Flesh in the Age of Reason (55 page)

Cunning Romanist priests had crafted the separate soul to feather their nests, notably through the fiction of purgatory. On the basis of that fabricated penal colony or way-station
en route
to heaven, the Vatican required offerings to redeem the souls of the departed – hence the abuse of chantries and the pensioning of countless monks and friars to pray for the souls of the departed. An edifice of gross corruption had been built upon a quite bogus philosophical principle.

With what did Priestley want to replace these papist falsehoods taken over, in large part, not only by Anglicanism but by moderate Nonconformity? As already noted, he believed in Christ the Messiah, a man like any other man, though one with a divine teaching mission. So what was a ‘man like any other man’ actually like?

Reason and intelligibility – in other words, the Hartleyan antimystification test – required that one should believe that God had created only one substance, which was matter or body. Corporeal matter was clear, tangible, concrete; why postulate two sorts of created stuff when one would do perfectly well? By contrast, traditional Platonic-cum-Cartesian dualism, with its polarity between body and soul, or extension and consciousness, created no end of philosophical confusion, not least the conundrum as to how those two poles would ever meet (the pineal gland problem). Intelligibility, simplicity and the Newtonian rule of economy demanded that Ockham’s razor be wielded; one should believe in a single entity, created by God, and that was matter. Through natural-philosophical reasoning and extensive electrical and chemical experiments, Priestley demonstrated to his own satisfaction that matter itself was active, and hence had the potential to sustain life and be the medium of consciousness.

In particular, in debate with fellow Dissenting minister Richard Price, Priestley argued that the traditional doctrine of matter authorized by the mechanical philosophy, notably by Newton’s
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
, was erroneous. The ensconced doctrine of the impenetrability of matter was shallow. Matter was active as
well as passive, it could expand and contract, it was penetrable, it possessed resistance as well as gravity. Accept that matter was polyvalent – that it had many potentialities – and the idea that man was made up of matter alone – that matter, properly organized, could generate consciousness – made perfect sense.

As will be evident, Priestley leant very heavily upon the teachings of his great hero David Hartley, whose
Observations on Man
he republished in 1775 – as already noted, leaving out the physiology as being too speculative. Priestley thus reinstated Hartley’s materialist doctrine of the brain as the organ of the mind, a view regarded by his many orthodox foes as dangerously radical, subversive and flatly anti-Christian. Priestley fairly countered that there was nothing in the Bible to mandate Cartesian or Platonic dualism.

Priestley had also been an early convert to the doctrine of necessity advanced, above all, by the freethinker Anthony Collins, another man he admired. (Prima facie, it might seem odd that Priestley had such respect for thinkers – another was Hobbes – who were clearly not Christian; it shows either his candour or his gullibility.) The doctrine of necessity or determinism might be read as a naturalized and rationalized version of the Calvinist predestination into which he had been indoctrinated – minus of course the ramifications about majority damnation and the implications that carried for divine benevolence. Calvinist predestination saw necessity as a proof and consequence of the Lord’s omnipotence. Following Hartley, by contrast, Priestley regarded necessity as a guarantee of order and hence of the reign of natural laws. Determinism in the human world was merely an extension of the laws of cause and effect in the cosmos at large. The vulgar doctrine of human free will contravened our experience of the universe: it was evidently a symptom of crass human vanity.

Priestley never denied that, in some sense, people were free agents. But just as in the physical world motion was subject to the laws of cause and effect, so in human affairs what produced action was not caprice but sufficient motive: no action without an adequate predisposing motivation – just as in Newtonian mechanics. Motives
could be studied, and motivation modified. By stressing the cause– effect chain of motive–action, Priestley believed he could show how human behaviour was intelligible and predictable. It could therefore be brought within science – indeed, within a utilitarian programme of the pursuit of pleasure towards the goal of happiness, not least in political science. Unlike Hartley, Priestley was a highly political animal – the more so the older he grew – and it was crucial for him to vindicate his radical liberalism and individualism with a scientific psychology of human nature and motivation, the laws of human action.

With his perennial energy, Priestley set about rebutting all and sundry defenders of vulgar free will and the immateriality of the separate soul. He took on, for instance, Andrew Baxter. In his
Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul
(1733), this influential Scottish divine had argued that dreaming and absent-mindedness were proofs that, even during temporal existence, the mind or soul could detach itself from the body. In any case, the spirit never tired – it was willing when the flesh was weak – further evidence that body and soul were essentially distinct. Priestley countered: the spirit might be willing, but the usual consequence was inactivity (though not, it seems, in the case of the tireless Priestley). During sleep, he argued further, reactivating an old controversy, the mind was as dormant as the body: dreaming (that ‘imperfect manner’ of thinking) was a pathological aberration, not the norm. No evidence existed of the continuation of consciousness beyond death in the form of ghosts. Belief in witches was naïve and exploded, the trash of a credulous age.

Priestley’s positions are important because he pursued the rationalizing logic of Protestantism, so as to create, within a biblical piety, a model of man detached from the traditional ecclesiastical and liturgical supports or straitjackets – efficacious sacraments, sustaining Church, miracle-working saints or priests, a mysterious Godhead, a separate soul and all the other palaver. As a Protestant, he indeed embraced scriptural eschatology – the Last Judgement, the Resurrection of the Dead – but these doctrines were to be believed as the revealed word of God, the Revelation of His Will.

While on earth, it was for man to go about his business – the pursuit of happiness. The utilitarian in Priestley was in large measure a champion of commercial and industrial society, especially as contrasted to the aristocratic indolence and privilege he detested. Man also had an overriding duty to pursue truth through rational and scientific inquiry. Priestley thus replaced Church-centred doctrines with bourgeois man, thinking for himself, rational, individual, liberty-loving, self-improving, involved in a quest for truth and freedom, and requiring no Church to help him to salvation: material man in a material world.

