Albion (48 page)

I
n
the roll-call of English philosophers
we must include here Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Of Hobbes it may be said that he felt the pressure of power upon his pulse and that, of all English philosophers, he harnessed the claims and exigencies of simple if brutal human experience. He disclaimed rhetoric, and repeatedly declined to quote from the wisdom of the ancients; his “Discourse of Civil and Ecclesiastical Government,” entitled
Leviathan
, was “occasioned by the disorder of the present time” to which he would apply the balm of “solid reasoning.” He has been described as “the founding father of modern metaphysical materialism,”
²²
which consorts well with all the pragmatic tendencies of his age. It has been said that, for Hobbes, “everything is a material process.”
²³
He himself wrote that “there is no conception in a man’s mind which hath not at first . . . been begotten upon the organs of Sense”; imagination was “nothing but
decaying sense
” and spirits themselves “really Bodies.” His life was one of retirement and contemplation. Of humble origin, he lived in the houses of the nobility in the role of tutor and companion. He suffered from what Aubrey called “a contemplative Melancholinesse,” and translated his fearfulness into the doctrine of absolute power.

In the pragmatic tradition he was a social moralist as well as a philosopher, and his principles were indeed of a thoroughly practical kind. “No man,” he wrote, “gives except for a personal advantage.” We pity others “because we imagine that a similar misfortune may befall ourselves.” He made a metaphysics out of worldliness. “Not he who is wise is rich, as the Stoics say; but, on the contrary, he who is rich is wise.” It can be assumed that
Leviathan
itself is a practical document, too, since it is concerned with the purpose and nature of political life. It has been suggested that Thomas Hobbes cannot be considered as representative of English philosophy because of his urgent desire to create a “system” of knowledge based upon first principles. But this is not an Hegelian or Platonic “system,” which seems propelled by unearthly powers and by a desire to forge abstractions into truth, but a wholly earthbound project designed to illustrate the social conditions of mankind. The work itself was prompted by the specific political circumstances of the period and, although Hobbes professed to despise the procedures of the Royal Society, he was equally concerned to demonstrate the practical efficacy of “solid speculation.” He detested scholasticism, and distrusted rhetoric; he evinced also a “profound suspicion of anything like authority in philosophy.”
²⁴

In Leviathan itself he argued that between men there is “a perpetual contention for Honour, Riches and Authority,” which in an ill-ordered world would create a condition of perpetual warfare; thus, to create civil order and stability, the will of each individual must be subsumed by a greater will. The fear of death and the promise of felicity also prompt men willingly to surrender their power to a supreme authority, which emerges in “the generation of the great Leviathan, the King of the Proud.”
²⁵
The Leviathan himself must be armed and potentially dangerous since “Covenants, without the Sword, are but words.” This abbreviated résumé is not designed to introduce the reader to Hobbes’s philosophy but, rather, to emphasise his often brutally pragmatic nature. The wisdom springing from such perceptions may then be considered “the end and crown of experience.” It is a fitting conclusion for a philosopher who led the English imagination into unknown paths.

The native spirit of John Locke has never been in doubt. In his “Epistle to the Reader,” introducing
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
, he places the origin of his treatise in “five or six friends meeting at my chamber” who agreed after more than usually strenuous debate that “it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what objects our understandings were or were not fitted to deal with.” There is no dogmatism or regimentation to be found, therefore, only the fruits of a modest enquiry. The
Essay
itself was “begun by chance” and “continued by entreaty”; it was “written by incoherent parcels; and, after long intervals of neglect, resumed again, as my humour or occasions permitted.” It was “spun out of my own coarse thoughts,” and “I am now too lazy or too busy to make it shorter.” Here are all the signs of that embarrassed modesty which has ever been the accompaniment of the English writer, together with a characteristic diffidence or detachment. Despite his lack of accomplishment, John Locke has emerged in print “being on purpose to be as useful as I may”; he is content to be “employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little,” particularly by identifying “the learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected or unintelligible terms introduced into the sciences.” This is an enterprise entirely in line with the English imagination, therefore, and the
Essay
itself, humbly presented, became “the philosophical Bible of the eighteenth century”
²⁶
in England, modifying the work of Sterne and Johnson, Reynolds and Addison.

