociability of Mankind, ed. James Moore and Michael Silverthorne. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Hutton, Sarah. 2015. British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jacob, Margaret C. and Guerlac, Henry. 1969. Bentley, Newton, and Providence: The Boyle Lectures Once More. Journal of the History of Ideas. 30:307–318. King, Josiah. 1698. Mr. Blount’s Oracles of Reason. Exeter.

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Lee, Henry. 1702. Anti-scepticism. London. Levitin, Dmitri. 2010. Reconsidering John Sergeant’s Attacks on Locke’s Essay. Intellectual History Review 20:457–477. Locke, John. 1694.Essay Concerning Human Understanding, second edition. London. Locke, John. 1976–1989. The Correspondence of John Locke, 8 vols., ed. E. S. de Beer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loudon, John. 1697. Theses philosophicae. Edinburgh. Lowde, James. 1694. Discourse Concerning the Nature of Man. London. Lowde, James. 1699. Moral Essays. London. Milner, John. 1700. An Account of Mr. Lock’s Religion. London. More, Alexander. 1691. Theses philosophicae. Aberdeen. Nicholls, William. 1699. A Conference with a Theists. Part II, second edition. London. Norris, John. 1690. Cursory Reflections on the Essay of Humane Understanding. London. Pahlan, Homyar. 2009. The Reception of John Locke’s Religious and Political Thought, 1690–1710. PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge. Parker, Samuel (junior). 1700. Six Philosophical Essays. London. Peacock, George. 1711. Theses philosophicae. Aberdeen. Pearson, John. 1845 [1659]. An Exposition of the Apostles Creed, ed. James Nichols. London. Philalethes. 1739. A Philosophical Discussion upon the Inlets to Human Knowledge. London. Pufendorf, Samuel. 1729. On the Law of Nature and Nations, fourth edition, ed. Jean Barbeyrac. London. Raffe, Alasdair. 2015. Intellectual change before the Enlightenment: Scotland, the Netherlands and the reception of Cartesian thought, 1650–1700. Scottish Historical Review. 94:24–47. Rivers, Isabel. 1991–2000. Reason, Grace, and Sentiment. A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England 1660–1780. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schuurman, Paul. 2003. Ideas, Mental Faculties and Method: The Logic of Ideas of Descartes and Locke and Its Reception in the Dutch Republic 1630–1750. Leiden, NL: Brill. Sell, Alan P. F. 1997. John Locke and the Eighteenth Century Divines. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Sergeant, John. 1696. The Method to Science. London. Sergeant, John. 1697. Solid Philosophy Asserted, Against the Fancies of the Ideist. London. Sergeant, John. 1698. Non Ultra: Or, a Letter to a Learned Cartesian. London.

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Sergeant, John. 1699. Raillery Defeated by Calm Reason: Or, the New Cartesian Method of Arguing and Answering Exposed. London. Shepherd, Christine M. 1975. Philosophy and Science in the Arts Curriculum of the Scottish Universities in the 17th Century. PhD Thesis, Edinburgh University. Shepherd, Christine M. 1982. Newtonianism in Scottish Universities in the Seventeenth Century. In The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. R. H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner, 65–85. Edinburgh: John Donald. Sherlock, William. 1704. A Discourse Concerning the Happiness of Good Men. London. Skene, George. 1688. Positiones aliquot philosophicae. Aberdeen. Stackhouse, Thomas. 1729. A Complete Body of Divinity. London. Stillingfleet, Edward. 1698. The Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to Mr. Locke’s Second Letter. London. Stillingfleet, Edward. 1836 [1690s]. Origines sacrae, second edition. In Edward Stillingfleet, Origines sacrae or a Rational Account of the Grounds of Natural and Revealed Religion, 2 vols. Oxford, 1836), II:247–404. Turner, John. 1685. Discourse Concerning the Messias. London. Turner, John. 1687. An Attempt Towards an Explanation of the Theology and Mythology of the Ancient Pagans. London. Turner, John. 1698. Phisico-Theological Discourse Upon the Divine Being. London. Tyrrell, James. 1692. A Brief Disquisition of the Law of Nature. London. Varenius, Bernhardus. 1673 [1649]. Descriptio regni Japoniae et Siam. Cambridge. Vries, Gerard de. 1685. Exercitationes rationales de Deo. Utrecht. Vries, Gerard de. 1690. De naturae Dei et humanae mentis. Determinationes pneumatologicae. Utrecht. Wise, Thomas. 1706. A Confutation of the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism. London. Wynne, John. 1700. An Abridgment of Mr. Locke’s Essay, second edition. London. Yolton, John. 1956. John Locke and the Way of Ideas. Oxford: Claredon Press. Yolton, John. 1986. Schoolmen, Logic and Philosophy. In The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. 5: The Eighteenth Century, ed. by L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell, 565–591. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Declining Discussion of Religious Innatism c.1710–c.1750

Abstract The debate over religious innatism lost its energy in the 1710s. The dominant attitude that replaced innatism was not one characterised by confident Lockeanism, but either ambivalence or lack of interest. Despite Locke’s arguments, the proof from the consensus gentium remained common. Key to the lack of interest in religious innatism was the shift in the principal external threat to Christianity in the early eighteenth century being deism rather than atheism. The argument from tradition and the necessity of revelation were increasingly relied upon by apologists. But equally significant was the rise of the internal sense theory of religion, associated with Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and which had supporters in both England and Scotland. Several philosophers and theologians shifted the locus of innate religiosity away from the faculty of the understanding to non-rational sources, such as the passions, instincts and internal senses. Keywords Moral sense · Shaftesbury · Francis Hutcheson · Consensus gentium · Religious affections · Religious passions

Religious innatism by no means disappeared in the early eighteenth century. Discussion over innate ideas within natural theology and Christian apologetics after 1710, however, lost much of its impetus. Innatism’s © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. J. W. Mills, The Religious Innatism Debate in Early Modern Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84323-6_6

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perceived link with “fanaticism”—which in their different ways troubled Parker, Webster, and Locke so much—seemed unimportant to an early Georgian England to whom the “religious fervours” and “innovations” of the Civil War era were an increasingly distant memory. The threats now were ridicule, freethinking and, above all, deism. The argument from design, further augmented by the successes of Newtonian natural philosophy, made innatism less necessary. As one-time Cambridge don Phillips Gretton noted, “the argument from innate ideas has been laid aside by some, and less insisted on by others,” with “reasons drawn from the works of creation and providence [being] chiefly used, and with great success” in the fields of natural theology and apologetics.1 The question of innate ideas remained a commented upon issue, but from the 1710s it was primarily discussed in terms indicating the issue was no longer current. Some religious writers viewed the abandonment of innate ideas as resulting from anti-innatism’s triumph in philosophical disputation: any subsequent appeal to the argument was a foolhardy move deleterious to the cause of true religion.2 Others held that innate religious ideas should be dealt with, as High Churchman Richard Fiddes put it in his Theologia speculativa (1718–1720), in a “problematical [rather] than in a decisive manner” given that the determination of the question was not of “great importance.”3 To many, the debate did not matter one way or the other—one anonymous writer dismissed the whole controversy as a “dispute about words”—with the real issue at hand being the best means of educating people into true religion and morals.4 Similarly, some held theologians should emphasise only what was agreed on by most: that human nature was equipped with the means to form basic religious notions easily.5 All that mattered was that, as schoolmaster Roger Davies claimed, “there is in men a natural propensity to some sentiments, owing to their original frame and constitution and the design of their creator.”6 What unites many of these positions on innatism is a sense that precise philosophical arguments—such as one might find in the texts of Locke, 1 Gretton (1726, p. iii). 2 Blackmore (1728, p. 29); Stephens (1737, vol. I, pp. 3–4); Anon. (1731, pp. iii–iv). 3 Fiddes (1718–1720, vol. I p. 63 and pp. 61–64). 4 Anon. (1714, p. v). 5 Atterbury (1720, p. 5). 6 Davies (1724, p. 69).

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John Sergeant, and Henry Lee—were unimportant and, frankly, to many, uninteresting. A scattered few authors still used the appeal to innate religious ideas.7 From the opposite end of the spectrum, an equally scattered few attacked an increasingly irrelevant Cartesian innatism, as did the lay religious writer and probable auto-didact Samuel Colliber.8 And it was quite possible for older theologians to write as if the preceding decades of debate had never happened: the Scottish mythographer Robert Millar, born in 1672, writing in 1726 could confidently restate the arguments from the consensus gentium and innatism based on the standard authorities of Cicero, Cicero’s Epicurean Velleius, and Seneca, and with all the related denials of the accuracy of accounts of atheist societies.9 Another key factor behind the reduced volume of appeals to innatism was that between the 1690s and 1720s the target of apologetics had shifted away from atheism and towards deism.10 By the 1720s the doctrine of innate religious ideas was often understood, to use sacred historian Samuel Shuckford’s phrase, as a central element “of our modern deism.”11 The refutation of the innate idea of God was a central plank of the belated epitome of anti-deist apologetics, Philip Skelton’s Deism Revealed (1749).12 Religious innatism was now associated with the deistic sense of natural reason’s ability to come to a comprehensive understanding of religious truth without recourse to scripture. But this was an anti-deist polemicist’s sleight of hand. As Nicholls clearly knew, English Freethinkers did not appeal to innatist arguments, only to the self-sufficiency of natural reason. Charles Blount repeated and expanded Herbert’s list of common religious notions, but he did not ground this in an innatist account of their origin. John Toland was a good Lockean, too good even. As we have seen, Anthony Collins bonded with Locke in mocking William Sherlock’s Platonist innatism. Matthew Tindal did not argue for the existence of innate religious ideas, only that the Fathers and 7 For example, Stoughton (1717, p. 8). 8 Colliber (1718, pp. 18–19, pp. 128–135). 9 Millar (1726, vol. I, pp. 12–14). 10 This is not to argue that deism was not a concern in previous decades, only that the

volume of anti-deist apologetics had grew to primacy. For an earlier anti-deist work see, for example, Stillingfleet (1677). On English deism recently see Lucci (2008); Hudson (2009a) and Hudson (2009b); and Wigelsworth (2009). 11 Shuckford (1728–1730, vol. I, p. 354). See also vol. I pp. 363–64. 12 Skelton (1749), vol. I, Dialogue 2.

