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‘Galen's Muscles’: Wilkins, Hume, and the educational use of the argument from design

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Isabel Rivers
Isabel Rivers
Affiliation:
St Hugh's College, Oxford
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Abstract

Wilkins's The principles and duties of natural religion, edited by Tillotson and published posthumously in 1675, designed to combat scepticism and infidelity, was reprinted nine times up to 1734 and was widely used as a textbook in the education of clergy and ministers. Hume's Dialogues concerning natural religion, substantially written in 1751 but withheld from publication on the advice of friends and only published posthumously in 1779, reversed Wilkins's procedure by scrutinising the tenets of natural religion from the perspective of scepticism. This essay explores the importance of Wilkins's text in the tripartite eighteenth-century scheme of natural religion, revealed religion, and ethics, and shows how Hume's parody of a well known passage from Wilkins – the ‘Galen's muscles’ of the title – was intended to contribute to the undermining of this scheme.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , September 1993 , pp. 577 - 597
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

1 See below appendix, passages B (second paragraph) and C. Subsequent quotations are from Wilkins, John, Of the principles and duties of natural religion (6th edn, 1710)Google Scholar, cited as Natural religion, and David Hume, he natural history of religion, ed. A. W. Colver, and Dialogues concerning natural religion, ed. Price, J. V. (Oxford, 1976), cited as DialoguesGoogle Scholar.

2 Jeffner, Anders, Butler and Hume on religion (Stockholm, 1966), p. 135Google Scholar: ‘Philo there quotes a passage from Galen which is a favourite of representatives of the scientific tradition…John Ray, for instance, who has it on p. 240 of The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, and probably found it in John Wilkins' Of the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion, 81. The nature of the quotation as found in Hume and the use he makes of it makes it probable that he borrowed it from the same tradition.’

3 Hume, David, Dialogues concerning natural religion, ed. Pike, Nelson (Indianapolis, 1970)Google Scholar; J. V. Price (Oxford, 1976); Martin Bell (Harmondsworth, 1990); Stanley Tweyman (London, 1991).

4 For some recent accounts of Natural religion seeWestfall, R. S., Science and religion in seventeenth-century England (New Haven, 1958)Google Scholar; Van Leeuwen, H. G., The problem of certainty in English thought 1630–1690 (The Hague, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McAdoo, H. R., The spirit of Anglicanism (London, 1965)Google Scholar; Shapiro, B. J., John Wilkins 1614–1672 (Berkeley, 1969)Google Scholar and Probability and certainty in seventeenth-century England (Princeton, 1983)Google Scholar; Ferreira, M. J., Scepticism and reasonable doubt (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar.

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19 Bentley, Richard quotes the terms from Boyle's, will in his Dedication to the Trustees of A confutation of atheism (1692)Google Scholar, reprinted in A defence of natural and revealed religion: being a collection of the sermons preached at the lecture founded by the honourable Robert Boyle, esq.; (from the year 1691 to the year 1732), ed. S. Letsome and J. Nicholl, 3 vols. (London, 1739).

20 Leng, John, Sermon, VII, in A defence of natural and revealed religion, III, 63–4Google Scholar. There is an unattributed borrowing from Bk II of Wilkins's Natural religion in Butler's, Religion no matter of shame, A defence of natural and revealed religion, II, 441–3Google Scholar.

21 A defence of natural and revealed religion, III, 67.

22 A defence of natural and revealed religion, I, 24.

23 A defence of natural and revealed religion, II, 211; cf.Woodward, , Sermon, I, ‘The certainty of God's being, and of his universal government’, II, 500Google Scholar.

24 A defence of natural and revealed religion, II, 48. The passage following, in which Galen, is invoked, is quoted in part by Price in his edition of the Dialogues, p. 246Google Scholar.

25 A defence of natural and revealed religion, II, 670; cf. Bk IV, ch. 2, II, 596.

26 ‘The “argument” from design was really counted to be not argument, but a body of fact in which the interpretation so patently coincided with the facts as itself to share in their self-evidencing character’, Smith, N. Kemp, Introduction to Hume's, Dialogues (Oxford, 1935), p. 56Google Scholar.

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28 A discourse of free-thinking (London, 1713), pp. 171, 177Google Scholar. For other adulatory references to Tillotson see Shaftesbury, , Characteristicks (2nd edn, n.p., 1714), III, 329 ff.Google Scholar, ‘Miscellaneous reflections’, ch. 3; Tindal, , Christianity as old as the creation (London, 1730), pp. 64, 288Google Scholar.

29 See e.g.Leland, John, A view of the principal deistical writers (4th edn, London, 1764), II, ch. 35Google Scholar, ‘General reflections on the deistical writers’.

