The book also occasioned a notorious event in English intellectual history. Berkeley maintained—or seemed to maintain—that the only real “substance” in the world was spiritual, not material. Locke had held that only the perceivable exists, but that the mind adds to its comprehension of perceivable things an innate idea of their materiality. Berkeley countered that he had no sense himself of any such innate idea, and replaced Locke’s concept of “material substance” by a concept of “spiritual substance”; to make a long story short, Berkeley thus maintained that the being of things was supported and maintained by the ever-present mind of God. A conclusion was easy to draw from this—although Berkeley himself did not draw it—to the effect that material things do not exist, and that the world we think we perceive is merely a collection of shades or shadows. Dr. Samuel Johnson, who really knew better, once got into an argument about Berkeley’s views and, to ensure victory, kicked a stone with his foot as hard as he could. Limping down the road, he expostulated: “Thus I refute Bishop Berkeley!”
The Scotsman David Hume completes our triumvirate of British Empiricists. Born in Edinburgh in 1711, Hume was one of the first professional literary men; his essays on political and economic subjects made him famous, and his History of England (1753-61) made him rich—“not only independent but opulent,” as he said himself.
Those works were a great success; his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which he cared about and published in several versions throughout his lifetime, was a great failure. It was indeed a rather frightening book for its time, for Hume’s radical Empiricism led him to the edge of a religious skepticism that was shocking to his contemporaries. He denied that he was not a believing Christian, but his most careful readers thought they knew better, and I think they were right. Hume, in fact, was as close as you please to being the kind of atheist who asks whether the existence of God can be proved, if not in the laboratory, then at least by scientific methods. And if not …
The superbly written Enquiry forms the capstone of the arch begun by Locke. It ends with one of the most passionate paragraphs ever written by a philosopher. Hume has expounded his principles and supposes that they are convincing. He imagines, therefore, a new beginning of philosophy based on his own ideas. To make this new beginning, much of the old underbrush will have to be swept away, including a lot of old, false books. He writes:
When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
That is wonderful. All philosophers should care as much as Hume did about the truth.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
1712–1778
A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
The Social Contract
At the end of his life Jean-Jacques Rousseau, exiled from all the nations where he had lived and a self-proclaimed citizen of the world, was the most famous man in Europe. And also one of the most feared, by secular and religious leaders alike. His restless, tormented spirit was not to be trusted, they felt, and with good reason. He was a danger to all established institutions, which he would just as soon pull down, they thought, for the pleasure of seeing them fall, as for any real sense of their injustice or corruption. They may have been right about that, too.
Certainly Jean-Jacques, as he was called by both his enemies and his admirers—he had few friends, as such—was one of the unhappiest men who ever lived. His life consisted of a series of failures and disasters; he was only saved, on occasion, by the merciful intercessions of women who were enormously attracted to his dark, haunted soul. Indeed, he was a pure Romantic spirit, but he lived a half-century before such types were appreciated. What is more, he received no credit whatever for having invented the character that made men like Shelley, Byron, and Victor Hugo famous.
Rousseau was born in 1712 in Geneva, then an independent city-state, but he did not stay there, finding its narrow Protestantism admirable in a way but intolerable to his turbulent personality. He lived in France, in Venice (also an independent city-state), and in England, to which, with the help of James Boswell, he journeyed in the company of David Hume—only to quarrel with both of his benefactors within a matter of months. There was no helping this bitter, perverse, ironic, and suspicious man; he turned like a wounded dog on all those who tried to succor him. In 1767, now fifty-five and tired of running, he returned to France. He died in a simple cottage at Ermenonville, near Paris, in 1778. The great of Europe were glad to know him gone, but his cult did not die; for half a century the name Jean-Jacques could strike terror in the breasts of authority and produce frantic excitement in those of young, ambitious men and women.
Rousseau’s literary career began in 1749 at the age of thirty-seven, when he entered a competition proposed by the Academy of Dijon for the best essay on the subject: “Has the progress of the arts and sciences contributed more to the corruption or purification of morals?” His essay, attacking civilization as corrupting the goodness of nature, won the prize and brought him his first fame. He gained the attention of Diderot, who was editing L’Encyclopedie; Diderot asked for an article on politics, and Rousseau wrote his Discourse on Political Economy, which first appeared in L’Encyclopedie in 1755. His romantic novel, La Nouvelle Eloise, about a girl brought up in a simple environment, was a great success; he followed it by Emile, a tract disguised as a novel, proposing a system of education based on direct acquaintance with nature, and The Social Contract, both published in 1762. His Confessions did not appear until after his death; they were as shocking as anything he had ever written. In them he spoke of personal matters that no serious writer before him had discussed in print and revealed himself as he really was, both bad and good.
The Academy of Dijon proposed another essay competition in 1755, and Rousseau entered this one, too, with his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. The question was, How has a condition of inequality among men come about? Rousseau’s answer was characteristic and similar to the one he had given to the previous question. That is, he changed the question somewhat, to ask how general unhappiness had come about—was this because man was naturally unhappy, or because civilization had made him so?
Leaving aside the assumption, typical of Rousseau, that mankind is generally unhappy, the essay is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing in the history of eighteenth-century thought. It begins with an account of the state of nature, which, Rousseau candidly admits, “no longer exists, perhaps never did exist, and probably never will exist,” and goes on to examine the unhappy series of events—as Rousseau views them—that have led to the present state of mankind.