A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1890)/Anthony Collins and his works
ANTHONY COLLINS AND HIS WORKS.
By J. M. Wheeler.
The father of English Freethought, whose chief philosophical work is here reprinted, was the son of Henry Collins, a gentleman of fortune, and was born at Heston, near Hounslow, Middlesex, on June 21, 1676. He was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge. Upon leaving the University he became for a while student in the Temple, but showed a greater predilection for literature and philosophy than for law, although his studies were of after service to him as a magistrate. His fortune enabled him to gratify his tastes. He had, too, the pleasure of cultivating the friendship of John Locke, between whom and himself much correspondence ensued. In an The father of English Freethought, whose chief philosophical work is here reprinted, was the son of Henry Collins, a gentleman of fortune, and was born at Heston, near Hounslow, Middlesex, on June 21, 1676. He was educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge. Upon leaving the University he became for a while student in the Temple, but showed a greater predilection for literature and philosophy than for law, although his studies were of after service to him as a magistrate. His fortune enabled him to gratify his tastes. He had, too, the pleasure of cultivating the friendship of John Locke, between whom and himself much correspondence ensued. In an early letter, dated Oct. 29, 1703, Locke says: “Believe it, my good friend, to love truth for truth’s sake, is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues; and, if I mistake not, you have as much of it as ever I met with in anybody.” In many other letters Locke speaks of his affectionate regard for his young friend and disciple, who became one of the trustees of his will. In a letter, written Aug. 23, 1704, four days before his death, he says: “By my will, you will see I had some kindness for . . . And I knew no better way to take care of him than to put him, and what I designed for him, into your hands and management. The knowledge I have of your virtues of all kinds secures the trust which, by your permission, I have placed in you, and the peculiar esteem and love I have observed in the young man for you, will dispose him to be ruled and influenced by you, so of that I need say nothing. May you live long and happy, in the enjoyment of health, freedom, content, and all those blessings which Providence has bestowed on you, and your virtues entitled you to. I know you loved me living, and will preserve my memory now I am dead.” Locke evidently looked on Collins as the man who would carry on the torch of truth when it had fallen from his own hand. And this position Collins endeavored to fulfil, though it may be doubted if the master would have approved of the direction taken by the disciple.
Locke, in his Reasonableness of Christianity, published in 1695, had raised the question which underlay the theological questions of the eighteenth century, the right of reason to be heard upon religion. To this question Collins directed himself in his first important work, published in 1707. It was entitled An Essay Concerning the Use of Reason in Propositions, the Evidence whereof depends upon Human Testimony. A second edition, corrected, appeared in 1709. Collin’s work throughout was that of a sapper and miner of the citadel of Christian superstition, and in this work he seeks to secure ample ground as the base of the rationalists’ operations. He lays it down that perception must be every man’s criterion to distinguish truth from falsehood. The argument Archbishop Tillotson had advanced against transubstantiation—that no miracle can prove a doctrine to be divine which is repugnant to our natural ideas—was adroitly turned against the orthodox, with the conclusion that as revelation was not immediate but dependent upon testimony, we are at liberty to reject it if it contradicts our reason. The essay, in fact, contains in germ Hume’s famous Essay on Miracles, and also incidentally deals with the anthropomorphism of the Bible, and the evidences of late date found in the Pentateuch.
In this essay, too, Collins deals incidentally with the question of Liberty and Necessity. He says (p. 34): “I know very well that divines put such an idea to the term Liberty as is directly inconsistent with the divine prescience; for they suppose Liberty to stand for a power in man to determine himself, and consequently that there are several actions of man absolutely contingent, since they depend as to their existence on man, who determines their existence from himself without regard to any extrinsical cause.” This idea, he proceeds to argue, “is not only inconsistent with the supposition of the Divine Prescience, but inconsistent with Truth.”
