Order, Union, Full Consent of Things!

'ORDER, UNION, FULL CONSENT OF THINGSI' F.E.L. PRIESTLEY Some years ago, in an essay on Pope and the Great Chain of Being, I discussed the ideas in the Essay on Man, and particularly in the first Epistle, in relation to the question of whether Pope is rightly to be classed with the Great Chain philosophers. I argued that he was not so to be classed, but tllat he rejected the whole ontological a priori argument on which King and Leibruz base their systems, ridiculing ilie presumptuousness which professes to a knowledge of the nature of infinite Being, and of the conditions constraining the infinite and omnipotent Deity to a particular mode of creation. Man, being finite, cannot know - in the sense of fully comprehend - the infinite; being but a part, and a small part, of a 'stupendous Whole,' he cannot know the total pattern, function, and purpose of that whole. He can only reaSOn wiiliin the limits of the range of his survey, piecing together by a posteriori reasoning tentative conclusions that seem probable. In developing my argument, I touched on one or two implications whim I purpose to consider in somewhat more detail. The most important, which I shall certainly not be able to pursue exhaustively here, is COntained in ilie opposition between a priori and a posteriori reasoning. On the surface, iliis looks like a simple quarrel about logic, and modes of proof. It should only be necessary for the student of the eighteenth century to look forward to the nineteenth century, and particularly to John Stuart Mill, to recognize how much more is involved. Mill's bitter and persistent attacks on a priori reasoning and a priori systems are in no sense a cool comparison of types of logiC: for him, a priori connotes a whole philosophical and theological tradition which he is out to smash. Mill's attacks are of great interest to students of the earlier period, since they mark a sort of terminus ad quem to a very long debate. It is of the nature of long debates that as they continue they steadily reduce ilie terms and simplify the issues, creating clearly defined alignments in what started out in much more complex, even ambiguous, patterns. So it is with a priori and a posteriori. If we look back to the seventeenth century, as a convenient place to pick up the pattern, we find the prestige of a priori reasoning very high. It is the one mode of attaining to demonUTQ , Volume XLn, Number 1, Fall 1972 2 F.E.L. PRIESTLEY strative knowledge, the one form of reasoning to end with a QED. Philoso· phers seek to demonstrate their systems more geometrico, in confidence that what is so demonstrated is irrefutable. Newton's admirers assert that in the Principia he has come as close as possible to a mathematical and scientific demonstration of the being of God so that no one with any competence in these matters can doubt. Underlying all this confidence is a strong faith in the powers of the human reason. Since every idea had theological implications, and since theological implications seem always to be double-edged, the assertion that the being and attributes of God could be 'demonstrated' by human reason was welcomed by some theologians as a support for Revelation, and mistrusted by others as suggesting Revelation was unnecessary, and hence encouraging Deism. At the same time, those natural philosophers who were of the school of Bacon were asserting the validity of a posteriori reasoning in the pursuit of scientific truth, and reducing the importance of the mathematical modes. Empirical psychologies and epistemologies fitted neatly into their patterns of a posteriori search for and discovery of truth, but the absence of a logic of induction made definition of truth as arrived at by induction difficult to establish by clear criteria. Theologically, the implications were here again not simple and unambiguous. For while there could be much in the reductionism of the empirical philosophers to rouse theological suspicions Cas many of Locke's controversies show), to give primacy to a posteriori reasoning is to emphasize the limitations of human reason, the tentative nature of its probings, and...