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contemporary divines did so—thereby insinuating that his arguments in favour of the sufficiency of natural religion were not opposed to standard Christian theology.13 William Wollaston actively denied all forms of innatism, as well as denying the uniformity of human behaviour on moral and religious matters. The argument from innate ideas and the consensus gentium were, at Wollaston phrased it, “superficial and transient views” for explaining how we come to our moral notions.14 Discussion of innate aids to religious belief formed no part of Thomas Morgan’s The Moral Philosopher (1737).15 In his Physico-Theology (1741), Morgan accepted Locke’s argument that we have, in Morgan’s words, “no innate principles, perceptions of truth, or judgement of reason,” but criticised what he took as Locke’s denial of innate “sensations, appetites, and instincts.”16 Especially following publication of Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), anti-deist apologetics utilised anti-innatist arguments to attack deists for their supposed naïve use of a discredited view of human nature and the origin of religious notions. They pounced on Tindal’s metaphorical talk of religion as “indelibly implanted in human nature.”17 This was religious controversialism, not accurate description: the deist position was attacked because of its similarity to the doctrine of innate ideas, rather than the deists’ actual use of it.18 The anonymous The Religion of Nature Consider’d (1731), written in response Tindal’s work and to the deist Thomas Chubb’s Discourse Concerning Reason (1731), is a good example of the strategy used by the orthodox (often themselves deploying the authority of Locke) to chastise the deists for their use of a discredited view of natural religion.19 Similarly, in his Deism Fairly Stated (1746), the strident freethinker Peter Annet made no mention

13 Tindal (1730, p. 46, p. 276). 14 Wollaston (1725, p. 23). 15 Morgan (1737, p. 25). 16 Morgan (1741, p. 73). 17 Tindal (1730, p. 2). 18 Smith (1736, vol. I, pp. xiii–xix). 19 Anon (1731, pp. iii–iv). See also Burnett (1730–1732, vol. I, pp. 11–12); Denne

(1730, p. 7); Smith (1736, vol. I, pp. xiii–xix); Johnson (1740, vol. II, p. 270); Shuckford (1728–1730, vol. I, p. 363).

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of innatism, but he was attacked as naively believing that there existed “connatural notices” that explained the origin of all religious tenets.20 In the face of the deists’ confidence in the powers of natural reason to understand a self-sufficient natural religion, many theologians went to the opposite extreme in their rejection of innate ideas: that, in the phrase of Henry Felton, Principal of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, the “light of nature” was “utterly insufficient to lead mankind into the knowledge of God and their duty.”21 In doing so, defenders of Christianity often extended Locke’s arguments against religious innatism to also cover the purported powers of unassisted reason.22 As throughout this essay, however, the status of pro-innatist and anti-innatist thought cannot be easily reducible to single party or theological groups or for singular apologetic reasons, and rather what we observe are shifts in the volume and emphasis of specific arguments. The attack on deism was not always linked with the denial of the existence of pre-rational aids to forming basic religious notions—denial of their sufficiency to come to all religious truths worked just as well.23 Even in the 1720s and 1730s, the occasional preacher still appealed to innatism against purported deists. The dissenting minister and frequent controversialist Caleb Fleming’s argued against Thomas Chubb’s deism by claiming that belief in “God’s particular providence” was an “innate principle” demonstrated by the “universal consent of men.”24 Fleming claimed this demonstrated that the deists’ belief in a non-interventionist god was fallacious because it went against the dictates of nature. By the beginning of the Georgian era the appetite of English booksellers and readers for innatist texts had diminished to a great degree. Up until then, the book market remained saturated with editions of midto-late seventeenth-century religious innatists, suggesting its continued appeal regardless of its abandonment on the avant-garde of philosophy. This changed in the 1720s. Similarly, we can find glimpses of how the debate over innate ideas retained a status within intellectual culture, but

20 Berrow (1751, p. 12). 21 Felton (1732, p. 72). 22 Conybeare (1732, pp. 338–339); Campbell (1739, p. 27, p. 73, p. 80 and pp. 170– 174); and Bale (1750, pp. 1–2). 23 E.g. Constable (1739, pp. 20–22). 24 Fleming (1739, p. 65). See also Anon (1742, pp. 28–29).

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one that indicated the doctrine’s declining significance. A scattering of essays in the literary magazines could deploy innatism well into the midcentury, such as an item in the Literary Journal in January 1746 on the existence of God which emphasised that the notion of an “immaterial agent” was “fixed” in the mind without any rational deduction.25 The eccentric clergyman and showman John Henley, known as “Orator Henley,” ran public debates at his Oratory in London in the mid-1730s on the topic of innate ideas.26 The Irish author Arthur Murphy, in a satire published in the Gray’s Inn Journal in 1752 on the conduct of London debating societies, included innate ideas as one of the topics being debated.27 Murphy’s satirical jibe served to expose the backward-looking and useless quality of the society’s activities. Following the burning out of the controversy over religious innatism by the 1720s, what followed was a period of continued if disjointed discussion of innate religious knowledge. As some theologians recommended, the doctrine indeed became primarily a subject for philosophers. As such, the debate over innatism became more periodic than continuous, entirely reflective of the fact that subject was less of a hot topic. Peter Browne, Bishop of Cork and Ross, wrote a popular book entitled The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of Human Understanding (1728; four editions by 1737), which neatly summarised the theological context of the previous century’s debate over religious innatism and exemplified the shift to analogical reasoning.28 The doctrine of innate religious ideas

25 Anon. (1746, pp. 91–113). 26 On innate ideas being the topic of the public debates series at the Oratory see Daily

Gazetteer 13 November 1735, 20 December 1735 and Grub-Street Journal 18 December 1735. 27 Murphy (1786, vol. v, p. 144). 28 In the mid-1730s, Browne’s work was set as required reading by Joseph Smith,

Provost of Queen’s College, Oxford, on the topic of Aristotelian view that nothing existed in the intellect beyond what was first in the senses. Papers of Joseph Smith, Queen’s College, Oxford, MSS 482, fols. 328–35. Joseph Smith’s own views on the strength of the light of nature were formulated, at least in part, in response to Socinus’s denial of such natural knowledge. See Commonplace book, Joseph Smith and others, Queen’s College, Oxford, MSS 478, fols. 61–63. Browne’s Procedure was also used by Philip Doddridge and John Wesley in their lectures, and by John Towers in his expansion of Richard Cumberland’s criticism of innatism in a footnote in Tower’s edition of De Legibus Naturae. See Wesley (1837, vol. I, p. 619); Cumberland (1750, pp. 290–230). See also Rivers (1991–2000, vol. I, pp. 235–236).

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resulted from concern about how humans could conceive of “immaterial and heavenly things.”29 The Platonic innatist position held that we have knowledge of God and immaterial matters “as they are in themselves.”30 But innatism was a naively hopeful and hopelessly implausible attempt to argue that human understanding was able “to take a direct view of spiritual things.”31 Browne’s criticism of innatism was part of the Procedure’s much larger assault on the “monstrous position … that we have as clear and distinct an idea of spirit, as we have of body.”32 What was one of Hobbes’ most scandalous claims was now an entirely defensible Christian commonplace. To Browne, we come to knowledge of God’s existence neither from “any idea [e.g. innate] we have of him” or from any “direct intuition of the intellect,” but from “reasoning upon the works of this visible creation.”33 We thereby form only an “indirect, analogous and very complex notion of him.”34 Browne argued that we only have “analogical” knowledge inferred from our reflections on ourselves and the world.35 His position was characteristic of the growing status of analogical reasoning within natural theological thought. One particularly strenuous set of criticisms of the Lockean view of the self-evident nature of moral truth and the existence of God came from the pen of the prominent but idiosyncratic Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, Robert Greene. From his appointment at Clare in 1706 until his death, Greene attacked Lockean philosophy, with his critique eventually published in Principles of the Philosophy of the Expansive and Contractive Forces (1727).36 Greene believed Locke’s anti-innatism was entirely implausible. Locke had stated that his method avoided any, in Greene’s phrase, “physical consideration of the mind.”37 To Greene, undertaking a study of the faculty of understanding that was deliberately “ignorant of the nature and constitution of the mind” and yet which was 29 Browne (1728, p. 89). 30 Browne (1728, p. 91). 31 Browne (1728, p. 95). 32 Browne (1728, p. 74). 33 Browne (1728, pp. 81–82). 34 Browne (1728, p. 82). 35 Browne (1728, p. 91). 36 On Greene, see Harré (1980, pp. 27–30). 37 Locke (1690) i.i.2; Greene (1727 p. 608).