Paramount in all this was mental autonomy: ‘should free inquiry lead to the destruction of Christianity itself’, he reflected, ‘it ought not, on that account, to be discontinued; for we can only wish for the prevalence of Christianity on the supposition of its being true; and if it fall before the influence of free inquiry, it can only do so in consequence of its not being true.’ Ironically, through the Scriptures and a quest for the real Christ, Priestley and his followers ushered into being, thanks to the cunning of reason, an essentially secularized, or at least nonecclesiastical, image of middle-class, liberal, individual man.

As a dauntless pursuer of the naked truth, William Hazlitt (1778–1830) was a kindred spirit to Priestley who emerged out of similar circles. The son of a Unitarian minister, turbulent in character and inveterate and embittered by experience, his sense of being a perennial outsider (‘born under Saturn’) owed much to his Dissenting origins.

Hazlitt had hailed the French Revolution: ‘a new world’, he wrote, ‘was opening to the astonished sight’. And he remained an unwavering Jacobin: ‘The love of liberty consists in the hatred of tyrants.’ A prose Byron, Hazlitt characterized his times as the age of betrayal. But if a ruthless critic of others, he was no less severe on himself, lacerating himself in private, in public and in print. His
Liber Amoris
(see
Chapter 16
), his story of his humiliating infatuation with his landlady’s daughter, is perhaps the most searing autobiographical account of love-madness ever written.

Hazlitt’s intellectual pedigree was similar to that of his intellectual heroes – men such as Hartley and Priestley. How then did he see the self ? His first work,
An Essay on the Principles of Human Action
, published in 1805 when he was just 27, was the culmination of views on personal identity begun by Locke and developed by Collins, Hume, Law, Hartley, Priestley and Godwin. Broadly speaking, it claimed to establish moral philosophy on the idealist basis of ‘disinterest’. Rather as for Godwin, the good man transcends self-interest for a rational vision of the good which escapes Hobbesian or Mandevillian egoism.

The distinctive insight of the
Essay
lay in an idea which, Hazlitt said, had come to him in a flash of inspiration back in 1794, when he was just 16. We are naturally connected to our past and present selves, physically (corporeal continuity) and through conscious memory. But (here is the new idea) we are only
imaginatively
connected to our future selves. Indeed, with respect to the future, our own selves-to-come are, as of now, no more real than are those of other people – all are imaginative projections. And so our future selves should carry precisely the same moral and prudential status as that of anyone else’s future self. Hazlitt then derived certain conclusions from these insights. Emphasizing the distinction between memory and imagination, he construed memory along Lockean lines, as the replication in the present of past experience, coupled with the feeling that that experience is of something that happened in earlier times. But he stressed the crucial difference between our relations to our past and future selves: we are already affected by past stages of ourselves and not yet affected by future stages. At any given time, imagination plays a greater role in linking current to future stages of ourselves, than to our past.

Hazlitt’s insight into the contingency of future identity was as disturbing to any notion of a solid and constant self as Locke’s notion of conscious selfhood had been in its day. Locke had seemingly denied physical continuity, especially respecting the afterlife; Hume had undermined the sense of self-evident self-transparency still accepted by Locke – much was interrupted, a broken thread. Now Hazlitt further questioned our relationship to our future self – on
earth and, by implication, beyond the grave. It was a philosophy appropriate to the Romantic perception of the impermanent and the ephemeral in our future hopes. It also, by implication, turned any future reality of a soul into a psychological projection.

The idea that
psychological development
was an inseparable aspect of the self was taking root from the mid-eighteenth century, stimulated by Hartley’s associationist account of the mind and passions. Largely under his influence, Priestley placed emphasis upon the role of education in the acquisition of concepts of the self. Hazlitt added a psychological account of how people identify with their future selves. Their seeming identities with their future selves are fantasies. His observation was a further nail in the coffin of any traditional notion of a given, invariable, core self, in the Platonic or Cartesian mould.

Seventeenth-century philosophers, as we have seen, still tended to subscribe to a basically Platonic conception of the soul, integral to orthodox Christianity. That conception was challenged by Locke, yet he retained, or took over uncritically, some traditional commitments. One was the idea that we each have an intuitive knowledge of our own existence as a self; another was the reflexive nature of self-consciousness – being conscious of being conscious; and a third was a static account of the acquisition of self-concepts.

Locke’s critics challenged and repudiated the simple memory-view of personal identity they assigned to him, and slighted his intimations about mental development. They held up as an objection to Locke the idea that the self as he conceived it was by implication a fictional construct – the notion extrapolated by the coffee-house wits. Samuel Clarke, Joseph Butler and many others protested that, if Locke’s view were true, the self would be a mask; people would have no reason to take account of their future selves beyond the grave – and so everyone could do what they liked.

Among those willing to embrace Locke’s view of the person as conscious selfhood was Hume, who developed the atomized idea of the self via the scepticism expressed in Book I of the
Treatise
: we lack an impression of a ‘simple and continu’d self’.

It was Hazlitt who took such subversive implications to the limit.
He rejected Locke’s belief that we all have intuitive knowledge of our own selfhood, and the consequent commitment to the reflexive nature of consciousness. Like Hume, Hazlitt embraced the idea that the self is a construct and – faithful student of Priestley that he was – he embedded this idea within a materialistic ontology. He advanced the idea, latent in the Lockean tradition and made explicit by Hartley, that people acquire their conceptions of their selves (and those of others) in developmental stages. Far from being destructive to theories of rationality and ethics, the notion of the self as a construct was actually their guarantee. Hazlitt was thus the culmination of the tradition of thinking about the nature of self and personal identity which began with Locke.