This was followed by what Professor Huxley calls the wonderful triangular duel between Dodwell, Clarke and Collins on the immortality and immateriality of the soul. The learned but eccentric Dodwell had put forward a treatise contending from the Bible and the Fathers of the Church that the soul was naturally mortal, but that it derived immortality by virtue of the Holy Spirit, received in baptism, and hence that no one since the apostles had power to bestow immortality save the bishops. Dodwell was a perfect pedant. His learning was, as Gibbon testifies, immense, but his method was perplexed and his style barbarous. In this case, from well-established premises, he drew the most absurd conclusions. To rest human hopes of immortality upon episcopacy was indeed a sandy foundation. Such a treatise was well calculated to please the profane and grieve the godly. Several opponents to Dodwell appeared, foremost among them Dr. Samuel Clarke, the friend of Newton, and, since the death of Locke, regarded as England’s leading metaphysician. Clarke essayed to “demonstrate” the natural immortality and immateriality of the soul. This gave occasion to Collins to call attention to the difficulties of the question, and to show how far they are from being cleared up by Dr. Clarke’s “demonstration.” Collins pointed out that Clarke failed to define his terms, and since he allowed that God might bestow the power of thinking upon matter, it followed ' that matter might think. He hinted, moreover, that scepticism as to the existence of deity began when the Boyle lecturers undertook to prove it. Swift, who, in the twelfth chapter of the Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus, pokes fun at some of Collins’s arguments, hits the metaphysicians more heavily than he hits Collins. His famous illustrations of the meat-roasting quality which inheres in a jack, though neither in the fly, the weight, nor in any particular wheel, and that of Sir John Cutler’s pair of black worsted stockings, “which his maid darned so often with silk that they became at last a pair of silk stockings,” tells as strongly against the metaphysical view as against inadequate physical explanations of psychological processes.
Collins replied to the three first defences of Clarke, and then having fully stated his case was satisfied with silence. His letters were collected and published in French in 1769, and are highly extolled by Naigeon in the Encyclopædie Methodique which devotes over a hundred columns to the article “Collins.” Prof. Huxley, in his paper on “The Metaphysics of Sensation,” published in Critiques and Addresses says: “I do not think that anyone can read the letters which passed between Clarke and Collins, without admitting that Collins, who writes with wonderful power and closeness of reasoning, has by far the best of the argument, so far as the possible materiality of the soul goes; and that in this battle the Goliath of Freethinking overcame the champion of what was considered Orthodoxy.”
Priestcraft in Perfection followed in 1709. In this little treatise Collins shows that the clause in the twentieth Article of the Church of England, declaring that “the Church hath power to decree rites and ceremonies, and authority in controversies of faith” is not contained in the Articles as sanctioned by law, and was fraudulently foisted in afterwards. This pamphlet went through three editions by 1710, and was reprinted in 1865, without any indication of its authorship, but with a preface by the Rev. F. Saunderson, an agitator for the revision of the Book of Common Prayer. The work was anonymous, like all the rest of Collins’s productions, but the authorship was pretty well known. He followed this pamphlet up with another, in which he sought to carry the matter further and show that the consent of law had only been given to those Articles which confirmed the confession of the true Christian faith and the doctrine of the sacraments. This engendered a smart controversy, now happily buried in the great rubbish-heap of the past. As late as 1724 Collins returned to the subject in An Historical and Critical Essay on the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England.
In 1710 appeared A Vindication of the Divine Attributes, in answer to a sermon preached by Archbishop King at Dublin, which bore the title Divine Predestination and Foreknowledge Consistent with the Freedom of Man’s Will. The Archbishop contended that “the nature of God as it is in itself, is incomprehensible by human understanding.” His powers and methods are indeed “of a nature altogether different from ours,” so that when we speak of his predetermination, it does not follow that this is inconsistent with the contingency of events or free will. Such theological jugglery Collins was able to expose on Theistic grounds. Truth, goodness and justice in God are meaningless unless the same as in ourselves. The Archbishop, he declared, gave up the question of Manicheeism to Bayle. “Only Mr. Bayle continues to believe God is good and wise against the force of all human reasoning; and his grace supposes God is neither wise nor good: which two do not much, if at all, differ, but in words; for Mr. Bayle’s good and wise against evidence and argument is much the same with being neither good nor wise.”
