TheCenter forMultiethnic and TransnationalStudies
Stephen Toulmin (Thomas Jefferson Lecture, March 24, 1997) A Dissenter's Life
I My story today begins in Washington nearly 200 years ago. Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated as President on March 4, 1801. Less than three weeks later, he wrote to a friend who had come to the United States as a political refugee from England in 1794, and had built up his reputation here as a natural scientist, and as a writer on philosophy and religion. Yours [Jefferson wrote] is one of the few lives precious to mankind, and for the continuance of which every thinking man is solicitous. Bigots may be an exception. What an effort, my dear sir, of bigotry in politics and religion have we gone through! The barbarians flattered themselves they should be able to bring back the times of the Vandals, when ignorance put everything into the hands of power and priestcraft. All advances in science were proscribed as innovations. They pretended to praise and encourage education, but it was to be the education of our ancestors. We were to look backwards, not forwards, for improvement. . . . . This was the real ground ([he continued] of all the attacks on you. Those who live by mystery and charlatanerie, fearing you would render them useless by simplifying the Christian philosophy, - the most sublime and benevolent, but most perverted, system that ever shone on man, - endeavored to crush your well-earned and well-deserved fame. Jefferson was writing to a man whom we know today for books on electricity, oxygen and other scientific subjects, but who was known at the time as the Unitarian Minister in Birmingham, England, and had his church and home burnt down for defending the French Revolution. Joseph Priestley was now settled in Northumberland, Penna., and had three years to live. Why was Priestley's fame of such concern to Jefferson? What made a scientist of Unitarian persuasion the target of politically contrived resentment and violence? This alliance of two distinguished figures [I will argue] throws light on British and American attitudes 200 years ago that had a wider historical significance, and still survive among us today.
Priestley was a Freethinker and Nonconformist - a "dissenter," the term then was. He reached his own opinions on any subject he took up: in religion or philosophy, in science or politics. As well as Science, he wrote on a dozen other subjects: not just the nature of factitious airs (what we call gases) but also rhetoric, free will and the origin of language: Jefferson and he had corresponded since the early 1780s. As Minister of the Unitarian New Meeting in Birmingham, he had taught a common sense Christianity that avoided all doctrinal technicalities. The Trinity and Transubstantiation were [for him] "ideas at which the common sense of mankind will ever revolt." Jesus' teachings were (he said) intelligible today to the kinds of men and women who were the first disciples: this was what Jefferson meant by simplifying Christianity, and defending the laity from power and priestcraft. What then got Priestley into trouble: his theology, science, or politics? Nowadays in the United States, Unitarian Universalism is hardly a matter for scandal, but in 1794 it was still a cutting edge system: at Philadelphia, Priestley gave the series of lectures that firmly linked Unitarian theology to Universalist natural philosophy. Nor need we assume that Unitarianism no longer has political overtones nowadays. The religion of Bosnia (e.g.) originated in the theological debates of 11th century Constantinople. The Bogomils of the Balkans saw Jesus as the best of human teachers, skirting around the mystery of how he could be both God and Man. In a word, they were not Trinitarians, but Monophysites: the nearest thing in the year 1100 to Unitarians. Only later, coming under criticism from the Roman Church to the West and from the Orthodox Church to the East, both of which are Trinitarian churches, did the Bosnian Bogomils join Islam; and they did so for theological as much as political reasons: if Jesus had been a human "messenger" from God, after all, his standing was like that of Muhammad. (At a time when people in this country are tempted to demonize Islam, we need to recall just how much in theological history Islam and Christianity have shared.)
Still, a Birmingham mob in the 1790s would not have rioted about theology alone; so what about Priestley's scientific ideas? There too he took a solitary road, which led him to conclusions that sound more innocent in the 1990s than they did in the 1790s. Though widely respected, he was an idiosyncratic scientist who walked a cusp between the respectable and the unorthodox. From the 17th century on, European discussions of Mind and Body had been (as we say) dualistic: treating Mind and Matter as distinct and separate realms, so that the question was, "How do the two interact?" A minority of writers argued that mental activity needs bodies or brains to support it, not a separate mind or soul; but they were denounced as materialists and Epicureans - wrong headed, immoral, or worse. When news arrived that the liveliest of these writers, Julien de la Mettrie, had died of food poisoning at the Court in Berlin, the reaction was that he had met his just reward. Priestley also belonged to this despised minority, and he put up a plausible defense of his beliefs. The point of the Resurrection [he said] is not that we survive death as immaterial souls: it is that, at the Last Day, God restores our Material Bodies, so that we can resume our interrupted lives in the flesh.
