William Paley's moral philosophy and the challenge of Hume: An enlightenment debate?

Modern Intellectual History

Volumn 7, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 1-31

  O'Flaherty, Niall ^a  

^a KING'S COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 77649179388     PISSN: 14792443     EISSN: 14792451     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1479244309990254     Document Type: Review

References (106)

1. See J. G. A. Pocock, "Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England", in R. Ajello, E. Contese and V. Piano, eds., L' eta dei Lumi: Studi storici sul settecento europeo in onere di Franco Veturri, 2 vols. (Naples, 1985), 1: 523-62, 553-4
2. and J. G. A. Pocock, "idem, "Histriography and Enlightenment: A View of Their History", Modern Intellectual History 5/1 (2008), 83-96
3. The claim was endorsed by Roy Porter in Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2000), xviii
4. John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680-1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 43, 9
5. See Brian Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debates from Locke to Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)
6. Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, 42. In attempting to displace France as normative and in viewing England as "an exception", Robertson is following Franco Venturi
7. See, for example, Franco Venturi, Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century, trans. Susan Corsi (London: Longman, 1972)
8. These criticisms aside, Robertson's study of eighteenth-century Scottish and Neapolitan philosophy represents an important contribution to the history of ideas, especially in the impetus it offers to comparative study
9. See D. L. LeMahieu, The Mind of William Paley: A Philosopher and His Age (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), chap. 5
10. The term latitudinarian ("latitude men") was coined in the seventeenth century as a pejorative term for Anglican churchmen who wished to reduce Christianity to a small number of fundamental teachings that Protestants could generally agree on. In this article it refers to the erudite circle of divines influenced by Edmund Law and Abraham Tucker
11. Abraham Tucker, The Light of Nature Pursued, ed. H. P. St. John Mildmay, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1831; first published 1768-78), 1: 110
12. See Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1795-1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 21
13. For Paley's response to Hume's Dialogues see Niall O' Flaherty, "The Rhetorical Strategy of William Paley's Natural Theology", forthcoming in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, section 2
14. For his defence of miracles see Neil Hitchin, "Probability and the Word of God: William Paley's Anglican Method and the Defence of Scriptures", Anglican Theological Review 77/3 (Summer, 1995), 392-407
15. William Wilberforce to Ralph Creyke, 8 Jan. 1803, in Robert Isaac and Samuel Wilberforce, eds., The Correspondence of William Wilberforce, 2 vols. (London, 1840), 1: 252
16. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1818-1819 on the History of Philosophy, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 1: 149
17. Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 3rd edn, 2 vols. (London: Elder & Co, 1876), 2: 124
18. Ernest Albee, A History of English Utilitarianism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1902), 174
19. M. L. Clarke, Paley: Evidences for the Man (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1974), 60
20. LeMahieu, Mind of Paley, 128-9
21. A. M. C. Waterman, Revolution, Economics and Religion: Christian Political Economy, 1798-1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 125
22. The coinage comes from Duncan Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 41
23. He stipulated in his will that he "would not have the said sermons published for sale", insisting instead that they be distributed "first to those who frequented the church, then to farmers' families in the county, then to such as had a person in the family who could read". William Paley, "Extract from a Codicil to the Last Will and Testament of The Rev. William Paley, D D.", in Sermons on Several Subjects (Sunderland, 1806), iii
24. See J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688-1831, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 293, n. 16
25. Robert Hole, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order in England 1760-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 73
26. OED
27. Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Politie VII, XV, S. 14
28. The construction is from Richard Bourke, "Edmund Burke and the Politics of Conquest", Modern Intellectual History 4/3 (2007), 403
29. Edmund Law to John Law, 1782, London, National Archives, Edward Law 1st Earl of Ellenborough Papers, PRO 30/12/17/3/23
30. John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 238-9
31. John Jebb, "An Address to the Freeholders of Middlesex", in The Works Theological, Medical, Political, and Miscellaneous of John Jebb MD FRS., 3 vols. (London, 1787), 2: 479. See also 3: 287-8
32. He told his son that Paley's discourse was "highly approved" by vice-chancellor Richard Beadon. Edmund Law to John Law, November 1782, PRO30/12/17/1/21
33. Anon., "Paley's Principles of Philosophy", The Critical Review or, Annals of Literature LX (1785), 208
34. William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, in The Works of William Paley: with Additional Sermons and a Corrected Account of the Life and Writings of the Author, ed. E. Paley, 6 vols. (London, 1830), 3: vii
35. Principles, xiv-xv
36. Thomas Rutherforth, Institutes of Natural law: Being the Substance of a Course of Lectures on Grotius de Jure Belli et Pacis Read in St John's Cambridge, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1754-6), 1: 10
37. Gay's essay first appeared anonymously in the first edition of Law's translation of Bishop King's On the Origin of Evil (1731). Law added his own treatise to the fourth edition
38. See John Gay, "Preliminary Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality", in An Essay on the Origin of Evil by William King, trans. Edmund Law, 4th edn. (Cambridge, 1758)
39. Edmund Law, "On Morality and Religion", in An Essay on the Origin of Evil
40. Tucker, Light of Nature, 1: 88
41. Gay, "Preliminary Dissertation", xxiv
42. Edmund Law, "Morality and Religion", xliv
43. Tucker, Light of Nature, 3: 24
44. Tucker, Light of Nature, 2: 365