30 The Bishop of London's second pastoral letter…occasion'd by some late writings, in which it is asserted, ‘that reason is a sufficient guide in matters of religion, withoutthe help of revelation’ (London, 1730), pp. 64, 66Google Scholar. See Sykes, N., Edmund Gibson, bishop of London 1669–1748 (London, 1926), ch. 8Google Scholar. The argument in this paragraph is condensed from Rivers, , Reason, grace, and sentiment: a study of the language of religion and ethics in England, 1660–1780, vol. II (forthcoming)Google Scholar.

31 Doddridge, , A course of lectures on…pneumatology, ethics, and divinity, in Works, ed. , Williams and , Parsons, IV, 362, 374–5, 383, 390, 395, 422, 509Google Scholar, lectures XXIX, XXXIII–IV, XXXIX, XLII, XLIV, LV, LXXIX.

32 Works, IV, 364, lecture XXX.

33 Works, IV, 538, lecture XCIX.

34 Works, V, 420. Williams and Parsons read ‘confirm’; the reading‘conform’, which I take to be correct, is that of the first edition of A Course of lectures, ed. Clark, S. (London, 1763), p. 595Google Scholar. On Doddridge, see also ‘Dissenting and methodist books of practical divinity’, in , Rivers, ed., Books and their readers in eighteenth-century England (Leicester, 1982)Google Scholar. Doddridge's, teaching methods were popularized by Fordyce, David, professor of philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen, in Dialogues concerning education (2 vols., London, 1745, 1748)Google Scholar; dialogues VIII and IX deal with the argument from design. On the influence of Doddridge on Fordyce and of thedissenting academies on Scottish universities, see Jones, P., ‘The polite academy and the presbyterians, 1720–1770’, in Dwyer, J. et al. , New perspectives on the politics and culture of early modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1982)Google Scholar.

35 Quoted by Sher, R. B., ‘Professors of virtue: the social history of the Edinburgh moral philosophy chair in the eighteenth century’, in Studies in the philosophy of the Scottish enlightenment, ed. Stewart, M. A. (Oxford, 1990), p. 92Google Scholar.

36 Quoted bySher, , ‘Professors of virtue’, p. 99Google Scholar.

37 Sher, , ‘Professors of virtue’, p. 101Google Scholar.

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39 Barfoot, M., ‘Hume and the culture of science in the early eighteenth century’, in Studies in the philosophy of the Scottish enlightenment, pp. 151, 155Google Scholar.

40 The physiological library. Begun by Mr. Steuart (Edinburgh, 1725), pp. 56–61Google Scholar. I am grateful to Dr Barfoot for providing me with a photocopy.

41 SeeMossner, E. C., The life of David Hume (2nd edn, Oxford, 1980), p. 73Google Scholar: the Treatise of human nature ‘was projected before he left college (aged fourteen or fifteen), was planned before he was twenty-one, and was composed before he was twenty-five’.

42 See Price, ‘Composition and publication’, in his edition of the Dialogues.

43 Examples of the first and third views respectively are Smith's, Kemp Introduction to his edition of the Dialogues (1935)Google ScholarandGaskin, J. C. A., Hume's philosophy of religion (2nd edn, London, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kemp Smith lists holders of the second view in his Introduction, pp. 74–6.

44 Penelhum, T., ‘Skepticism and the Dialogues’ in McGill Hume studies, ed. Norton, D. F. et al. (San Diego, Cal., 1979), p. 270Google Scholar.

45 Pamphilus to Hermippus, pp. 144–5; Part 2, p. 159.

46 Penelhum, , Hume (London, 1975), p. 209, n.10CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Smith, Kemp, Introduction to Dialogues, p. 90Google Scholar.

47 Butler, E.g., Religion no matter of shame, in A defence of natural and revealed religion, II, 458Google Scholar: ‘There is nothing more common, than for Atheists to call something God, and to talk as if they believed there were such a Being, but of another sort tha n we suppose him to be. They are willing enough that something should be called by that Name, so it were something neither to be loved, feared, nor obeyed.’ Cf the freethinker Lysicles in Alciphron: ‘Since, therefore, nothing can be inferred from such an account of God, abou t conscience, or worship, or religion, you may even make the best of it. And, not to be singular, we will use the name too, and so at once there is an end of atheism’, Berkeley, , Works, ed. Luce, A. A. and Jessop, T. E., in (London, 1950), 165Google Scholar.

48 It is likely that a good deal of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century theology remains buried in the Dialogues, and that its disinterment will affect our reading. Hurlbutt, R. H. made a useful start in ‘David Hume and scientific theism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XVII (1956), 486–97Google Scholar, with the identification of passages from George Cheyne and Colin MacLaurin.

49 Paley, , Natural theology (London, 1802), p. viiGoogle Scholar.

50 See Leslie Stephen's account of Paley in the Dictionary of National Biography.

51 Natural theology, pp. 156–7. Paley quotes from Bk II, ch. 8 of Natural religion in Natural theology, ch. 24, p. 481.

52 Natural theology, p. 473.