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entirely willing to comment upon its contents and powers was a disingenuous and untenable position to hold.38 Locke’s reliance on travel accounts evidenced a mockable credulity, given that the supposed “facts” of travel literature were being alternatively “affirmed and refuted every day.” It was an act of supreme intellectual arrogance and naivety for Locke to position himself as the “settler of the boundaries of knowledge, and [as] a tetherer to the mind of man” on such flimsy foundations.39 Moreover, Greene rejected Locke’s belief that humanity shared a uniform standard of intellectual capability. The notion of souls as rasae tabulae with shared innate intellectual powers could not explain the diversity of human beliefs in the world. Difference on moral and religious matters demonstrated conclusively that humans were born with different levels of mental ability.40 Discernible amongst early eighteenth-century commentaries on Lockean epistemology, however, was a clear attempt to re-state the natural religiosity of human nature. In his widely used logic textbook, the Independent minister Isaac Watts refused to debate the topic of “origin of ideas” beyond noting that it was a “controversy” in which “Mr. Locke utterly denies [the doctrine of innate ideas]; others as positively affirm it.”41 Things were different in Watts’ Philosophical Essays (1733). Essay IV was dedicated to the topic “Of Innate Ideas, and Propositions Natural and Moral.” While claiming that Locke had “ingeniously and sufficiently refuted” the existence of immediately understood innate ideas engrafted into human nature at birth, Watts offered a renewed account of humanity’s religious predisposition.42 Human nature possessed two pre-rational sources for religious ideas. The first were those “practical principles” which related to “virtue and vice, religion and morality,” situated in the conscience and whose existence was demonstrated by the instantaneousness of our moral judgements.43 Here, Watts re-stated the old casuistical argument about the innate contents of the conscience, though he believed he did so in a way not vulnerable to Locke’s arguments against innate 38 Greene (1727, p. 602). 39 Greene (1727, p. 600). 40 Greene (1727, p. 603). 41 Watts (1725, p. 42). See also p. 282. 42 Watts (1733, p. 99). 43 Watts (1733, pp. 106–107).

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ideas as they acted in a proleptical fashion. More innovatively, the second were “general principles” motivating behaviour located within the “moral sense or instinct.”44 By doing so, Watts aligned himself with the moral philosophy found in Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks (1711).45 Locke had argued for the existence of one innate motivating principle in human nature: the hedonistic one of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain.46 Watts merely increased the number, including the worshipful reverence of the creator.47 Thus he expanded the Lockean account of human nature’s innate “principles” to re-establish the inherent religiosity of human nature in direct opposition to that same Lockean account’s denial of natural religious propensities. A similar combination of re-stating religious innatism and supplementing it with a new focus on religious passions and senses, inspired partly by Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks, can be found in the Irish clergyman John Maxwell’s lengthy appendices to his translation of Cumberland’s anti-innatist De legibus naturae (1727). In these Maxwell also relied heavily on Anglican clergyman Richard Brocklesby’s (1635–1714) expansive An Explication of the Gospel-Theism and the Divinity of the Christian Religion (1706) to defend the religious predisposition of human nature. Brocklesby’s work was a voluminous text which one reader described as “the prodigiousest mass of learning that was ever printed in English tongue,” and it was well received in some quarters.48 Maxwell wrote against not only Cumberland and Locke, but also Bentley and Selden. For Maxwell (and Brocklesby), silently quoting Tertullian, the “soul of man is naturally Christian.”49 Human nature has numerous “natural notices” of religion.50 Firstly, humans have a set of innate ideas and principles that are comprehended at the stage of intellectual maturity. External objects acting upon our senses alone cannot explain the origins of “purely intelligible” notions and hence these notions had to be

44 Watts (1733, p. 110, p. 108). 45 Watts (1733, p. 108). 46 Locke (1690) i.iii.3; Watts (1733, pp. 111–112). 47 Watts (1733, p. 110). 48 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Rawl. Letters 9 fol. 172 Elisha Smith to Thomas Hearne 19 October 1706. 49 Cumberland (2007, p. 929). 50 Cumberland (2007, p. 860); Brocklesby (1706, p. 664).

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viewed as innate.51 Maxwell utilised the majority of Brocklesby’s defence of innate religious ideas, which the latter directed against Locke’s Essay and Bentley’s Boyle Lectures.52 But Maxwell supplemented it with reference to Shaftesbury’s rejection of arguments against universal consent on the grounds that they were based on a perverse enjoyment of “monstrous accounts of monstrous men.”53 The second natural source of religious knowledge was the conscience, the actions and judgement of which demonstrated that the morals and piety were antecedent to any human institution. Here both Brocklesby and Maxwell invoked the long-standing concept of “synteresis,” as the innate storehouse of religious principles, to explain the workings of the conscience.54 Thirdly, Brocklesby and Maxwell appealed to religious passions: prompts to religious belief and action that existed separate to, but influenced, the act of reasoning. These “instincts of nature to religion and society” exist “below reason, will, and choice” and are thus “devoid of reason.” The two examples that Brocklesby and Maxwell used were the “passion of devotion,” by which natural instinct humans become the “devotional suppliants of an invisible superior power,” and the passion of the “fear of conscience.”55 We find another forging together of innate religious propensities of the understanding with innate religious passions in the Arminian theologian Thomas Stackhouse’s popular Complete Body of Divinity (1729; five editions by 1776). Stackhouse positioned himself as heir to an English theological tradition that had emerged since the 1650s, undertaken by a first generation of Cudworth, More, Benjamin Whichcote and Wilkins and followed up by Barrow, Simon Patrick, Stillingfleet, and Tillotson.56 At the very beginning of the Complete Body, Stackhouse stated that “if we look into the frame and disposition of our minds, we shall soon perceive, that God has implanted in us such inclinations and propensions to the general offices of religion, as move us in a manner mechanically, and

51 Cumberland (2007, pp. 905–906). 52 Cumberland (2007, pp. 921–933); Brocklesby (1706, pp. 668–672). 53 Cumberland (2007, p. 929); Shaftesbury (2001, vol. I, p. 212). 54 Cumberland (2007, p. 907, pp. 936–937); Brocklesby (1706, p. 661, pp. 674–675). 55 Cumberland (2007, p. 907, pp. 934–936); Brocklesby (1706, p. 661, pp. 672–674). 56 Stackhouse (1729, pp. ii–iii).

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without any previous deliberation” (my italics). Humanity’s natural sentiments “have a manifest tendency to the duties of religion; [they] are not the result of our reason but produced in us whether we will or no.”57 It was still thus entirely possible for an Anglican theologian to open a popular body of divinity work in the early eighteenth century with a confident statement of humanity’s essential religiosity based on an innate religious disposition. But the locus of that disposition within human nature, and its explanatory terminology, had changed. Alongside the more familiar “propension,” were appeals to “inclinations” and “sentiments” and of these driving humans to religious belief in a mechanical—that is, unthinking and unwilled—fashion. Locke had argued against innate religious knowledge within the faculty of the understanding. A generation of theologians and philosophers who followed now repositioned man’s innate religiosity in the passions and affections. In the works of Stackhouse, Maxwell and Watts, we find theologians and philosophers of varying stamps developing a new version of religious innatism that appealed to religious passions lying beneath or acting prior to the separate act of reasoning. This involved the resituating of at least some of human nature’s inherent aids to religious belief away from the realm of reason, and therefore away from the critique of Platonic and Cartesian innate ideas lodged in the mind. Both Maxwell and Watts used Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks (1711) in their expositions of renewed religious innatism. Shaftesbury had revealed his own motivations behind repairing the argument for human nature’s inherent religiosity in a letter to his friend Michael Ainsworth in June 1709. Shaftesbury complained that Locke’s Essay had “struck the home blow” for Hobbes’s philosophy. Locke’s anti-innatism had “struck at all fundamentals, threw all order and virtue out of the world, and made the very ideas of these (which are the same as those of God) unnatural, and without foundation in our minds.” Locke had credulously trusted unreliable travel accounts of atheist societies and, in the process, gave up the much securer foundations of ancient philosophy’s argument for the existence of God from universal consent. Moreover, Locke’s reduction of all innatism down to naïve innatism dodged the true question of “whether the constitution of man” upon

57 Stackhouse (1729, p. 2).

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becoming an adult will develop “infallibly, inevitably, necessarily … the idea and sense of order, administration, and a God.”58 Shocked by what he viewed as Locke’s Hobbesian denial of humanity’s religious predisposition, Shaftesbury put forward a teleological account of human nature in which a worshipful, monotheistic religious belief was a “natural affection” or “natural passion.”59 Religiosity resulted from an instinctive feeling of wonder upon perception of the “numbers, harmony, proportion, and beauty of every kind” evident in nature. These naturally captivate “the heart, and raises the imagination”—rather than the faculty of reason—“to an opinion or conceit of something majestic and divine.”60 This “passion” or “natural affection” Shaftesbury posed as an inherent part of human nature. “It is evident,” he claimed “that religion itself is of the kind and must therefore be natural to man.”61 To form true religious notions, however, the religious affections had to be supplemented by exercise of humanity’s “rational part.” For Shaftesbury, this wonderment prompted the individual to investigate their “immediate relation to the universal system and principle of order and intelligence.”62 The “natural affection” of religion motivates us to think rationally about the god that we instinctively believe in. Shaftesbury’s argument was picked up by Francis Hutcheson (1696– 1746) and other Irish and Scottish theologians.63 In Shaftesburian vein, Hutcheson maintained that basic religious notions were not the result of long deductions of reason but due to the workings of a number of internal senses—though it has been suggested that we can also hear echoes in Hutcheson of the Calvinist sensus divinitatis.64 In his An Essay on the Nature and the Conduct of the Passions and the Affections (1728), Hutcheson argued that “ideas of divinity arise from the internal senses”; humanity’s natural “apprehensions of a deity” first arose from the

58 Cooper (1900, pp. 403–405). 59 Cooper (2001, vol. III, p. 23). See also vol. 1, p. 31, vol. ii, p. 43, vol. ii, p. 88

and vol. iii, p. 24. On Shaftesbury and Locke see Carey (2006) and Uehlein (2017). 60 Cooper (2001, vol. iii p. 20). 61 Cooper (2001, vol. iii, p. 23). 62 Cooper (2001, vol. iii, p. 137). 63 Hutcheson (1728, pp. 175–176, pp. 199–200). On this development see Mills

(2016) and, especially, Crowe (2010). 64 Crowe (2011) and Harris (2008). On Hutcheson and Calvin see Gellera (2016).

