Flesh in the Age of Reason (63 page)

Intellect has a perpetual tendency to proceed.

Man is in a state of perpetual mutation.

The Greatest of all human benefits, that at least without
which no other benefit can be truly enjoyed, is independence

william godwin

As we saw in
Chapter 20
, Joseph Priestley developed a theology which incorporated the determinism of the freethinker Anthony Collins and the Christian materialism of David Hartley (thought the product of the brain). Prizing truth and candour – he had a horror of mystification and hypocrisy, identifying falsehood with the self-serving power-mongering of Anglicanism and its ivory-towered outposts – Priestley concluded that official dualism was neither Christian nor scientific.

Up to a point, William Godwin followed a parallel path. The early life and thinking of Godwin displays some similarities to Priestley’s. Born in 1756 the son of a Calvinist minister, Godwin studied from 1775 at the Dissenting Academy at Hoxton on the north-east outskirts of London, a hotbed of critical thinking, and in 1778 was appointed minister to a Nonconformist congregation at Ware in Hertfordshire. His faith was soon shaken, however, first by his readings of Rousseau, d’Holbach, Helvétius and other
philosophes
, and then by the teachings of Priestley himself. Unlike that Dissenter, however, Godwin could not halt at Unitarianism – what Erasmus Darwin jeeringly called a ‘feather bed to catch a falling Christian’; in 1783 he quit the ministry
and soon lapsed into complete religious scepticism. Moving to London at the age of 27, Godwin found his
métier
among Grub Street journalists and metropolitan intellectual circles, beginning what would prove to be half a century of literary activity. Fame came when the French Revolution politicized him.

Appearing in 1793,
An Enquiry concerning Political Justice
won its author instant celebrity for its clarion statement of radical individualism. For some years Godwin shone as one of London’s most celebrated men of letters, and his personal life doubled his notoriety, thanks to his liaison with Mary Wollstonecraft. Both held enlightened views on marriage –
Political Justice
deemed matrimony a stifling monopoly, while her word for it was ‘legal prostitution’. ‘It is my wish that Mr Godwin shall visit and dine out as formerly,’ she wrote, early in their relationship, ‘and I shall do the same; in short, I still mean to be independent.’ The liberated couple, embodiments of ‘modern philosophy’, maintained separate homes and met for meals. They did, however, finally bow to convention when Mary became pregnant and they were married in March 1797. A child, Mary Godwin, was born on 30 August 1797. Ten days later Mary was dead.

Godwin never recovered from that private disaster or from the public collapse of revolutionary fervour, but he went on doggedly writing.
Caleb Williams
turned the themes of
Political Justice
into fiction;
The Enquirer
(1797) restated the political points of his earlier work; and he took to writing more novels, plays, children’s books and dictionaries.

Crucial to Godwin’s vision of man was his loss of Christian faith. Like Gibbon, he found he could not stomach the biblical God: ‘Books have been handed down from generation to generation, as the true teachers of piety and the love of God, that represent him as so merciless and tyrannical a despot, that, if they were considered otherwise than through the medium of prejudice, they could inspire nothing but hatred.’ Holding up for worship, as it did, a Lord of vengeance, nothing perhaps had contributed more to the growth of bigotry in the world than the doctrines of the Christian religion: ‘It caused the spirit of intolerance to strike a deep root.’ Committed,
like Priestley, to candour, Godwin was proud to stand up and be counted: ‘I am an unbeliever. I am thoroughly satisfied that no book in existence contains a record and history of the revelation of the will of an invisible being, the master of us all, to his creatures.’

Influenced in this respect probably by Hartley, Godwin suggested that the ‘truths’ of religion were best understood as products of the slipperiness of speech. ‘Heaven’, he pronounced, ‘in reality is not so properly a place as a state of the mind’ – which may explain a reported exchange at his wife’s deathbed: ‘Oh Godwin, I am in heaven,’ exclaimed Mary, a pious Anglican; ‘You mean, my dear,’ replied the philosopher, ‘that your physical sensations are somewhat easier.’

