Determinism and Freewill: Anthony Collins’ A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty

130 Pages·1976·5.68 MB·English

by  J. O’higgins S. J. (auth.)

DETERMINISM AND FREEWILL
ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDEES
INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
Series Minor
18
J. O'HIGGINS S. J.
DETERMINISM AND FREEWILL:
ANTHONY COLLINS' A PHILOSOPHICAL
INQUIRY CONCERNING HUMAN LIBERTY
Directors: P. Dibon (Paris) and R. Popkin (Washington Uniy., St. Louis)
Editorial Board: J. Aubin (Paris); J. Collins (St. Louis Uniy.); P. Costabel (paris);
A. Crombie (Oxford); I. Dambska (Cracow); H. de la Fontaine-Verwey (Amsterdam);
H. Gadamer (Heidelberg); H. Gouhier (Paris) ; T. Gregory (Rome); T. E. Jessop (Hull);
P. O. Kristeller (Columbia Uniy.); Elisabeth Labrousse (Paris); A. Lossky (Los Ange
les); S. Lindroth (Upsala); J. Orcibal (Paris); I. S. Reyaht (Paris); Wolfgang Rod
(Miinchen); J. Roger (Paris); G. S. Rousseau (Los Angeles); H. Rowen (Rutgers
Uniy., N.J.); C. B. Schmitt (Warburg Institute, London); G. Sebba (Emory Uniy.,
Atlanta); R.Shackleton(Oxford); J. Tans (Groningen); G. Tonelli (Binghamton, N.Y.).
DETERMINISM AND
FREEWILL
ANTHONY COLLINS'
A Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty
edited and annotated
with
a discussion of the opinions of Hobbes, Locke, Pierre Bayle,
William King and Leibniz
by
J. O'HIGGINS S. J .
•
MARTINUS NIJHOFF I THE HAGUE I 1976
© 1976 by Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
All rights reserved, including the rights to translate or to
reprodua this book or parts thereof in any form
ISBN-13: 978-90-247-1776-7 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-010-1368-0
DOl: to.l 007/978-94-010-1368-0
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE VII
INTRODUCTION 1
Deism 1
Anthony Collins 2
Writings 3
The Controversy on Freewill 5
The Philosophical Inquiry 6
Thomas Hobbes 8
John Locke 11
Pierre Bayle and William King 12
Liberty of Indifference 15
De Origine Mali 17
Bayle and King 19
Leibniz 22
The Inquiry 25
Conclusion 44
TEXT OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY CONCERNING HUMAN
LIBERTY 47
NOTES TO THE TEXT OF THE INQUIRY 111
CoLLATION OF THE TEXT OF THE INQUIRY 121
PREFACE
The Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty of Anthony Collins'
was considered by Joseph Priestley and Voltaire to be the best book
written on freewill up to their own time. Priestley admitted that it convert
ed him to determinism and it had a powerful effect on Voltaire in the same
direction. It seems important to place in its wider historical context a
book which so influenced such men and which greatly impressed the
philosophes in general. Therefore - and because such an account has value
in itself - the Introduction contains a survey of the freewill controversy
from the time of Hobbes to that of Leibniz, giving in some detail the
opinions of Hobbes, Locke, Pierre Bayle, William King, Archbishop of
Dublin, and Leibniz and an account of the Scholastic doctrine of liberty
of indifference - opinions which either influenced Collins or against which
he reacted.
The value and originality of Collins' works need assessing. He was also
at times liable to misinterpret or misunderstand the authorities he quoted.
I have, therefore, subjected the Inquiry to a detailed critique. This also
gives cross-references to parallel passages in Collins' works and those of
the authors who influenced him, and, by discussing the philosophical and
theological questions to which his writings give rise, obviates the need
for a good many footnotes in the notes that follow the text.
INTRODUCTION
DEISM
Anthony Collins (1676-1729) was one of the leading members of that
group of men who, in the first half of the 18th century were designated
free-thinkers or Deists. They were a very varied collection, ranging from
the impecunious and rather disreputable Irishman, John Toland, with
his pantheistic leanings, and the ex-tallow chandler's apprentice, Thomas
Chubb, to the aggressive if cautious fellow of All Souls College, Matthew
Tindal, and the wealthy Essex squire, Collins himself. Their beliefs varied.