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instinctive workings of our senses and thus belief in God was a “natural effect” of our constitutions, rather than a consequence of our ratiocination. Our “internal sense” leads us to immediately perceive “grandeur, beauty, order, [and] harmony” upon observation of the natural world and whenever this happens we immediately “raise an opinion of a mind, of design, and wisdom.”65 As soon as we feel this idea of a “superior mind” developed, an “inward devotion arises” in a way that is “antecedent[] to any volition of our will.”66 The “disposition in mankind to religion” is undeniable and proven by the consensus gentium: religion develops within humans “as universally and with as much uniformity” as humans mature into “a certain stature and shape.”67 For Hutcheson, as for Shaftesbury, human nature’s inherent religiosity demonstrates that it is the “perfection of our kind … to know, love and reverence the great author of all things.”68 The prominent Scots-Irish presbyterian clergyman John Abernethy of Antrim reiterated the argument from Hutcheson’s Essay in his popular Discourses Concerning the Being and Natural Perfections of God (1740; eight English, Scottish, and Irish editions by 1778). Religious sentiments “naturally arise” because the human mind is “so constituted as to have a pleasing sense of beauty, in order, proportion and harmony” and a moral sense, from which we feel ourselves into belief in an omniscient, wise and good God.69 Likewise, the one-time regent of Marischal College, Aberdeen, George Turnbull acknowledged his indebtedness to Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in his Principles of Moral Philosophy (1740).70 Like Watts and Maxwell, however, Turnbull’s account fused together traditional religious innatism and the new internal sense philosophy. Upon consideration of the natural world, the mind immediately and unavoidably develops the “idea of a creating and sustaining power or principle.”71 We can term this idea of God “innate” because it is an “idea the mind cannot

65 Hutcheson (1728, p. 175). 66 Hutcheson (1728, pp. 199–200). 67 Hutcheson (1728, pp. 175–176, pp. 199–200). 68 Hutcheson (1728, pp. 199–200). 69 Abernethy (1740, pp. 33–36). 70 Turnbull (2005, vol. I, p. 14). 71 Turnbull (2005, vol. I, p. 230).

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avoid if it thinks, but that necessarily occurs to everyone.” As with Hutcheson, the immediate conceptualisation of our innate idea of God upon considering the natural world had devotional effects: our innate moral sense “naturally disposes us to ascribe the best disposition and temper to such a mind.” Our moral sense “leads us to ascribe not only intelligence, but the love of order, and benignity of temper” to God. Citing Hutcheson’s Essay as his authority, Turnbull maintained that there was a “disposition in man to admire the author of nature” and “religion is therefore as natural to the mind as a moral sense.”72 Reiterations of the Shaftesbury and Hutcheson argument are present in the Dialogues Concerning Education (five editions between 1745 and 1758), by another Regent of Marischal College, David Fordyce, and in his Elements of Moral Philosophy (originally published as part of Robert Dodsley’s The Preceptor in 1748, which went through twelve editions by 1793, and was published separately in 1754, 1758 and 1769). Fordyce’s intellectual engagement with Hutcheson was not wholly positive,73 but when it came to his explanation of the origins of humanity’s first religious notions, Fordyce was in step with the position developed by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. In the Dialogues, Fordyce outlined the logically consecutive but temporally immediate stages in the first formation of an idea of a deity. Our first views of nature “excite wonder,” which in turn “awakens curiosity and attention,” leading us to a “perception of beauty and order.” Our “internal sense” apprehends from this beauty “contrivance and design” and from here “we naturally, and without any nice deduction” come to an idea of an “intelligent, wise, and beneficent” supreme being. We “feel at first, rather than reason that there is a God.”74 In his Elements, Fordyce reiterated his Hutchesonian view that a human is “by the constitution of [its] nature” designed to be a “religious creature.”75 The origin of an idea of a deity “requires no nice search or elaborate deduction of reason, to trace or prove that connection” but is the result of “direct intuition.” The subsequent “reverence” of the deity

72 Turnbull (2005, vol. I, p. 235). 73 See his criticisms in National Library of Scotland, MS 584, fol. 791 (David Fordyce

to William Craig, 24 August 1735) and MS 2670, fol. 158 (David Fordyce to William Craig, 23 December 1735). 74 Fordyce (1745, p. 219). 75 Fordyce (2003, p. 147). See also p. 37.

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is, likewise, a “native propensity of the mind.”76 Fordyce’s discussion was incorporated into entry on “Moral Philosophy” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, meaning it had an afterlife well into the nineteenth century.77 That said, the argument for human nature’s inherent religious tendencies grounded in a moral sense did not have to be linked only to Shaftesbury’s or Hutcheson’s influence. We find in the Jacobite philosopher Alexander Forbes, Lord Forbes of Pitsligo’s Essays Moral and Philosophical (1734) a commitment to inherent religiosity drawing upon the Restoration jurist Sir Matthew Hale as much as Shaftesbury. Forbes maintained that in matters of right and wrong, including over foundational religious beliefs, our judgements are formed by our “moral or internal sense.”78 In support of this claim, Forbes cited Hale’s argument for a “moral sense” capable of knowing basic “moral dictates.”79 To Forbes, the judgement of right and wrong is an “operation of the mind [that] has been uniform in all ages of the world.”80 The argument against innatism from moral and religious diversity missed the point. Differences of opinion occur not over moral principles so much as over how agreed-upon principles are to be acted upon. Everyone’s conscience inherently declares that “God is to be honoured in the most perfect manner,” the “dispute only comes to be, what is the most perfect manner?”81 In this, Forbes had just reasserted the old syllogistic understanding of the conscience as made up of synderesis providing the major premise and potentially fallacious discursive reasoning providing the minor. But he believed his understanding of the conscience would help “settle the debate about innate ideas, which is not now so high as it was some years ago.”82 We do not have nor need an “innate idea of a moral proposition,” because our “mind ripens as to its comprehension of truths both geometrical and moral” that all mankind “are agreed upon.”83 Forbes rebuked Locke’s claim in the Essay that even golden rule required justification, on the grounds that it was an intuitively true 76 Fordyce (2003, pp. 108–109). 77 Anon. (1771, vol. iii, p. 296). 78 Forbes (1734, p. 286). 79 Forbes (1734, p. 286) citing Hale (1700, esp. pp. 154–157). 80 Forbes (1734, p. 282). 81 Forbes (1734, p. 284). 82 Forbes (1734, p. 285). 83 Forbes (1734, pp. 285–286).

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proposition. To deny this self-evidence was to claim than it was possible to “never see the obligation of any moral rule.”84 Together, the internal sense theorists of religion all claimed that worshipful theism is the natural propensity of human nature. Religiosity first develops not because of reasoned consideration, but because of the internal senses of beauty, harmony, and order and the correlate moral sense. The relocation of human nature’s dispositional aids to forming religious belief into the senses protected, it was hoped, the argument from Locke’s attack on Cartesian and Platonic notions of latent innate ideas lodged in the faculty of the understanding.85 Moreover, the explanation of the origins of religious belief in the passions and affections was far more convincing, these theorists held, than the appeal to ratiocination alone. In Fordyce’s framing of the position, “it does not appear, from any true history or experience of the mind’s progress, that any man by any formal deduction of his discursive powers, ever reasoned himself into the belief of a God.”86 We find in the Scots-Irish internal sense theorists bold arguments for the natural religiosity of human nature that match, if not exceed, the comparable statements of mid-seventeenth-century England. But while the internal sense theory explanation of the origins of religion gained standing in Ireland and Scotland, and gained some adherents in England,87 it was subject to criticism south of the Tweed.88 Critics of Hutcheson’s philosophy, noticeably, deployed the earlier anti-innatist authorities of Cumberland, Pufendorf, and Locke against the new nativist argument.89 The stark difference between the new nativism and the postLockeans was well captured in the Cambridge academic and theologian Thomas Johnson’s bold claim that “what Mr Locke has advanced against innate practical principles, may as justly be applied to all those instincts, passions, and affections, which are generally looked upon to be natural” (my italics).90

84 Forbes (1734, p. 144). 85 For arguments about the continuity between Cambridge Platonism and Scottish

Enlightenment philosophy see, for example, Gill (2010) and Hutton (2012). 86 Fordyce (2003, p. 108). 87 Foster (1749–1752, esp. vol. I, p. 107). 88 Carey (2015). 89 Johnson (1731, pp. 31–46); Dove (1750, esp. pp. 115–116). 90 Johnson (1731, p. 31).