45. Tucker, Light of Nature, Ibid., 375, 378. Paley took a more conciliatory attitude towards evangelicals, assuring his flock in 1790 that the "danger . . . of preaching up the necessity of faith, which was left to be unproductive is nearly overpast." The clergy would do better to vent their fury on those intent on "setting up a kind of philosophical morality, detached from religion"
46. Edmund Paley, Life of Paley, xc
47. Hume writes, "Men are always more concern'd about the present life than the future; and are apt to think the smallest evil, which regards the former, more important than the greatest, which regards the latter." David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000; first published 1739-40), 337. For the psychological foundations of this view see 79
48. Edmund Paley, An Account of the Life and Writings of William Paley, D.D. (1825), in The Works of William Paley, 1: li. In 1765, while in Greenwich, Paley won the Cambridge Members' prize (for Bachelors) for an essay, in Latin, comparing the effects of Epicureanism and Stoicism on society
49. See Edmund Paley, The Works of William Paley, ibid., xliv-liv. A year later he was elected a fellow of Christ's
50. William Paley to John Law, 1765, PRO/30/12/28/49
51. William Paley to John Law, 1778, PRO/30/12/28/103
52. This is despite his assertion that such lessons were "the end of all moral speculation". David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, in L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed., Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1975; first published 1751), 136
53. Of course, Gay had brought Locke's notion of association to bear on morals before the publication of either Hume's Treatise (1739-40)
54. or Hartley's Observations on Man (1749)
55. However, on his adaptation of Hume's political theory see below, 29
56. See Law, "Morality and Religion", lii
57. See Joseph Butler, "Of the Nature of Virtue", The Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and the Course of Nature to which are Added Two Brief Dissertations, in W. E. Gladstone, ed
58. The Works of Joseph Butler, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1896), 1: 410
59. Thomes Gisborne, The Principles of Moral Philosophy Investigated (London, 1789), 17-18
60. The Thirty-Nine Articles refer only to salvation and hell
61. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Morals, 244, 178, 245
62. Enquiry Concerning Morals, Ibid., 233
63. See ibid., 228-234
64. Paley accused Gibbon and Hume of using sly rhetorical strategies to deprecate Christian testimony. See ibid., 317
65. This was one of Paley's objections to moral sense theory, but it was equally pertinent to the assault on Hume. Ibid., 14
66. William Paley, "Good Friday", Sermon IV, Works, 6: 169
67. William Paley, "Observations upon the Character and Example of Christ and the Morality of the Gospel" (1776), Appendix to Memoirs of William Paley, DD., by George Wilson Meadley (Sunderland, 1809), 57
68. This essay was originally annexed as a summary and appendix to Edmund Law, Reflections on the Life and Character of Christ (Carlisle, 1776)
69. Evidences of Christianity, in Works 2: 32
70. William Paley, Evidences of Christianity, in Works, vols. 1 and 2, 1: 18
71. Evidences, 2: 205
72. John Wesley, A Sermon on Salvation by Faith, 10th edn. (London, 1778), 7
73. Edmund Law, Considerations on the Theory of Religion, 7th edn (Carlisle: R. Faulder, 1784), 237
74. Joseph Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government, and the Nature of Political, Civil and Religious Liberty, 2nd edn (London, 1771), 1-2
75. see Edmund Law, Considerations on the Theory of Religion, 233-4, 237
76. Jack Fruchtman, The Apocalyptic Politics of Richard Price and Joseph Priestley: A Study in Late Eighteenth-Century English Republican Millennialism (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983), 1
77. I have argued elsewhere that Paley's response in Natural Theology to Hume's demolition of the argument from design in the Dialogues may well have been grafted from Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever (1780)
78. See O' Flaherty, "Rhetorical Strategy", section 2
79. Clark, English Society, 373
80. See John Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 54
81. Niall O'Flaherty, "The Theology and Social Thought of William Paley 1743-1805" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2008), 173, n. 233
82. Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics, 78
83. Hume, Treatise, 347-8
84. Pocock, "Historiography and Enlightenment", 94
85. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, ed. A. Wayne Colver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976; first published Edinburgh, 1757), 87, 89
86. Hume, Natural History of Religion, 87
87. John Wesley, "The Witness of Our Own Spirit", Sermon XI, in Sermons on Several Occasions (Bristol, 1760; London, 1985), 128
88. Hume, Natural History of Religion, 90
89. Wesley, "The Witness of Our Own Spirit", 129
90. See Pocock, "Clergy and Commerce", 531-3, 552
91. Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, 3 vols. (Glasgow, 1755), 1: 63. Of course, Butler believed in an ethical faculty
92. A System of Moral Philosophy, Ibid., 55
93. Wesley, Sermon XI, in Forty-four Sermons, 124, 128
94. Hannah More, An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World, 3rd edn (Dublin, 1791) 150
95. For the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries see Max Weber's The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5)
96. and Skinner's engaging defence of Weber's thesis in Quentin Skinner, "Moral Principles and Social Change", in idem, Visions on Politics, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1: 145-57
97. For the nineteenth century see Hilton, The Age of Atonement
98. John Wesley, Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions (London, 1773), 5, 13
99. Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750-1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 66
100. See Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 2nd edn (London, 1761), 273
101. Adam Sedgwick, A Discourse on the Studies of the University (Cambridge, 1833), 57
102. Sedgwick lavishly praised Paley's Natural Theology in the appendix
103. Joseph Butler, 'Preface', Fifteen Sermons
104. in The Works of Joseph Butler, 2: 28. Butler's ethics were also more congenial to High Church intellectual traditions at Oxford, where Paley was less influential
105. See M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys, eds., The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 6 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 210
106. In 1843 a committee could still remark that the Principles and the Evidences "formed an important base of the theological curriculum". Martha McMackin Garland, Cambridge before Darwin: The Idea of a Liberal Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 58; see also 56-68