In his
History of Western Philosophy
, first published in 1945, Bertrand Russell distinguishes Locke from European philosophers such as Leibniz or Descartes or Hegel by concluding that, in continental writing, “a vast edifice of deduction is pyramided upon a pin-point of logical principle” whereas in Locke “the base of the pyramid is on the solid ground of observed fact, and the pyramid tapers upward, not downward.”
²⁷
His philosophy is established upon observation rather than speculation, and can justifiably claim a Baconian lineage. In this context it has also been asserted by Russell that “British philosophy is more detailed and piecemeal than that of the continent,”
²⁸
eschewing system or authoritarian organisation; the significance of detail and organic accretion is once more underlined. It represents individual liberty of thought. In politics as well as in philosophy, therefore, Locke was “tentative and experimental”; such diffidence encourages toleration and a trust in freedom of expression, so that the philosopher was “not at all authoritarian.”
²⁹
Here are the lineaments of native thought.

One of its conclusions would then run as follows. The desired goal is not that which is ideally or speculatively the best, but that which is most practical. This is, in a nutshell (to use the English phrase), also the history of the English constitution and of English common law. In the knowledge of nature, according to Locke, we possess only “the twilight of probability”; but that is enough. In this condition our faculties must be “accommodated to the use of life.” It is a philosophy of earnest practicality, one well suited to the accomplishments of Gresham College and the Royal Society. Engines may be less exciting than theorems, and utensils more homely than speculations, but they are somehow more appropriate.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
is animated by a kind of inspired common sense, then, or by what Locke more elegantly terms “the common light of reason.” He remarks in passing that “it is the affectation of knowing beyond what we perceive that makes so much useless dispute and noise in the world”; this dislike of noise and dispute, the philosophical equivalent of not making a scene in a restaurant, also seems innately English. That is why Locke uses the most homely metaphors to make his point. He illustrates his theory of the association of ideas, for example, by citing the instance of a man who could dance only when there was a trunk in the room. The image might have come out of
Tristram
Shandy
, and is an instance of that whimsicality which seems endemic to the native genius.

Out of Locke ’s self-deprecation, evinced in his “Preface,” irony may also spring. It has in turn been suggested that within “the English discursive tradition, attending as it does upon empiricist attitudes, irony is pervasive.”
³⁰
Irony suggests that there is some kind of collective experience which shadows any individual statement, and that there are certain shared sentiments which need only to be intimated rather than expressed. It also suggests the primacy of experience over theory. It might be put another way by declaring, with Locke, that “all ideas have their origin in experience.”
³¹
No more radical exposition of English empiricism has been made. As Locke’s editor suggests, “the very word ‘principle’ has evil associations for him”;
³²
it is as if all the theoretical arguments were purposeless. So “Locke has written himself down as the founder of the English philosophy of experience,” to which may be added the suggestion that “English philosophy is instinctively the philosophy of experience, and the advance of English philosophy is the more precise definition of what experience means.”
³³
It appears also in Francis Hutcheson’s
An Enquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue
where he coined the phrase “the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers,” which was in turn co-opted by the English utilitarians. The sentiment was reasserted by Joseph Priestley, who concluded that happiness is “the great standard by which everything relating to that state must finally be demanded.”

We
approach the nineteenth century
with Jeremy Bentham, who appropriated and reformulated Hutcheson’s proposition by suggesting that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” Bentham, like Locke and, indeed, like the humanists of the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, was preoccupied by civic conduct. In texts such as
Fragment
on Government, Anarchical Fallacies
and the
Constitutional Code
he eschewed what he called the politics of “abstract advantage” and speculation in order to concentrate upon practical, if radical, reform. His pre-eminence meant that “philosophical radicalism in England, unlike the corresponding revolutionary doctrines in other countries, was based upon an empirical utilitarianism and not upon a priori ideas about natural rights.”
³⁴
The same conclusion might be drawn of Bacon and of Hobbes, so traditional has it become.