Priestley could afford to take such eccentric positions, because socially he did not belong to the English Establishment. He was always a religious Nonconformist, and this - looking back - was an advantage: as such he was barred, not just from joining Parliament and the professions, but from attending Oxford and Cambridge University, where he would have learned only Ancient Literature and the mathematics of Newton. Instead, he went to the Dissenters' Academy at Daventry in the Midlands, where the students had a richer curriculum. With this as background, he could read La Mettrie's polemic against the narrowness of 17th century physical theory, and speculate about the spiritual potentialities of the material world.
Yet, once again, the Mind-Body Problem was scarcely a reason for riot. What got Priestley into trouble was his support for the French Revolution. He was a colleague of Richard Price, whom Edmund Burke pilloried in his Reflections on the Revolution in France - and he himself wrote a reply to Burke. Why was it so shocking to applaud the French Revolution? At first, many English people saw 1789 as continuing the 1688 English Revolution, when the Dutch Protestant Prince William of Orange replaced the Catholic James II; and also the Revolution of the 1580s, in which the Dutch reacted to Spanish religious persecution by abjuring their earlier loyalty to Philip of Spain. After the Terror of 1791, however, Anglican preachers attacked dissenters as enemies of the British Monarchy, and for 30 years events in France traumatized respectable England, as the Russian Revolution of 1917 traumatized mid-20th century America. Calling Priestley a Dissenter thus meant only a religious Nonconformist, who did not accept the teaching of the Anglican Church. Yet feeling against dissenters cut deep. The Revolution in France convinced many people in England that religious conformity was needed in order to defend the State from sedition. (The word keeps cropping up in sermons and pamphlets in the 1790s.) After the American War of Independence, the British monarchy had been frail, but the execution of Louis XVI was the last straw: from then on, anyone with a good word to say for the French was suspected of plotting against George III, and damned as a "regicide" or King-killer. How wonderful is the power of Denial! In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides tells us how, flushed with pride at their victories over Persia, the Athenians would not let the colony of Melos declare its neutrality between Sparta and Athens, but put to death all the grown men they took, and sold the women and children as slaves. This barbarism was not acceptable in the city of Pericles and Phidias; and the name of Melos - like My Lai for us - was one the Athenians prefered to forget. Likewise, when they executed Charles I in 1649, the English had set an example of the very "regicide" they now chose to condemn; yet, by 1790, most people in England found the memory of that event unacceptable. Priestley might insist that Unitarians had nothing against the Royalty - indeed, had no political agenda at all - but by this time blood was stirred, and a riot was easily whipped up.
The bigotry that burnt Priestley's home and church was just the pigheadedness that led the Founding Fathers to reject any establishment of religion. Before Independence, the history of Europe taught them that, for the sake of civil peace, no country could risk religious war. Priestley's last public act in England was a sermon On the Present State of Europe that forecast a replacement of feudal monarchies by more egalitarian rŽgimes. He spoke in the measured tones of Vaclav Havel today; but, after his own misfortunes, he feared changes as violent as those in France, and looked to America as a Laboratory of Toleration in which the contrast of Establishment and Dissenters finally lost sense. For, in America, there were no established doctrines for Dissenters to dissent from.
Priestley's arrival in Philadelphia did not end his troubles: once here, he was still open to attack. Jefferson hoped to attract him to Monticello, where they might jointly pursue their shared interest in natural science together. As it was, Priestley was active in the American Philosophical Society to which Jefferson (the Society's President from 1797 to 1815) gave papers on paleontology -- e.g., on the large fossils from Paraguay of a clawed animal known to scientists today as the Giant Sloth, Megalonyx Jeffersoni. Still, despite Jefferson's support for education, his scientific interests did him no good politically: notably, when he put the bones of ancient vertebrates on show in the East Room of the White House. Even in religion, Jefferson was an ambiguous ally, for his views made him plenty of enemies among the Churchmen of his time -- The Christian priesthood [he wrote] finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in Plato materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might give employment for their order and introduce it to profit, power and pre‘minence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms grafted on them. . .for this obvious reason, that nonsense can never be explained -- But, in saying this, Jefferson based his views on ideas set out in Priestley's own book, A History of the Corruptions of Christianity. So, as a refugee from England, Priestley did not set up a new home in Pennsylvania expecting his life to be one of pure peace. It was not obvious that the U.S. he actually came to was exactly the U.S. he idealistically foresaw: a place where religious toleration was the rule in fact, not just an article in the Consitution. But that did not matter to him: he had never shirked a good argument.