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Despite the debate between internal sense theorists and their critics, one striking feature about discussion of religious innatism to the mideighteenth century is how the issue ceased to be as of great a concern amongst theologians and philosophers as it had been in the late seventeenth. Much of the earlier ire directed towards religious innatism was ire directed towards Platonism and Cartesianism, and both fell from prominence with some rapidity. Deism provided a new threat to Christianity, which prompted both the rise in prominence of the argument from (Christian) tradition and the accusation that the “deists” believed in the now untenable doctrine of innate ideas. The appeal to an innate religious disposition did not disappear entirely. But the subsequent deployment of religious innatism within the fields of natural theology and apologetics from the 1710s onwards was less frequent and often employed using ambivalent language. A common position was that the critics of innate ideas were probably right, but this did not undermine the sense of humanity’s innate religiosity as proved by the consensus gentium. In a way, for religious writers uninterested with the niceties and nuances of philosophical reasoning, the question over the existence over innate ideas was not decided one way or the other, it just did not matter very much. By contrast, in more learned discussions of the origins of our moral and religious notions, we find re-statements of religious innatism that shifted the locus of this religiosity away from the faculty of reason and to the prerational or sub-rational parts of human nature—the passions, affections, instincts, and internal senses.

References Abernethy, John. 1740. Discourses Concerning the Being and Natural Perfections of God. Dublin. Anon. 1714. Wisdom and Reason: Or, Human Understanding Consider’d. London. Anon. 1731. The Religion of Nature Consider’d. London. Anon. 1742. A Dissertation on Deistical and Arian Corruption. London. Anon. 1746. ‘An Essay on the Being and Attributes of God’, Literary Journal, 91–113. January. Anon. 1771. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 3 vols., ed. William Smellie. Edinburgh. Atterbury, Lewis. 1720. Twelve Practical Discourses on Several Subjects. London. Bale, Julius. 1750. The Use and Intent of Prophecy, and History of the Fall. London.

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Berrow, Capel. 1751. Deism Not Consistent with the Religion of Reason and Nature. London. Blackmore, Richard. 1728. Natural Theology; or, Moral Duties Consider’d Apart from Positive. London. Brocklesby, Richard. 1706. An Explication of the Gospel-Theism and the Divinity of the Christian Religion. London. Browne, Peter. 1728. The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of Human Understanding. London. Burnett, Thomas. 1730–1732. The Argument Set Forth in a Late Book, entitled Christianity as Old as the Creation, Review and Confuted, 3 vols. London. Campbell, Archibald. 1739. The Necessity of Revelation. London. Carey, Daniel. 2006. Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carey, Daniel. 2015. Francis Hutcheson’s Philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment: Reception, Reputation, and Legacy. In Scottish Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century: Volume I: Morals, Politics, Art, Religion, ed. James Harris and Aaron Garrett, 36–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Colliber, Samuel. 1718. An Impartial Enquiry into the Existence and Nature of God. London. Constable, John. 1739. Deism and Christianity Fairly Consider’d. London. Conybeare, John. 1732. A Defence of Reveal’d Religion, second edition. London. Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury. 1900. The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand. London: Sonnenschein. Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury. 2001 [1711]. Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Douglas den Uyl, 3 vols. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Crowe, Benjamin D. 2010. Religion and the ‘Sensitive Branch of Human Nature.’ Religious Studies. 46:251–263. Crowe, Benjamin D. 2011. Hutcheson on natural religion. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19:711–740. Cumberland, Richard. 1750. De legibus naturae, ed. John Towers. Dublin. Cumberland, Richard. 2007 [1672/1727]. Treatise of the Law of Nature, trans. John Maxwell, ed. Jon Parkin. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Davies, Roger. 1724. An essay in the Socratick Way of Dialogue, on the Existence of a Divine Being. London. Denne, John. 1730.Want of Universality No Just Objection to the Truth of the Christian Religion. London. Dove, John. 1750. A Creed Founded on Truth and Common Sense. London. Felton, Henry. 1732. The Christian Faith, Asserted Against Deists, Arians, and Socinians. Oxford. Fiddes, Richard. 1718–1720. Theologia speculativa, 2 vols. London.

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Fleming, Caleb. 1739. Remarks on Mr. Thomas Chubb’s Vindication of His True Gospel of Jesus Christ. London. Forbes, Alexander, Lord Forbes of Pitsligo. 1734. Essays Moral and Philosophical. London. Fordyce, David. 1745. Dialogues Concerning Education. London. Fordyce, David. 2003 [1748]. The Elements of Moral Philosophy, ed. Thomas Kennedy. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Foster, James. 1749–1752. Discourses on All the Principal Branches of Natural Religion and Social Virtue, 2 vols. London. Gellera, Giovanni. 2016. The Epistemology of Sense from Calvin to Hutcheson. Journal of Scottish Thought. 7:148–170. Gill, Michael B. 2010. From Cambridge Platonism to Scottish Sentimentalism. Journal of Scottish Philosophy. 8:13–31. Greene, Robert. 1727. Principles of the Philosophy of the Expansive and Contractive Forces. Cambridge. Gretton, Phillips. 1726. A Review of the Argument A Priori, In Relation to the Being and Attributes of God. London. Hale, Matthew. 1700. Contemplations Moral and Divine. The Third Part, ed. by Gilbert Burnet. London. Harré, Rom. 1980. Knowledge. In The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, 11–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harris, James A. 2008. Religion in Hutcheson’s moral philosophy. Journal of the History of Philosophy. 46:205–222. Hudson, Wayne. 2009. The English Deists: Studies in Early Enlightenment. London: Pickering & Chatto. Hudson, Wayne. 2009. Enlightenment and Modernity: The English Deists and Reform. London: Pickering & Chatto. Hutcheson, Francis. 1728. An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections. London. Hutton, Sarah. 2012. From Cudworth to Hume: Cambridge Platonism and the Scottish Enlightenment. Canadian Journal of Philosophy. 42:8–26. Johnson, Thomas. 1731. An Essay on Moral Obligation. London. Johnson, Samuel. 1740. Thirty-Six Select Discourses Doctrinal and Practical, 2 vols. London. Locke, John. 1690. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London. Lucci, Diego. 2008. Scripture and Deism: The Biblical Criticism of the EighteenthCentury British Deists. Bern: Lang. Millar, Robert. 1726. The History of the Propagation of Christianity and the Overthrow of Paganism, second edition, 2 vols. London.

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Mills, R.J.W. 2015. Archibald Campbell’s Necessity of Revelation (1739)—the Science of Human Nature’s First Study of Religion. History of European Ideas. 41:728–746. Mills, R.J.W., and Mills. 2016. Lord Kames’s Analysis of the Natural Origins of Religion: The Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751). Historical Research 89:751–775. Morgan, Thomas. 1737. The Moral Philosopher. London. Morgan, Thomas. 1741. Physico-Theology: Or, a Philosophico-Moral Disquisition Concerning Human Nature. London. Murphy, Arthur. 1786. The Works of Arthur Murphy, 7 vols. London. Rivers, Isabel. 1991–2000. Reason, Grace, and Sentiment. A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England 1660–1780. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shuckford, Samuel. 1728–1730. The Sacred and Profane History of the World Connected, 3 vols. London. Skelton, Philip. 1749. Deism Revealed, 2 vols. London. Smith, Elisha. 1736. The Cure of Deism, 2 vols. London. Stackhouse, Thomas. 1729. A Complete Body of Divinity. London. Stephens, William. 1737. Sermons on Several Subjects, 2 vols. Oxford. Stillingfleet, Edward. 1677. A Letter to a Deist. London. Stoughton, William. 1717. The Greatest Good, or the Greatest Evil, Deriv’d to Mankind from the Right Use or Abuse of Religion. London. Tindal, Matthew. 1730. Christianity as Old as the Creation. London. Turnbull, George. 2005 [1740]. The Principles of Moral and Christian Philosophy, 2 vols., ed. Alexander Broadie. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. Uehlein, Friedrich A. 2017. Whichcote, Shaftesbury and Locke: Shaftesbury’s Critique of Locke’s Epistemology and Moral Philosophy. British Journal for the History of Philosophy. 25:1031–1048. Watts, Isaac. 1725. Logick, Or, The Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry After Truth. London. Watts, Isaac. 1733. Philosophical Essays. London. Wesley, John. 1837. The Journal of the Reverend John Wesley, 2 vols., ed. John Emory. New York. Wigelsworth, Jeffrey R. 2009. Deism in Enlightenment England: Theology, Politics, and Newtonian Public Science. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wollaston, William. 1725. The Religion of Nature Delineated. London.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

Abstract The conclusion surveys the attitudes of the Boyle Lecturers from 1692 to 1725 to demonstrate the continued appeal of religious innatism and the consensus gentium, regardless of the decline of the standing of the doctrine of innate ideas. The arguments of previous chapters are brought together, with a stress placed on the generational shift as innate ideas fell from fashion and deism became the principal target of apologetics. It is argued that changes in commonplace attitudes within intellectual culture need to be studied on the level of the mass collection of texts, as done in this book, rather than by focus on canonical authors. The continued belief in the innate religiosity of human nature by many suggests that Locke was not victorious, and some sceptical suggestions are made about whether there had been any substantial shift in the belief of the naturalness of religion. Keywords Boyle Lectures · Natural theology · Consensus gentium · Canonical authors · Intellectual culture · Religious innatism

