The Seventeenth Century Synthesis
The Seventeenth Century Background. By Basil Willey. (Chatto and Windus. 12s. 6c1.)
ENGLISII historians have not as a rule been attracted to the writing of histories of English Thought, but for no period has this neglect been so marked as for the seventeenth century. And yet for no period can such a neglect be so little justified. The English thought of that age had an effect on other countries and in other centuries such as it has never had before or since : the theories of Locke shaped two subsequent revolutions ; those of Newton the universe of two subsequent centuries. No less decisive was the domestic importance of the century. The word Renaissance has been generally abused, but it is perhaps a justifiable, description of England in the seventeenth century. For it was then, and not in the time of Elizabeth, that a new synthesis, easily to be distinguished from that of the middle ages, was created : the proper study of mankind became for the first time Man, and not God. In the middle ages it is true man occupied a much more central position in the U‘iverse than he did as the result of seventeenth-century thought, for the trend of that thought was to replace the supernatural by the natural, and not by the biological, sciences. But though the Universe ceased to be something created for the benefit of man, it became something of which man was the intellectual and material master ; revelation ceased to be an adequate guide either to analysis or action.
Mr. Willey, in a brilliant book, has examined the nature of this change in attitude, has isolated the general restatement that the seventeenth century put forward, and has considered the relation between this change and the literature of the period. His main task has been to state how, in the seven- teenth century, the problem later posed by Kant, " Should science be the torchbearer or the handmaid of religion?" was answered. He shows how this problem assumed the shape of a conflict between reason and authority, and in some form or other entered into every branch of human activity. In literature there was the dispute over the position of the authors of antiquity : should their authority, be regarded as final, even against reason and experience. Within theology there was the similar question as to the position of the Scriptures and of the Fathers—of whom it was Chillingworth, I think, who said : " We call them Fathers when we agree with them and children when we don't." Philosophy was con- fronted by the claims of revealed truth. Mr. Willey's range is sufficiently catholic to enable him to examine this question in its every manifestation. To be sure the question was not a new one ; both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas had considered it ; Berengar and Lanfranc had made it the subject of a famous debate, but it became urgent in the seventeenth century, and Mr. Willey has shown a fine historical sense in realizing that the urgency of a particular problem is more important historically than is its novelty.
Any examination of the general " restatement " made by this century begins inevitably with Bacon.- Here Mr. Willey has seen where others have failed to, the peculiar paradox of Bacon's position ; that he secured the victory for Reason by turning his back on Rationalism. For if ever there was an age of Rationalism it was the age that Bacon scorned, the age when men ignored the truths that experience of the material world could give and tried to reason about Buridan's Donkey, and to compute how many angels—provided they were good angels—could dance on the point of a needle. The reproach Bacon levelled at Scholasticism was that it " did out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit spin gut . . laborious webs . . . " His remedy was to practise what Duns Scotus had only pondered, to insist on what was the real system of the seventeenth century, Em- piricism. But though Bacon was farseeing he was not far-
thinking ; he was unable to produce any theory which should justify the method he advocated. Thus having surveyed the field in Bacon's company, Mr. Willey turns to an examination of how the intellectual justification for Bacon's arbitrary position was worked out during the century and finally synthesized in the Essay on 'Human Understanding."
The result is brilliantly successful. Mr. Willey's general scheme is just sufficiently definite to impose a unity of signi- ficance on writers so diverse as Milton and Descartes, while allowing full play to his sensibility towards individual achieve- ment. This is particularly marked in the treatment of Sir Thomas Browne. Sir Thomas Browne, there can be no doubt, was an old muddlehead ; but his very muddleheaded- ness was a sign of the times : " the Great Amphibium" was pulled in one direction by the old world, and then shaken
rudely into another by his realization of the new. He could write both the Religio Medici which is mediaeval in outlook and The inquiry into Vulgar errors, where he rejects authority and holds that " Opinions must be judged like coins, by their metal and not by their superscription." The same type of conflict can be found in Milton, who managed to achieve a traditional religious_ epic in an age that was turning away from traditional religion. But then—though Mr. Willey does not go so far as to say this—Paradise Lost in many ways exhibits the qualities of a tour de force. For as far as I can see, the lack of harmony between the thought and the content of that poem can be accounted for by saying that the thought was the thought of a system already dead ; and not only dead, but discredited.
Two criticisms alone can be made. In particular I think that Mr. Willey in devoting most of his study of the theological change to an examination of the Cambridge Platonists has missed the point that Cudworth and More merely made suit- able for academic consumption conclusions achieved in a slightly different atmosphere by men such as Falkland and Jeremy Taylor. There is also the general criticism that applies to any idealist historian of thought, though less so to Mr. Willey than most. Most historians are apt to claim that the period they are examining represents a notable advance on anything that has gone before ; that truth " in some way suddenly " triumphed." They are thus confronted by the materialist with the question : why did " truth " triumph in this particular place, at this particular moment ? Mr. Willey, however, though an idealist, does not write in teleological terms, and though the question still remains, his method of examining the change he is describing simply as a change, has robbed the usual criticism of its usual force.
It rests to be said that the style and attitude of Mr. Willey's book are extremely pleasant : there is the sense of excitement and of conquest which is so often the unique gift of an un- touched subject. There is also something finer and more rare, a sense of intellectual responsibility as well to the present as to the past, an integrity which justifies one in placing Mr. Willey's book on the thought of the seventeenth century in the same rank as Leslie Stephen's classic for that of the
Previous page