Political Justice
imagines a world without God, where man shall have no ‘master’. The old Christian tyranny and terror, as mediated through Throne and Altar, have disappeared; and men grow godlike, that is to say, autonomous rational beings, beholden to none. The book may thus be read as a foundational text of anarchism, declaring as it does the illegitimacy and ‘euthanasia’ of monarchy, aristocracy, armies, police, indeed the whole state apparatus and all its subaltern institutions. The existing distribution of wealth is also counter-utilitarian: capitalism is a system designed not for the creation of prosperity but for the manufacture of surplus (but unjustly distributed) wealth, hence of unnecessary labour, and thus of extremes of profusion and poverty. These are, as will be obvious, anti-Mandevillian views, and much of Godwin may be read as a critical commentary upon that cynic.

Deeming government ‘in all cases, an evil’, and calling for the dissolution – though not by violence – of the existing juridical, political and social edifice, Godwin pinned future hopes entirely on the individual. His preferred society, such as it was, would comprise loose voluntary clusters of individuals, essentially self-sufficient, coming together only occasionally for mutual support – a devolved and decentralized utopia. ‘Man is a species of being whose excellence depends on his individuality; and who can be neither great nor wise, but in proportion as he is independent.’ Central to Godwin’s vision
for human regeneration was self-sufficiency: ‘individuals are everything, and society… nothing.’ The sovereignty of individual judgement – thinking for oneself – was a
sine qua non
for the advance of knowledge, and that in turn was the dynamo of improvement at large: ‘The extent of our progress in the cultivation of knowledge is unlimited.’ This was Locke taken to the limits.

Everyone must optimize his talents as a rational individual and avoid kowtowing to conventional beliefs and practices, as traditionally dictated by Church and State, and by the straitjacket of public opinion. Individual questing was paramount, permanent self-criticism crucial: ‘The wise man is satisfied with nothing…. The wise man is not satisfied with his own attainments, or even with his principles and opinions. He is continually detecting errors in them; he suspects more; there is no end to his revisals and enquiries.’ Like Socrates, Godwin rejected the unexamined life.

Discussion between equals expedited enquiry, but truth must never be imposed – force was no argument and was always wrong. Individuals might legitimately seek to persuade each other, but even collaboration as generally understood was misguided, since it compromised originality: ‘Everything that is usually understood by the term co-operation’, he declared, astonishingly, ‘is in some degree an evil.’ For that reason, Godwin not only opposed the yoke of marriage, but cohabitation too, this being

also hostile to that fortitude which should accustom a man, in his actions, as well as his opinions, to judge for himself.… Add to this, that it is absurd to expect the inclinations and wishes of two human beings to coincide, through any long period of time. To oblige them to act and to live together is to subject them to some inevitable portion of thwarting, bickering and unhappiness.

Other forms of collective action were also questionable: ‘shall we have concerts of music?… Will it not be practicable hereafter for one man to perform the whole?’ Similarly, stage plays were inimical to ‘individuality’, for ‘all formal repetition of other men’s ideas seems to be a scheme for imprisoning, for so long a time, the operations of
our own mind’. All in all, ‘we ought to be able to do without one another,’ judged Godwin, in a declaration as courageous as it was chilling.

Like Bunyan’s pilgrim but without God, individuals must wend their way through the world alone, self-aware and self-reliant, except for candid and critical friends. The only extraneous prop would be lawful possessions, for Godwin had no doubts that private judgement and mental development presupposed private property, ‘the palladium of all that ought to be dear to us’. In short: ‘Property is sacred’ – ‘sacred’ in this unbeliever’s value-system pertaining to the sanctity of the individual.

Godwin’s predilections, both personal and political – the personal
was
the political – reflected his revolt against Calvinism (total dependency upon God) and incorporated his fervent hatred of the
status quo
. Moreover, they also had weighty philosophical underpinnings. Analysing the human animal naturalistically and dispassionately rather than through religious or moral rhetorics, the prime device he deployed was Hartley’s doctrine of necessity. It made a splash: ‘throw aside your books of chemistry,’ declared Wordsworth, initially enthusiastic, ‘and read Godwin on necessity.’