The following year Collins visited Holland, where he became acquainted with Le Clerc, and other learned men, and after his return, he published, Feb. 1713, A Discourse of Freethinking, occasioned by the Rise and Growth of a sect called Freethinkers. The very title was as the unfurling of a flag presaging battle to theological authority and supernaturalism. Two years before Toland had written of “we Freethinkers.” They were a sect and growing. Collins’s Discourse was the manifesto of a new cause, a plea for exercising the Protestant principle of private judgment on the Protestant fetish of revelation. To us the duty and necessity of free inquiry seem truisms. At the beginning of last century this plea was a necessary one. Only a century previously Legate and Wightman had been burnt to death for Anti-Trinitarianism, and, as late as 1697 Thomas Aitkenhead was hung for blasphemy at Edinburgh, for calling the books of Moses, Ezra’s fables. In the controversy that ensued upon the publication of the Discourse Collins was unfortunate. There was a host of replies. The Whigs disclaimed him with loud abhorrence. The Church champions attacked him violently. Even the “Socinian bishop,” Hoadly, felt it necessary to controvert the Freethinker. Against such as Hoadly, Hare or Whiston, Collins, had he chosen, might have held his own, but his anonymous treatise had the singularly infelicitous fortune of eliciting two anonymous adversaries, one the prince of critics, the other the king of satirists.
Bully Bentley, in the guise of “Phileleutherus Lipsiensis,” fiercely attacked the Discourse. In truth, while the arguments of Collins were sound his illustrations were faulty. The Freethinking bantling was healthy, but it was so badly dressed that it was almost smothered with contempt. Collins made mistakes in his historical allusions. Addison had done no better. In his work on the Evidences of Christianity, as Macaulay reminds us, Addison “assigns as grounds of his religious belief, stories as absurd as the Cock Lane ghost, and forgeries as rank as Ireland’s Vortigern, puts faith in the lie about the Thundering Legion, is convinced that Tiberius moved the Senate to admit Jesus among the gods, and pronounces the letter of Agbarus, King of Edessa, to be a record of great authority.” Yet Addison was the pride of Oxford, and his work in defence of orthodoxy was received with applause, while the heresy of Collins was scouted. Bentley succeeded by attacking the illustrations and avoiding the question at issue. He exposed the inferior scholarship of his adversary, and made out that his bad Greek was the outcome of a wicked heart. “Inquire closely into their lives and you will find why they declaim against religion.” He even hints that the magistrate should take care of Collins either in a prison or dark rooms, and suggests that the Government should “oblige your East India Company to take on board the whole growing sect, and lodge them at Madagascar, among their confessed and claimed kindred (since they make themselves but a higher species of brutes), the monkeys and the drills.” This suggests that Lord Monboddo was not, as generally supposed, the first to maintain that apes were allied to the human species. Bentley left his attack unfinished in two parts, because the court refused to back him in his demand for certain academical fees, and he consequently discovered that “those whom he wrote for were as bad as those he wrote against.” The phrase, says Leslie Stephen, supplies a queer confusion between the interests of the Church of Christ and those of the Court of George I.
Richard Cumberland, a grandson of Bentley, says, in the romance entitled His Life, that Collins was afterwards helped by Bentley, who, conceiving that by having ruined his character as a writer he had been the occasion of his personal misery, liberally contributed to his maintenance. “In vain,” says Isaac D’Israeli in his Curiosities of Literature, “I mentioned to that elegant writer, who was not curious about facts, that this person could never have been Anthony Collins, who had always a plentiful fortune; and when it was suggested to him that this A. Collins, as he printed it, must have been Arthur Collins, the historic compiler, who was often in pecuniary difficulties, still he persisted in sending the lie down to posterity, totidem verbis, without alteration in his second edition, observing to a friend of mine that ‘the story, while it told well, might serve as a striking instance of his great relative’s generosity; and that it should stand, because it could do no harm to any but to Anthony Collins, whom he considered little short of an Atheist.” This “should stand” as an illustration of the conception that duty is only due to those of the faith. Collins, like all pioneers of thought, has had to hold his own against Christian calumny no less than to be on his guard against Christian persecution.
In truth Bentley’s scholarship and brow-beating left Collins’ argument for Free Inquiry untouched. Swift, in the guise of a Whig, put forth a satire entitled Mr. Collins’ Discourse of Freethinking put into Plain English by Way of Abstract for the Use of the Poor, by a Friend of the Author. It was a masterly skit. But the irony of events is more powerful than that of the great Dean. The joke now is that much of Swift’s splendid satire can be retorted on orthodoxy in earnest. Swift’s satire evidently proceeded from his belief, let the reader call it misanthropical or simply just, according to his predilection, that “the bulk of mankind is as well qualified for flying as thinking.”