Samuel Clarke, in his Boyle lectures of 1704-1705 divided them into four
classes: those who held the existence of God but denied that he concerned
himself in the government ofthe world; those who held the existence and
material providence of God but denied that he was concerned with the
morally good and evil actions of men; those who believed in God and
his providence and his insistence on man's obedience but denied the im
mortality of the human soul; and those who believed in God, in provi
dence, in Natural Religion and a future life with rewards and punish
ments, but who denied Revelation. The denial of Revelation was uniform
in all of them. The belief that unaided reason could work out for itself the
whole of the contents of religion was their common characteristic. They
all held that the existence of God and of his essential attributes can be
rationally demonstrated - with some reservations in the case of Toland
with regard to the nature of God himself. But they never founded a single
school of thought and with regard to one important question, that with
which the text here reproduced is concerned, they differed widely. Tindal
and Collins were determinists, Thomas Chubb a defender of the freedom
of the will. They were regarded by their contemporaries as enemies of the
Christian faith, yet Tindal and Chubb called themselves Christian Deists
and Collins remained a communicating member of the Church of England
2 INTRODUCTION
till his death and was angered, apparently genuinely, by accusations that
he was a hypocrite in so doing. They were an interesting phenomenon;
partly a product of the reaction against the religious enthusiams of the
seventeenth century and the religious wars and yet not quite men of the
Enlightenment. But they contributed to the Enlightenment. They corre
sponded in England to the circle that surrounded Comte Henri de Bou
lainvilliers in France, though their views were less extreme than those ex
pressed in the clandestine manuscripts that were circulating in the latter
country. 1 Their writings were reported on and often summarised in the many
contemporary literary journals that were published in France and Holland
and their works were translated into French - the Philosophical Inquiry had
two separate French translations. They were the centre of heated theological
controversies that raged in England from the time of the publication of
Toland's Christianity not Mysterious in 1696 to the middle of the eigh
teenth century. Apparently they got the worse of the exchanges. But they
and the attitude of mind which they represented had a considerable in
fluence in England on what G. N. Stromberg describes as a religion that
"rested on a good deal of indifference to all except a minimum of moral
rectitude"2 and in France their effect is more easy to trace in Voltaire,
D'Holbach and the Encyclopedists. Of all the English writers of his time,
Collins was the one who was most noted in the contemporary French
literary journals, and in Jacques Andre Naigeon's volumes on Philosophy
in the Encyclopedie Methodique it was he who was given the second
longest article, and in that article a translation of his work on free will
was reproduced in full.
ANTHONY COLLINS
In social position Anthony Collins was by far the most favoured of the
Deists. He was born in Heston, in Middlesex, of a family that came from
the Isle of Wight, that had legal connections and that became landowners
in Essex. His grandfather, Anthony, had been a Bencher and Treasurer
of the Middle Temple; his father, Henry, was called to the bar in 1667,
but did not practise. He himself went first to Eton, then, for a year, to
Cambridge and finally to the Middle Temple. He was never called to
the bar, though his interrupted legal training may have been of use to
him in'his later polemical writings, He himself considered that his rather
1 For an account of these, cf, I. O. Wade, The Clandestine Organisation"and Diffusion
ofP hilosophic Ideas in France, from 1700 to 1750, (Princeton, 1938), "
2 G. N, Stromberg, Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth Century England, (Oxford,
1954) ,p, 170.
INTRODUCTION 3
unsystematic education might have been a disadvantage to him. He was a
very wealthy man. It was estimated that his father was worth £ 1,800 a
year and he himself married the daughter of one of the richest men in
London, the banker Sir Francis Child.3 At first he lived in London - after
the early death of his first wife in 1703 - in Lincoln's Inn and then in
Lincoln's Inn Fields; then at the fine old mansion of Hunterscomb in
Buckinghamshire, where he received Queen Anne and her court who
"took delight in walking in his fine gardens" and where he refused the
blandishments of the local gentry to stand as parliamentary candidate for
the county, presumably in the whig interest; and finally, after short-lived
stays in Banstead, Sutton and Whaddon in Surrey, he moved to Essex in
1715. Here, though he still kept a town house, he became very much the
country gentleman. At the same time that he was earning notoriety as a
freethinking writer, in his own county he was a pillar of county society,
Justice of the Peace, county Treasurer and Deputy Lieutenant. His repu
tation as a writer did nothing to damage his standing as a country gentle
man and from a manuscript life in the British Museum, written presuma
bly by a county acquaintance, one would never gather that he had put
pen to paper except to sign official documents - and in the official docu
ments contained in the Essex county record office, his is, for this period,
the signature that most frequently occurs. He remained Justice and Trea
surer till his death in 1729.