Given their status as totemic attempts at statements of modern Anglican orthodoxy, surveying the use of religious innatism within the first generation of Boyle Lecturers (1692–1725) is a productive way to end our

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. J. W. Mills, The Religious Innatism Debate in Early Modern Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84323-6_7

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survey.1 The Boyle Lectures are often associated by scholars with Lockean anti-innatism and the fall of the innatist argument away from its position of centrality in English natural theology and apologetics. The Lectures do indeed present a microcosm of post-1690 positions on religious innatism, but not in a way that suggests Lockean anti-innatism was triumphant. Certainly, Richard Bentley opened the first course of Lectures with the bold claim that innate notion of God was a theological “mistake,” serving no apologetic purpose and which should be jettisoned.2 No-one else subsequently went quite as far as Bentley. Samuel Clarke attacked Platonist innatism in his 1705 lectures, but in the previous year had described the idea of God as proved partly from the “unavoidable apprehensions of our own minds.”3 Samuel Bradford in 1699, John Hancocke in 1706 and Josiah Woodward in 1711 were sceptical about the proof from innatism, but stressed humanity’s easy apprehension of basic religious notions. The Lockean position over innate religious knowledge “serves our purpose as much as the supposition of innate ideas” (Woodward) nor did religious nativists “assert anything dangerous to natural or revealed religion” (Hancocke).4 The fact that the Boyle Lecturers did not present a unified body of post-Lockean anti-atheist apologetics can be seen from the repeated utilisation by some of the preachers of arguments from innate religious predispositions alongside that of the consensus gentium. Strikingly, the majority of Boyle Lecturers retained the argument, as Clarke phrase it, that the existence of God was proved by the “common consent of all other men.”5 Many re-stated religious innatism, often in strong terms. In 1695 John Williams lectured his audience on how the reasoning power in the mind contained innate “notions and impressions;” because these principles were “antecedent to our own reasoning,” they “proceed from no 1 For discussion of the Boyle Lectures as presenting a doctrinally-unified natural theological position predicated on recent developments on natural philosophy see Dahm (1970); Jacob (1976); Jacob (1981); Jacob and Jacob (1980), Holmes (1978) and Gascoigne (1989, pp. 81–86). 2 Bentley (1692a, pp. 3–4); and Bentley (1692b, pp. 4–5). 3 Clarke (1706, pp. 71–73); Clarke (1705, p. 262). 4 Woodward (1712, p. 26); Hancocke (1707, p. 9). 5 Clarke (1705, p. 262); Gastrell (1703, pp. 24–31); Turner (1709); Butler (1711,

p. 44, pp. 97–188); Gurdon (1723, pp. 9–13); Burnett (1726, vol. I, pp. 97–98, vol. I, p. 244); Williams (1708, p. 55).

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other a principle than revelation does, and is therefore equivalent to it.”6 In doing so, Williams appealed to the authority of Cicero’s argument from universal consent, though from the lesser known passages in Pro Milone and Pro Cluentio.7 George Stanhope maintained in his 1701 lectures that the immortality of the soul was demonstrated by the “innate presages” of expectations of non-temporal rewards and punishments “implanted in every man.”8 John Clarke, Lecturer in 1719–1720, maintained that the mind had been “originally implanted” with “certain faculties and dispositions” that allowed for the perception and inclination towards moral conduct.9 One particularly strong re-statement of the religious nativist position came from John Leng, later Bishop of Norwich. Leng dedicated many of his Lectures in 1717–18 to demonstrate that religion has its “original foundation” in human nature.10 He listed three complementary explanations for how humans came to their religious notions: education and tradition, the argument from design and “the natural frame or make of every man’s mind.”11 Leng saw no reason for privileging any one of “these three grounds of persuasion” for explaining the “universal consent of mankind” in the existence of the deity.12 Nor did he see the relevance of the debate over innate ideas, though he was very happy to cite pagan authorities who did argue for an innate idea of God.13 Leng dedicated much effort in highlighting a plethora of heathen worthies attesting to both the consensus gentium and consensus sapientium.14 Then, with Stillingfleet as his authority, and most likely with Locke in mind, Leng rejected the validity of travel literature maintaining the existence of atheist societies on the standard grounds that they were the result of short-term study by credulous visitors.15 6 Williams (1708, pp. 52–55). 7 Williams (1708, p. 55). 8 Stanhope (1702, p. 18). 9 Clarke (1721, pp. 157–158). See also pp. 113–115. 10 Leng (1730, p. 96). 11 Leng (1730, p. 182 and pp. 182–189 more generally). 12 Leng (1730, p. 168). 13 Leng (1730, pp. 182–183, pp. 100–103). 14 Leng (1730, pp. 94–158). 15 Leng (1730, pp. 185–187); Stillingfleet (1836, vol. ii, pp. 382–384).

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The example of John Harris is also illuminating. Harris was the 1698 Lecturer and already clearly sceptical about the persuasiveness of the doctrine of innate ideas, which he expanded upon in his Lexicon technicum (1710). Yet he retained confidence in deploying the consensus gentium argument for a proleptical notion of God in his refutation of atheism.16 In one sermon entitled “The Atheist’s Objection, That we can have no Idea of God, Refuted,” Harris relied wholesale on the standards of religious innatism. Against the Hobbesian charge that “all knowledge is sense” and that the idea of God is “absolutely unconceivable,” the “common notion which all mankind have of a God” was both a “sufficient refutation” of Hobbes and a “very good proof of the real existence of the deity.”17 In his “The Notion of a God, Neither from Fear nor Policy,” Harris reiterated that the claim that “the universality of the notion and belief of a God” disproved atheist accusations that the idea of God originated in the passions or priestcraft, supporting his claim with a plethora of quotations from the ancients for the existence of a “prolepsis” or “anticipation” of the idea of God.18 In one sense, Harris repeated the standard arguments of anti-atheist apologetics. But for Harris, as for Leng, the doctrine of innate ideas was now too dubious to rely on, though the argument from a natural prolepsis could still be deployed, as could the consensus gentium. The diversity of opinion within the Boyle Lecturers’ sermons and the continuation of religious innatism, though not in the form of innate ideas, illustrates a key problem with a Locke-centred approach to analysing the status of innatism. Narrowing our attention to Locke’s intentions, targets and arguments can result in a lopsided picture in which a canonical work single-handedly changes the intellectual landscape. Locke’s Essay was certainly a loud, clear voice in an occasionally cacophonous and confusing debate over the origin of moral and religious knowledge, but his was not the only one being heard. Indeed, much of the debate over innatism in the 1690s and 1700s involved authors who either were not discussing Locke or were only discussing the Essay amongst several significant works. It is difficult to talk about any “Lockean” shift in the status of innatism, if this comes at the expense of the influential positions of, say, 16 Harris (1698a, pp. 13–14). 17 Harris (1698a, pp. 11–12). 18 Harris (1698b, pp. 27–28). Harris rejected the claim of “a late ingenious author”

that atheist societies exist, which might have been a rebuke to Locke’s Essay. See Harris (1698), p. 27.

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Samuel Parker, William Nicholls, Samuel Pufendorf, Richard Cumberland or the usually silent but ever-present spectre of Thomas Hobbes. Any approach that privileges concern with the sophisticated argument of major thinkers cannot tell us much about the real character of wider intellectual change. Motivated reasoning matters much more than sound argument. The heated nature of the controversy of the 1690s and 1700s encouraged participants to deal in acrimonious disputation. Many of the defenders of religious innatism positioned themselves orthodox figures batting off a flurry of dangerous innovations and heterodox positions. It was not a dispute over the finer points of religious epistemology, but a culture war over what counted as authoritative statements of how individuals come to true religious belief. This is true, at least, during the highpoint of the debate over innate religious ideas between c.1690 and the 1710s. From the 1720s onwards, discussions mentioning critics of innatism nearly always cited Locke or Pufendorf and rarely mentioned pro-innatists. Most likely this was the consequence of these two authors’ works becoming university textbooks across Britain, with a new generation of moral and religious writers versed in their arguments, or appealing to their authority, now participating in theological debate. Another generational aspect relates to the book market: the most prominent mid-seventeenth-century innatist theologians and philosophers remained viable publishing propositions until the 1720s. But from this decade onwards, we see fewer and fewer new editions of old nativist texts. At this very moment, however, in the growing space left by the decline of innate religious ideas, a succeeding generation of internal senses theorists redeveloped what was an equally strong form of inherent religiosity. In the case of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, this was with the aim of resurrecting innatism in opposition to the Lockean critique. They thereby reinstated the naturalness of religion in the face of the perceived sceptical implications of anti-innatism that made religion without foundation, adventitious, liable to be influenced by specific historical circumstances and, therefore, ultimately, possibly untrue. They did so by shifting the location of inherent aids to religious belief to the natural affections and internal senses, shorn, they hoped, of many of the negative association with the Platonic and Cartesian accounts of innate knowledge. Religious innatism’s standing was also different in early Georgian Britain compared to Stuart England and Scotland. By the 1720s onwards, the appeal to innate ideas was primarily associated with the confidence of