Yet another master mind joined in the attack on Collins. No. 3 of the Guardian contained a paper which, says Leslie Stephen, was “attributed either to the admirable Berkeley or the good-natured Steele,” but which was certainly by Berkeley, being ascribed to him by his son, Dr. George Berkeley, as well as the annotators, and included in Fraser’s edition of Berkeley’s Works, 1871. The writer says: “As for my part, I cannot see any possible interpretation to give this work but a design to subvert and ridicule the authority of Scripture. The peace and the tranquility of the nation, and regards even above these, are so much concerned in this matter that it is difficult to express sufficient sorrow for the offender, or indignation against him. But if ever man deserved to be denied the common benefit of air and water, it is the author of A Discourse of Freethinking.” Had the articles in the Guardian been signed, the excellent Berkeley might have been spared the reproach which may be said to attach to him for this incitement to persecution.[1]
Collins deemed it prudent to pay a visit to his friends in Holland. He was in consequence ridiculed by those who had been crying out for persecution. But he was not idle. In 1715 he returned to England, and retired to Essex, where he acted as Justice of the Peace, as he had done before in the County of Middlesex and the Liberty of Westminster. In the same year he published the work here reprinted.
Dr. Samuel Clarke, in his Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1704) had replied to Spinoza’s arguments in proof of Necessity. To this Collins had evidently an eye when he said “Liberty is contended for by its patrons as a great perfection.” He only mentions “the most acute and ingenious Dr. Clarke,” however, towards the close of the work, when he adroitly quotes him to show that by his own admissions as to Moral Necessity he was in fact a Necessitarian. To this Clarke replied that Moral Necessity was no Necessity at all. It is notable that modern metaphysicians like Dr. Hutchinson Stirling take exactly the contrary view.
Clarke having contended against Collins that the doctrine of Necessity was opposed to religion and morality, the Freethinker did not deem fit to run the risk of persecution by provoking further controversy with his opponent. His later Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, a tract of but 23 pages, was not published until after the death of Clarke and in the year of his own decease, 1729.
It is, however, upon the little work here reprinted that the fame of Collins as a philosopher securely rests. The writer of the article on Collins in the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th ed.) says: “His brief Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1715) gives, in a remarkably clear and concise form, all the important arguments in favor of his theory, with able and suggestive replies to the chief objections which have been urged against it. Little, in fact, of moment has been added by modern determinists.” Similar is the testimony of Dugald Stewart in his Dissertation on Philosophy prefixed to the seventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Collins, he says, “following the footsteps of Hobbes, with logical talents not inferior to his master, and with a weight of personal character in his favor, to which his master had no pretensions,[2] gave to the cause which he so warmly espoused a degree of credit among sober and serious inquirers which it had never before possessed in England. . . . Indeed, I do not know of anything that has been advanced by later writers in support of the scheme of Necessity, of which the germ is not to be found in the inquiry of Collins.”
In France the works of Collins had a notable influence on the progress of philosophical ideas. His letters in the Clarke and Dodwell controversy were collected and published (probably by d’Holbach) in 1769 as Essai sur la nature et la destination de l’âme Humaine, They were also reprinted in Naigeon’s eulogistic article on Collins in the dictionary of ancient and modern philosophy of the Encyclopédie Méthodique. This also reprinted the work here published, of which two translations had previously been made—one by De Bons, published by Des Maizeaux in his Recueil de Diverses Pièces sur la Philosophie, la Religion, etc. (Amsterdam, 1720), and the other, that used by Naigeon, translated by Lefèvre de Beauvray, published in 1754 as Paradoxes Metaphysiques sur les Principes des Actions Humaines. Voltaire, in his Letters on authors accused of attacking the Christian religion, calls Collins “one of the most terrible enemies of the Christian religion.”
There has been some controversy raised as to whether Collins’s arguments for Necessity do not lead in the direction of Atheism. As if aware of this, he points out that the Epicurians asserted, Liberty, while it was denied by the theistic Stoics. He argues, too, that free-will is inconsistent with the omnipotence ascribed to Deity. But his opponents, in the loose fashion of that period, considered him an Atheist.