To sum up this story: I am not arguing that Priestley was right in all he believed and everybody else was wrong. I am not saying that he was right to be a Republican not Monarchist in politics, a Materialist not an Idealist in philosophy, or a Unitarian not a Trinitarian in religion. None of his dissenting opinions taken alone explains why he was attacked quite as violently as he was. As we shall see, the explosive mixture was made up of all his opinions taken together. But again, even that is not the point: the point is, that he was entitled to hold and argue for his opinions; many of his English contemporaries were too intolerant to respect this right; and the first question to ask is, "Why?" <P
II Let me now step aside, and look at the backdrop to this episode. Neither Priestley nor Jefferson was just a scientist or a mere essayist. Neither of them may have been a William Shakespeare or an Isaac Newton, but both combined literary sensibility with scientific talent. Ask my old friend, the late C.P. Snow, which of his "Two Cultures" they belonged to - Natural Sciences or Humanities - and he could not put either of them on one side only: their minds transcended that division, so he would have had to reply, Both. So let me now take a wider angle lens, and set the present episode at a point half way between the Gutenberg revolution of the late 15th century, and the new revolution in communication in which we are living today. Snow's Two Cultures - I will suggest - separated as a result of two different innovations that followed Gutenberg's invention, each of which carried its own distinct philosophical preoccupations. Around 1500, it was at last economic to distribute knowledge in printed form, not as manuscripts. Along with this, came a revival of the old tradition of Humane Letters: what we now know as the Humanities. The worlds of learning and public service were opened to a lay public, who could now study texts that had been closed to them before. Print taught readers to recognize the complexity and diversity of our human experience: instead of abstract theories of Sin and Grace, it gave them rich narratives about concrete human circumstances. Aquinas had been all very well, but figures like Don Quixote or Gargantua were irresistible. You did not have to approve of, or condemn such figures: rather, they were mirrors in which to reflect your own life. Like today's film makers, 16th century writers in the Humanities from Erasmus and Thomas More to Montaigne and Shakespeare present readers with the kaleidoscope of life. We get from them a feeling for the individuality of characters: no one can mistake Hamlet for Sancho Panza, or Pantagruel for Othello. What count are the differences among people, not the generalities they share. As Eudora Welty said in appreciation of V.S. Pritchett, who died just recently at the age of 96: The characters that fill [his stories] -- erratic, unsure, unsafe, devious, stubborn, restless and desirous, absurd and passionate, all peculiar unto themselves -- hold a claim on us that cannot be denied. They demand and get our rapt attention, for in the revelation of their lives, the secrets of our own lioves come into view. How much the eccentric has to tell us of what is central!
What an "unscientific" thought Eudora Welty here offers us - that the eccentric explains the central, rather than the other way around. No wonder the Humanities contributed as little as it did to the creation of the Exact Sciences. As late as 1580, Montaigne still questioned whether any universal theories about Nature were possible at all: let alone, mathematical ones like Newton's were to be. Given the uncertainties, ambiguities and disagreements in our experience, that ambition struck him as presumptuous. The creation of the Exact Sciences was, thus, a separate, 17th-century story, which I turn to now. In 1618, the final and most brutal of Europe's religious wars broke out. Henri IV of France set an example of toleration, by treating his Protestant and Catholic subjects as equal citizens: this had led a fanatic to murder him in 1610. From then on, things went only downhill. From 1618 to 1648 Central Europe was laid waste: during thirty years of war, one third of the population of Germany were killed, half of its cities destroyed. (From Grimmelshausen to Brecht, playwrights have written of this horror.) One event was especially ironic. To commemorate the slaughter of a Protestant army outside Prague, in 1620, a pearl among Rome's smaller churches was built. Dedicated to the Holy Mother of the Prince of Peace, it was called Santa Maria della Vittoria -- or Saint Mary of the Victory. With Europe split by War, the 16th century Humanists' modesty about the human intellect and their taste for diversity came to look like luxuries. Instead, new and more systematic ways of handling problems were devised, what we call disciplines, whose standardized procedures could be taught as a drill, which students learned to perform step by step, in one-and-only-one right way. Devised by the Flemish scholar Lipsius, this method was put to practical use by Maurits van Nassau, the Dutch Prince whose military academy at Breda in Holland was a Mecca for students from all across Europe. Maurits was struck by the consensus achievable in mathematics. If religion had been discussed with the same kind of neutrality, what miseries Europe might have escaped! Even while dying, he was no partisan. A Protestant Minister asked him to declare his beliefs: he replied, "I believe that 2 + 2 are 4, and 4 + 4 are 8. This gentleman here [pointing to a mathematician at his side] will tell you the details of our other beliefs." Soon, this mathematical ideal took a more general hold. In theory and practice alike - in jurisprudence and philosophy, as much as in the training of infantry - Skill gave way to Technique, Artistry to Artisanship.