But there is more than philosophy in the sphere of pragmatism. The French Revolution was considered by many English observers to be the direct consequence of “French theory” and Arthur Young, in his
The Example of
France a Warning to Britain
, urged a political ethic established “merely upon experience.” Burke’s animadversions against that revolution are well documented, but his sense of historical violation rendered his
Reflections on the
Revolution in France
sympathetic to an English audience. The unspoken pact between past and present, in which the example of the dead earns the suffrage of the living, is the single most poignant note of Burke’s exposition; it is the “great melody” in which the voices of past orators mingle with Burke’s own to furnish a savage denunciation of the French revolutionaries who thought to create a society
ab novo
and to extirpate the historical roots of their culture or nation. But English observers posited the power of practical as well as historical experience. The strength of the English Constitution, for example, according to one modern cultural historian, lay “in its having no theory, in its being the gradual and patient accumulation of practice and precedent, in its being, above all, unwritten.”
³⁵
A general aversion to “rules,” and a disdain for theoretical enquiry, mark English political discourse which accommodates the claims of individual liberty and individual circumstance more readily than abstract speculations about the “rights” of those individuals.

That
empirical temper
can be found to be no less prominent in the art and music of England. Of eighteenth-century landscape painting it has often been suggested that “in Italy the tradition of painting was one of idealisation and generalisation” where in England more attention was granted to “revealing particularities of sky and water.”
³⁶
The art of Stubbs and Joseph Wright is preoccupied with “the nature of things”
³⁷
and even the work of Turner has been described as “not scientific but empirical.”
³⁸
In eighteenth-century English music, too, the emphasis shifted “from scientific and metaphysical speculation to empirical discussion of music itself.”
³⁹
The triumphs of nineteenth-century architecture were those in which practical engineering played a formative role, as in the construction of the great railway stations of Newcastle Central, Paddington and King’s Cross. The engineers themselves were celebrated for their “inventive genius” and became the new heroes of Victorian England. “These men,” Samuel Smiles wrote, “were strong-minded, resolute and ingenious.” In Germany the philosopher-scientist was king, but in England it was the technician. The Department of Practical Art was established in London as a direct consequence of the Great Exhibition of 1851, but it had already been anticipated by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The “science” was, as usual, “applied.” As a character in Charles Kingsley’s novel
Two Years Ago
(1857) explains, “We doctors, you see, get into the way of looking at things as men of science; and the ground of science is experience.”

The same attitude is present in Matthew Arnold’s belief that the English only exert themselves within “the field of plain sense, of direct practical utility.” A Russian, Oloff Napea, wrote in
Letters from London
that “in France every particle glistens, all is blandishment; in England all is utility, but no glitter.” This may account for the ugliness and lack of symmetry in London, contrasted with the elegance and formality of Paris; London grew instinctively and organically, while the centre of Paris was fashioned by administrative
fiat
and aesthetic principle.

The English possess moralists and psychologists rather than metaphysicians, and in England the tree of knowledge is prized only for its fruit in practice and activity. Thus A. J. Ayer, in
Logical Positivism in Perspective
, suggests that in England there has been “an almost complete disregard of the current extravagancies of German speculative thought.”
⁴⁰
He also describes the tendency of “contemporary British philosophers . . . to deal with philosophical questions in an unsystematic illustrative way.”
⁴¹
The continuity of methods and preoccupations, from Bacon to the last century, would be astonishing if it were not for the fact that such remarkable continuities are found in every area of the English imagination. The discipline of logical positivism, associated with “the Vienna Circle,” for example, was welcomed and adopted in the English philosophical habitat; but it was subtly adapted for native circumstances. Its “uncompromising positivism” and its “blanket rejection of metaphysics” were modified. All extremes, in other words, were toned down. As a result of this process of assimilation, “generalisations are distrusted, particular examples are multiplied . . . common sense reigns as a constitutional, if not an absolute, monarch, philosophical theories are put to the touchstone of the way in which words are actually used.”
⁴²
A. J. Ayer calls the approach “empirical in the political sense, the sense in which Burke was a champion of empiricism”;
⁴³
indeed his reference to “constitutional” monarchy does suggest the larger context in which English empiricism prevails.