Bentley assumed that Collins was one of “those Atheists, who, looking at their own actions, wish there was no God; and because they wish there were none, persuade themselves there is none.” There was little likelihood of Atheism, if it existed, being known, whilst ‘Atheist’ was considered the synonym of ‘scoundrel.’” Collins says that his expression of his opinion was carefully kept “within the bounds of doing himself no harm.” He always published anonymously, or with but his initials. But the authorship of his works never remained long a secret. It was probably his position which saved him from attack. How else can we explain it that Blount, Shaftesbury and Collins, who were rich, escaped, while Toland, Woolston and Annet, who were poor, were prosecuted, and the two latter severely punished, for their heresies?
In the advertisement to his Alciphron, Bishop Berkeley says he “is well assured that one of the most noted writers against Christianity in our times declared he had found out a demonstration against the being of a God.” From Dr. Chandler’s Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson—not the lexicographer, but an American friend of Berkeley—it appears that this noted writer was Collins. Chandler says (p. 57): “Mr. Johnson, in one of his visits to the Dean [Berkeley], conversing with him on the work on hand [Alciphron] was more particularly informed by him that he himself [the Dean] had heard this strange declaration, while he was present in one of the deistical clubs, in the pretended character of a learner, that Collins was the man who made it; and that the ‘demonstration’ was what he afterwards published, in an attempt to prove that every action is the effect of Fate and Necessity, in his book entitled A Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty. And, indeed, could the point be once established, that everything is produced by Fate and Necessity, it would naturally follow that there is no God, or that he is a very useless and insignificant Being, which amounts to the same thing.”
This anecdote must evidently be taken with caution. According to Collins the way to demonstrate the non-existence of God would be to demonstrate the freedom of the will—the very thing he is opposing. No doubt his opposition to Christianity went deeper in reality than in appearance, but there is even less reason for denying his sincere Deism than in the case of Voltaire.
Dr. John Hunt, in his candid Religious Thought in England, (vol. ii., p. 399), says, “Collins’s intellect was as cold as it was clear, but it was thoroughly honest. To examine freely and to judge fairly was his religion. . . . . As a magistrate he bore a high character. His worst enemies, it is said, could never charge him with any vice or immorality. He is described as amiable, prudent, virtuous, and humane in all domestic duties and relations; of a benevolence towards all men worthy of the character of the citizen of the world.” Dr. Hunt would fain give him the title of Christian, and evidently endorses the observation recorded in the Autobiography of Alexander Carlyle, one who knew Collins well once said that if he was not saved in the ship he would certainly get ashore on a plank.
The Philosophical Inquiry was republished with a preface by Priestley at Birmingham in 1790. Priestley considered it superior to the renowned work by Jonathan Edwards on the Freedom of the Will. It is curious, indeed, how far the New England Calvinist (certainly the ablest American metaphysician), whose work was first published in 1754, followed the work of the English Freethinker. Dugald Stewart says, “The coincidence is so perfect that the outline given by the former of the plan of his work, might have served with equal propriety as a preface to that of the latter.” Indeed, if the argument of Collins can be looked on as a demonstration of the non-existence of God, so must that of the great Puritan divine. But Edwards, like Collins, argues that the scheme of free will, by affording an exception to the dictum that everything has a cause, would destroy the proof for the being of God. Professor Fraser, in his smaller work on Berkeley in Philosophical Classics, gives his testimony that Collins “states the arguments against human freedom with a logical force unsurpassed by any Necessitarian.”
In 1718 Collins was chosen Treasurer for the County of Essex, to the delight, it is said, of tradesmen and others, who had, owing to the defalcations of a former treasurer, large sums of money due to them from the county. Collins supported the poorest of them with his private cash and paid interest to others, till in 1722 all the debts were discharged by his integrity, care and management. These duties appear to have taken up Collins’s attention, for it was not till 1724 that his next work appeared. This was entitled A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion. It was the most powerful attack upon orthodoxy which had then appeared. With unerring aim he went to the weakest point of Christian Evidences. He maintained, what is indeed indisputable, that Christianity was founded on Judaism, and that the Apostles derive and prove Christianity from the Old Testament. But an examination of the Old Testament prophecies alleged to be fulfilled in the New Testament shows that they do not literally correspond. For example, Matt i., 22-23: “Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet [or rather, as the Revised Version gives it, by the Lord through the prophet], saying. Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel.” The words as they stand in Isaiah vii., 14, in their obvious and literal sense, refer to a young woman in the reign of Ahaz, king of Judah, and the context shows that the child was Isaiah’s own son, the prophet in this matter leaving nothing to the labors of his successors. The only resource is to say that the prophecy was typical, and this Collins explains as such a sense as no one could have discovered in the passages quoted in the New Testament simply as they stand in the Old; so that prophecy was verily a light in a dark place, but not overcoming the darkness, and God must have been in the habit of talking to his prophets in riddles. Collins does not expressly draw the natural inferences from the New Testament misquotations and misinterpretations. He writes as a Christian, and on this, as on many other points, the broad Christians of to-day have come to occupy the ground taken up by the Deists of last century.