Building on Hartley, Godwin developed the ‘material system’, which he touted as the key to the ‘mechanism of the human mind’. Just as, in the natural world, Newton’s laws are supreme – they are what make nature intelligible – so, in the human world, necessity (cause and effect) is equally the basis of any understanding of what makes human beings tick – and hence comprehensible. Moreover, only in a necessarian order is it possible to change what moves people, by correcting their motivation. Human behaviour is determined – people act as they do out of necessity. But that is precisely the reason why it should be possible, through education and persuasion, to change their incentives, and hence reform them.

Like Hartley’s, Godwin’s optimistic necessarianism drew on Locke’s
tabula rasa
model of the mind: ‘Children are a sort of raw material put into our hands, a ductile and yielding substance.’ The understanding is wholly conditioned by sense inputs, man is entirely
a creature of his environment, and individual differences arise from educational and external influences. Denying innate ideas and instincts, Godwin went as far as to doubt whether man can truly be said to have a mind as such; he used the word only provisionally as a shorthand to signify the lattices of thought which produce the complex of personal identity. It was in these natural facts – which created controversy because they seemed so blatantly to threaten free will and accountability – that Godwin found the intelligibility of human agency and the hope of improving it through education. ‘The Characters of Men Originate in their External Circumstances’, boldly declared the title of Book I, chapter iv of
Political Justice
, the next chapter being headed ‘The Voluntary Actions of Men Originate in their Opinions’. At first sight this may seem the yoking of opposites, but it was central to Godwin’s thinking and for him quite consistent, because ‘the great stream of our voluntary actions essentially depends, not upon the direct and immediate impulses of sense, but upon the decisions of the understanding’.

Man could be led by reason to live in ways conducive to the greater happiness – as a convinced utilitarian, Godwin insisted that pain was in all circumstances an evil. The maximization of happiness was to be achieved through man’s
duty
of exercising his reason. Reason should discern optimum personal and social arrangements and point to the correct – that is, the just – course of action. Of prime importance was the cultivation of the responsible individual mind – ‘Of Awakening the Mind’ is, significantly, the title of the leading essay in
The Enquirer
.

Rational action must triumph over the passions and the despotism of convention. It is in this light that, in
Caleb Williams
, Godwin contrasts his hero Caleb with the highborn Falkland who, while in his own fashion a decent man, is entirely the slave of inherited class prejudices. Countering
aristocratic
codes of honour, Godwin insists upon a basic, elemental
human
equality: ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ are not laid down at birth – all privilege is detestable – but hinge on exercise of judgement: some people behave more rationally than others.

And rationally is the way one is duty-bound to behave. In what
became a notorious thought-experiment, Godwin maintained that, in a blaze in which it is possible to save from the flames either the philosopher Fénélon or his valet, it is indubitably right to rescue the philosopher, because it is he who will further the happiness of the race. Only when the rational supersedes the emotional or sentimental will truth, justice and happiness prevail.

Progress consists in the gradual and invincible triumph of reason, held this latter-day Platonist who, although a principled materialist, was nevertheless confident that happiness would best be secured by the withering away of the inferior, or imagined, pleasures of the flesh – in favour not, of course, of those of the fictitious transcendental soul, but rather of the understanding.

Due recognition of the sovereignty of Mind is the key to man’s destiny. Like Hartley and Erasmus Darwin, but with a different thrust, Godwin held that even such actions as walking, which might seem automatic and innate, are at bottom
voluntary
:

An attentive observer will perceive various symptoms calculated to persuade him that every step he takes, during the longest journey, is the production of thought. Walking is, in all cases, originally a voluntary motion. In a child, when he learns to walk, in a rope-dancer, when he begins to practise that particular exercise, the distinct determination of mind, preceding each step, is sufficiently perceptible.