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English deistic thought in the powers of natural reason to reach the basic truths of religion, rather than as an argument against atheism. The position that the light of nature was insufficient to come to religious truth without the aid of revelation (or tradition) was considerably more prominent in apologetic works in Georgian England. But as we have seen, many Anglican theologians and Scots-Irish internal sense theorists could still appeal to religious innatism in one form or another. In Scotland especially, the belief in the self-sufficiency of the light of nature retained its strength for longer, both in orthodox Presbyterian thought and the new internal sense philosophy.19 The successes of recent experimental natural philosophy had led to new works of natural theology—most prominently John Ray’s Wisdom of God, William Derham’s Physico-Theology (1716) and Samuel Clark’s two sets of Boyle Lectures—built on what seemed to be considerably firmer a priori and a posteriori foundations.20 In this new era of natural theology, the doctrine of innate ideas seemed old-fashioned. But the framing of this shift away from innatism and towards design needs to be complicated. Certainly, the appeal to religious innatism declined around the end of the seventeenth century, partly due to the concurrent growth in the persuasive power of the argument from design. But this is not a simple case of direct causation. Noticeably, the rise of the (for the want of a better phrase) the scientific revolution’s new natural theology in the mid-seventeenth century occurred at the same time as religious innatism rose to the status of being a commonplace.21 Both were on the ascendant at the same time. The arguments of Glanvill, Parker, and Boyle articulated the first justifications for cutting-edge natural philosophy, but it was only with Ray, Derham, and Newton that these became orthodoxy. By contrast, the changing status of the other form of religious innatism—cognitive predispositions and rational aids—is more difficult to assess. During the seventeenth century, the claim that humanity possessed religious prolepses was associated with the Epicurean and Stoic traditions. The attacks on religious innatism from the 1680s until 1710 focused primarily on innate religious ideas, and by the 1720s religious innatism was associated primarily with a decrepit Platonism and Cartesianism. Most likely, the explanation that basic religious and moral notions would be

19 See Ahnert (2014). 20 On physico-theology’s significance see Blair and von Greyerz (2020). 21 See also Calloway (2016).

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formed easily because they were “self-evident” upon any sustained consideration essentially played the same role as the appeal to natural prolepses. Debate mattered less because the Cartesian and Platonic arguments for the existence of God had been superseded by new natural philosophical and rationalist ones. One major strand of seventeenth-century innatism merged smoothly with enlightened empiricism, though now shorn of its explicit moorings in pagan philosophy—not least because such tethering was no longer needed to play a role in convincing atheists. Within intellectual and religious culture, the changing status of an argument has more to do with generational shifts, cultural osmosis, and emergent threats to established notions, than with major authors’ works achieving their intended results.22 The abandonment of religious innatism in its Cartesian and Platonic forms, within English and Scottish religious writing broadly conceived, was precisely such an attitudinal shift. The debate over the natural origins of religious belief, especially in the 1690s and 1700s, had been splenetic. Accusations of destroying the fabric of society were countered with accusations of perverting primitive Christianity with paganism or encouraging fanaticism. And then, suddenly, by the 1720s, the energy disappeared. Certainly, generations of students coming out of Oxford and Cambridge, Edinburgh and Glasgow, were likely to hold that there no good philosophical grounds for believing innate religious knowledge was lodged in the mind. But there are reasons to be cautious about the generational explanation. A Lockean or Pufendorfian university ethos set aside innate ideas, but not necessarily for strict Lockean or Pufendorfian reasons. This is most clearly demonstrated by innatism’s old partner in persuasion, the appeal to the consensus gentium. Both Locke’s and Pufendorf’s arguments against innate ideas and principles were predicated on the argument from religious and moral diversity. If the decline in support for innate ideas was a “Lockean” or “Pufendorfian” development we should also witness a parallel decline in the belief of humanity’s inherent religiosity. We do not, at least on the level of broader intellectual culture.23 Locke’s supposedly “decisive role” in the formation of eighteenth-century English and Scottish conceptions

22 See comparable arguments about growing scepticism towards magic in Hunter (2020). 23 Reid (2015).

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of human nature looks less secure when we consider that what was particularly unique about his argument was its sustained assault on the consensus gentium and that the very same argument, though depleted, continued to be deployed.24 The debate over the character and meaning of the growing evidence of religious diversity did not end with Locke or with the debate over innate religious ideas. This decline of religious innatism occurred due to a mixture of complicated, contemporaneous but not necessarily overlapping factors— including but not limited to the rise in physico-theology; the replacement of atheism with deism as the central threat to Christianity; new generations of students versed in Lockean epistemology or Pufendorfian natural law theory; Platonism’s and Cartesianism’s loss of credibility; and the decline of religious “fanaticism.” Intellectual change is partly brought about by intellectual innovation and superior argumentation; thus, Locke’s Essay had a philosophical sophistication that occasioned changes of belief. But change to the status of an argument is also brought about due to modification of the intentions of groups who previously utilised the argument. In the case of religious innatism in the period from c.1650 to c.1740, we can observe that most natural theologians and Christian apologists eventually ceased to view it as a useful proof. This does not mean that they ceased to believe that man was an animal religiosum, only that it no longer needed to be said. Given that religious innatism was expressly something deployed in anti-atheist polemic, the fact that it disappeared speaks as much to changes in current religious controversies as it does the philosophical credibility of the doctrine. The targets shifted, so did the weaponry. In explaining intellectual change, arguably, we could pay less attention to the works of great thinkers, more attention to the succession of controversies, the aims of the combatants involved, and the challenges they faced. Thus, the new orthodoxy that downplayed religious innatism and its benign picture of the relationship between religion and human nature itself spawned a response, in form of the arguments for innate religiosity associated with Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and their followers and fellow travellers.

24 Carey (2006, p. 1).

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References Ahnert, Thomas. 2014. The Moral Culture of the Scottish Enlightenment 1690– 1805. London: Yale University Press. Bentley, Richard. 1692. The Folly of Atheism. London. Bentley, Richard. 1692. A Confutation of Atheism from the Structure and Origin of Human Bodies. London. Blair, Ann, and Kasper von Greyerz, eds. 2020. Physico-theology: Religion and Science in Europe, 1650–1750. Baltimore, MA: John Hopkins University Press. Burnett, Thomas. 1726. A Demonstration of True Religion, in a Chain of Consequences from Certain and Undeniable Principles, 2 vols. London. Butler, Lilly. 1711. A Discourse, Proving, That the Faith and Practice of True Christians, Are No Just Matter of Shame or Reproach. London. Calloway, Katherine. 2016. Natural Theology in the Scientific Revolution: God’s Scientists. London. Carey, Daniel. 2006. Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clarke, Samuel. 1705. A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God. London. Clarke, Samuel. 1706. A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion. London. Clarke, John. 1721. An Enquiry into the Cause and Origin of Moral Evil. London. Dahm, John J. 1970. Science and Apologetics in the Early Boyle Lectures. Church History. 39:172–186. Gascoigne, John. 1989. Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gastrell, Francis. 1703. The Certainty and Necessity of Religion in General, second edition. London. Gurdon, Brampton. 1723. The Pretended Difficulties in Natural or Reveal’d Religion. London. Hancocke, John. 1707. Arguments to Prove the Being of God. London. Harris, John. 1698a. The Atheist’s Objection, That We Can Have no Idea of God, Refuted. London. Harris, John. 1698b. The Notion of a God, Neither from Fear nor Policy. London. Holmes, Geoffrey. 1978. Science, Reason and Religion in the Age of Newton. British Journal for the History of Science. 11:164–171. Hunter, Michael. 2020. The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment. London: Yale University Press. Jacob, James, and R. 1980. The Anglican Origins of Modern Science: The Metaphysical Foundations of the Whig Constitution. Isis 71:251–267. Jacob, Margaret. 1976. The Newtonians and the English Revolution 1689–1720. Hassocks: Harvester Press.

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Jacob, Margaret. 1981. The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans. London: Allen & Unwin. Leng, John. 1730. Natural Obligations to Believe the Principles of Religion, and Divine Revelation, second edition. London. Reid, Jasper. 2015. The Common Consent Argument from Herbert to Hume. Journal of the History of Philosophy. 53:401–433. Stanhope, George. 1702. The Truth and Excellence of the Christian Religion Asserted. London. Stillingfleet, Edward. 1836 [1690s]. Origines sacrae, second edition. In Edward Stillingfleet, Origines sacrae or a Rational Account of the Grounds of Natural and Revealed Religion, 2 vols. Oxford, 1836), II:247–404. Turner, John. 1709. The Wisdom of God in the Redemption of Man. London. Williams, John. 1708. Twelve Sermons Preach’d … concerning The Possibility, Necessity and Certainty of Divine Revelation. London. Woodward, Josiah. 1712. The Divine Original and Excellent of the Christian Religion. London.