Dr. John Hunt says: “Whatever error Collins may have made in detail, his great principle was fairly established, that the evidence for the truth of Christianity from prophecy rests in secondary or typical fulfilments.” The real purport of this admission is made plain in Leslie Stephen’s acute statement that Collins’s true meaning may be brought out by everywhere substituting “nonsense” for “allegory.”
The discourse made a great sensation. In the preface to his Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered, 1727, in which he replied to his critics, Collins gives a list of thirty-five answers which had already appeared. Collins gave the principal attention to Bishop Chandler. Lesser fry suggested persecution. Dr. John Rogers, Canon of Wells, wrote: “A confessor or two would be a mighty ornament to his cause. If he expects us to believe that he is in earnest, and believes himself, he should not decline giving us this proof of his sincerity. What will not abide this trial, we shall suspect to have but a poor foundation.” No prosecution, however, was instituted.
In 1726 Collins lost his only son, which affected him deeply. He suffered for some time with the stone, and was in very bad health for several years before his death, which occurred at his house in Harley Street, London, Dec. 13, 1729. He was buried at Oxford Chapel, where a monument was erected to his memory. In the year of his death, in addition to the brief dissertation upon Liberty and Necessity, already mentioned, he published an anonymous Discourse on Ridicule and Irony, in which he vindicated the employment of these weapons in religious controversy.
Collins bore so high a character that even theological rancor was unable to assert anything against him. On his death he was called in the papers “the active, upright and impartial magistrate; the tender husband, the kind parent, the good master and the true friend.” Locke had described him as a gentleman who had “an estate in the country, a library in town, and a friend everywhere.”
Collins was a great lover of literature, and his fine library was open to all comers and especially to antagonists. By his will he left part of his goods to the poor. Legacies were also left to Dr. A. Sykes, one of his opponents, and to Des Maizeaux, his friend and literary agent, to whom he left his manuscripts, which included a dissertation on the Sibylline Oracles, showing they were forged by the early Christians, and a discourse on Miracles which he mentions at the end of his Scheme of Literal Prophecy Considered. One collection, we know not what it was, was in eight octavo volumes.
This precious legacy the widow of Collins persuaded Des Maizeaux to relinquish, upon which she presented him with fifty pounds. Des Maizeaux was weak but not dishonest. He returned the money “convinced” as he says in a letter written Jan. 6, 1730, “that I have acted contrary to the will and intention of my dear deceased friend; showed a disregard of the particular mark of esteem he gave mo on that occasion; in short, that I have forfeited what is dearer to me than my own life—honor and reputation.” Seven years afterwards, on Des Maizeaux spreading a report that the MSS. had been betrayed to the Bishop of London, Mrs. Collins wrote him a sharp letter. He replied in a tone which spoke at once of his affection for Mr. Collins and his own remorse for his weakness. He concludes thus: “Mr. Collins loved me and esteemed me for my integrity and sincerity, of which he had several proofs; how I have been drawn in to injure him, to forfeit the good opinion he had of me, and which were he now alive, would deservedly expose me to this utmost contempt, is a grief which I shall carry to the grave. It would be a sort of comfort to me, if those who have consented I should be drawn in were in some measure sensible of the guilt towards so good, kind and generous a man.” The unpublished MSS. disappeared like those of Toland and Blount, and the second volume of Tindal.
- ↑ It is, of course, open to any friend of Berkeley, whose goodness of heart was as undoubted as his genius, to argue that he did not intend any incitement to persecution; air and water being the common benefits of “Providence,” whom Collins had presumably insulted, and not such things as men are usually deprived of by their persecutors.
- ↑ In a footnote Professor Stewart explains that “I allude to the base servility of Hobbes’ political principles, and to the suppleness with which he adapted them to the opposite idea.” “To his private virtues the most honorable testimony has been borne, both by his friends and by his enemies.”