WRITINGS
Without doubt the most important and most formative experience in
Collins' life was his friendship with John Locke. He may first have met
the latter in the sixteen-nineties but the close friendship existed only
during the last two years of the philosopher's life. It was exceedingly close.
"Why do you make yourself so necessary to me," wrote Locke. "I thought
myself pretty loose of the world, but I feel you begin to fasten me to it
again."4 Locke had a high opinion of Collins' ability and may well have
been responsible for his turning to a career as an author. "I know no
body that understands it" - the Essay on Human Understanding - "so
well,"s he wrote to Collins, and when he mused on the "openings to truth,
3 Brit. Mus. Addit. MSS. 4282, f. 243. For a fuller account of the life of Collins and
an analysis of his library, cf. J. O'Higgins, Anthony Collins, the Man and his Works,
(International Archives of the History of Ideas, The Hague, 1970).
4 J. Locke, Works, (6th ed., London, 1759), III, p. 730. Locke to Collins, 24 June,
1703.
5 Ibid., III, p. 742. Locke to Collins, 3 Apr., 1704.
4 INTRODUCTION
and direct paths leading to it" which he thought he saw in his old age,
but considered himself too old to follow up, he wrote "it is for one of
your age, I think I ought to say for you yourself, to set about it."6
Locke died in 1704. The first of CoIlins' works were published in 1707.
In them he showed the strong influence of his friend but he was to move
away, finally far away, from Locke's position. In the Essay on the Use of
Reason of 1707 he took up much the same position as that of Toland in
his Christianity not Mysterious of 1696. He held that there is no room for
mystery in religion. Propositions are either according to reason and fully
comprehensible or contrary to reason and there is no room for any other
category. Locke admitted truths above reason, though he was rather am
biguous when he came to discuss them, but Collins certainly took Locke's
theory of ideas as a starting point for his argument. In the same year,
1707, began a long controversy with Samuel Clarke, on the immateriality
and natural immortality of the soul. Taking up Locke's casual remark
that we do not know whether "omnipotency has not given to some sys
tems of matter fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think,'" CoIlins,
unlike Locke, plainly held that the soul is material and that matter is
capable of the power of thought. God, alone, he conceded, is a spiritual
being. Clarke got by far the better of the debate, but Collins' pamphlets
- four in all - were particularly beloved by the atheist Jacques Andre
Naigeon, who, since he did not read Clarke himself, but only Collins'
pamphlets, in translation, maintained that Clarke had the worse of the
argument. In 1710 came the Vindication of the Divine Attributes denying
man's analogical knowledge of God, and, three years later, the most
notorious of Collins' writings, A Discourse of Freethinking, a defence of
freethinking as such, very anti-clerical, that was immediatelyitranslated
into French and caused a great furore on the continent as well as in Eng
land, but that was savagely and effectively dealt with by the great classical
scholar Richard Bentley, who demolished the scholarship of Collins'
work, and by Jonathan Swift, who satirised its logical weakness. Three
years later there followed the Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human
Liberty, one of the least notorious but probably the mostlimportant of
Collins' works, and then there was a gap of seven years during which he
was most engrossed in local administration and became the Treasurer of
the County of Essex.
In 1724 began the last period of his literary activity. In that year his
Historical and Critical Essay on the Thirty Nine Articles - a book that
6 Ibid., III, p. 734. Locke to Collins, 29 Oct., 1703.
7 J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human 'Understanding, IV, 3, n. 6, (Fraser's edition,
Dover Publications, New York, 1959), lI,p.:193.