Index

A Abernethy, John Discourses Concerning the Being and Natural Perfections of God (1740), 109 Anti-atheist apologetics, 15 Anticipations. See Prolepses Apologetics Anti-deist, 100 Arbuckle, James, 87 Argument from consensus gentium Status in Boyle Lectures, 118 Argument from tradition, 57, 89 In response to deism, 101 Reception of, 57 Aristotelianism, 8, 63, 83 Atheism, 18 Anti-atheist apologetics, 16 Practical and speculative, 19 B Bailey, Nathan, 79 Barclay, Robert, 34 Barker, Matthew

Natural Theology (1674), 17 Baxter, Richard, 27 Beconsall, Thomas Criticism of Locke, 89 Bentley, Richard, 82 Dismisses religious innatism, 118 Biddle, John, 55 Boyle Lectures Status of religious innatism, 120 Boyle, Robert, 63 Position on religious innatism, 66 Utility of innate ideas, 65 Brocklesby, Richard An Explication of the GospelTheism and the Divinity of the Christian Religion (1706), 105 Brown, John, 37 Browne, Peter The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of Human Understanding (1727), 103 Budgell, Eustace, 2 Burgersdijk, Franco, 56 Burthogge, Richard

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. J. W. Mills, The Religious Innatism Debate in Early Modern Britain, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84323-6

127

128

INDEX

Argument from tradition, 57 Late Aristotelian criticism of innatism, 63 Praises Locke’s essay, 78 Burton, Robert, 21

C Calvin, John, 20 sensus divinitatis , 21 Cambridge Platonism, 6 Campbell, Archibald, 3 Carmichael, George, 85 Cartesian Innatism, 8, 34 Reception of, 41, 61, 66, 84, 87, 99, 110, 123 Charleton, Walter The Darknes of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature (1652), 31 Chauvin, Pierre De naturali religione (1693), reception of, 90 Cockburn, Catharine Trotter A Defence of Mr Lock’s Essay of Human Understanding (1702), 75 Colliber, Samuel, 99 Confutation, strategy of, 19 Conscience, 23 Consensus gentium Continued use, 4 consensus gentium, argument from the, 2 Consensus sapientium, 23 Locke, John, acceptance of, 74 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Lord Shaftesbury Reception of, 105, 106 Cudworth, Ralph The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), 59

Culverwell, Nathaniel An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature (1652), 40 Conscience tradition, 22 Spiritual Opticks, 39 Cumberland, Richard, 27 De legibus naturae (1672), 59 Reception of, 87, 91, 106

D Dalrymple, James, Vicount Stair, 14 Davies, Roger, 98 Derodon, David, 36 De Vries, Gerard Reception of, 85

E Edwards, John, 91 Elys, Edmund, 35, 85 England, George Enquiry into the Morals of the Ancients (1735), 3 Epicurean Innatism, 8, 25 Episcopius, Simon, 55, 91

F Ferguson, Robert, 28, 33 The Interest of Reason in Religion (1675), 42 Necessity of revelation, 42 Reception of, 82 Sober Inquiry into the Nature, Measure, and Principle of Moral Virtue (1673), 42 Fiddes, Richard, 98 Forbes, Alexander, Lord Forbes of Pitsligo Essays Moral and Philosophical (1734), 112

INDEX

Forbes, Robert, 20, 86 Fordyce, David Dialogues concerning Education (1745), 111 Elements of Moral Philosophy (1748), 111 Fraser, George, 86 G Gale, Theophilus, 23, 36 The Court of the Gentiles, Part IV (1677), 29 Gassendi, Pierre, 25, 30 Reception of, 60 Gildon, Charles, 82 Glanvill, Joseph, 26, 64 Good, Thomas, 34 Greene, Robert Principles of the Philosophy of the Expansive and Contractive Forces (1727), 104 Grotius, Hugo, 55 H Hale, Matthew Reception of, 112 Hall, John, of Richmond Of Government and Obedience (1654), 56 Halyburton, Thomas, 78 Harris, John Lexicum technicum (1710), uses Locke, 2, 79 Religious innatism in Boyle Lectures, 120 Herbert of Cherbury, 27 Conscience tradition, 21 De veritate (1624), 25 Reception of, 27, 39, 81, 99 Stoic influences, 26 Hickes, George, 78

129

Hobbes, Thomas Idea of God, 58 Reception of, 15–17, 40, 59, 63, 108, 120 Hooke, Robert, 62 Hoornbeek, Johannes, 36 Horneck, Anthony, 29 Hunter, Michael, 17 Hutcheson, Francis, 85 An Essay on the Nature and the Conduct of the Passions and the Affections (1728), 109 Internal sense, religion, 109 On reputation of innate ideas, 3 Reception of, 111

I Innate Commonplace usage, 28 Innate ideas, 2 Accusation of fanaticism, 60, 61

J Jackson, Thomas, 28

K King, Josiah, 82

L Latitudinarianism, 6 Lee, Henry Anti-Scepticism (1702), 80 Le Grand, Antoine Defences of Cartesianism, 83 Leighton, Robert, 14 Leng, John Religious innatism in Boyle Lectures, 119 Locke, John

130

INDEX

Critique of innate ideas and principles, 74 Difference with previous anti-innatists, 76 Essay concerning human understanding (1689), 74 explodes consensus gentium, 72 idea of God, natural propensity of the mind, 73 Innate power, 74 The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), 75 Reception of, 92, 101, 104, 108 Reception of anti-innatism, 75, 81 Reception of Essay, 4 Scottish universities, 79 Lowde, James, 90 Lucretius, 15 Lucy, William, 16

M Mackenzie, George, 37 Manningham, Thomas, 27 Masham, Damaris, 34 Maxwell, John Edition of Cumberland, 106 Use of Richard Brocklesby’s Explication of the Gospel-Theism, 105 Melanchthon, Philip, 20 Millar, Robert, 99 Milner, John An Account of Mr Locke’s Religion (1700), 81 More, Henry An Antidote Against Atheism (1652), 34 Reception of, 60, 81 Reception of views on religious innatism, 34

N Natural theology, 18 New science Distancing from religious innatism, 63 Nicholls, William A Conference With a Theist, part II (1697), 89 Argument from tradition, 89 Reception of, 89 Nicole, Pierre, 36 Norris, John, 33, 34, 90 Reception of, 91 Nye, Stephen, 55 O Owen, John, 35 P Parker, Samuel Account of the Nature and Extent of the Divine Dominion and Goodness (1667), 62 Free and Impartial Censure of Platonick Philosophie (1666), 61 Reception of, 40, 81, 91 Tentamina physico-theologica de Deo (1665), 61 Parker, Samuel (jnr), 83 Pelling, Edward, 57 Penn, William, 34 Physico-theology, 122 Pierce, Thomas, 17 Platonic Innatism, 8, 30 Pre-existence of souls, 30 Reception of, 39, 87, 92, 103, 123 Reminiscence, 30, 32 Platonist Innatism Philosophical standing, 27 Reception of, 41, 59, 61

INDEX

Plessis-Mornay, Philip du, 36 Prolepses, 8 Usage in vernicular texts, 24 Pufendorf, Samuel Reception of, 85

131

Q Quakerism, 35

Scriptural sources, 2 Terminological confusion, 37 Uses, 14 Religious notions Origin in fear, 15, 23, 25, 56, 58, 106, 120 Three possible origins, 38, 119 Rust, George, 26 Ryrie, Alec, 18

R Ray, John The Wisdom of God (1691), 66 Reformed theology, 36 Religions notions Three possible origins, 2 Religious innatism Ambivalence towards, after 1710, 98 As commonplace, 92 Debate not related directly to Locke, 83 Declining popularity of innatist texts from 1720s, 102 Deism, 101 Deism, associated with, 100 Dutch authorities, 37 Dutch sources, 56, 85 French authorities, 37 Generational change in attitudes, 121, 124 in Scottish universities, 87 Intellectual humility as challenge to, 63, 64 Internal sense theory, religion, 112 Less prominent after 1710, 98 Magisterial Reformers, 20 Multifaceted nature of critique, 121 Multiple critics, 91 Non-rational origins, 105–107, 111 Patristic authorities, 19 Remonstrant sources, 56

S Sancroft, William Conscience tradition, 23 Sanderson, Robert, 22 Scott, John The Christian Life (1681–1696), 14 Selden, John De jure naturali et gentium (1640), 56 Reception of, 57, 58 Sergeant, John The Method to Science (1696), 84 Sherlock, William Discourse concerning the Happiness of Good Men (1704), 92 Sinclar, George, 66 Skene, George, 86 Smith, John, 24 Socinianism English Socinians, views on religious innatism, 55 Reception of, 91 Socinus, views on religious innatism, 54 South, Robert, 35 Souverain, Matthieu, 33 Spencer, John, 19 Sprat, Thomas, 62 Stackhouse, Thomas A Complete Body of Divinity (1729), 107

132

INDEX

Stillingfleet, Edward Reception of, 81, 83, 119 Second ediiton, Origines sacrae, 80 Stoic innatism, 8, 24 Reception of, 73 Widely cited passages, 24 T Taylor, Jeremy, 22 Tillotson, John, 57 Conscience tradition, 22 Travel literature, 9, 72, 81–83, 99, 104, 107, 119 As influence on acceptance of consensus gentium argument, 54 Turnbull, George Principles of Moral Philosophy (1740), 110 Turner, John, 82 Tyrrell, James A Brief Disquisition of the Law of Nature (1692), 87 Reception of, 91 Reporting on Locke’s success, 80

V Varenius, Bernhardus, 83 Voetius, Gijsbert, 36 Vorstius, Conrad, 55, 91

W Watts, Isaac Philosophical Essays (1733), 105 Restatement of religious innatism, 105 Webster, John, 33 The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677), 60 Willis, Richad Remarks upon an Essay concerning Human Understanding (1697–99), 74 Wynne, John Abridgement of Locke’s Essay, 78, 79

Y Yolton, John, 7, 23

48

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