The Place of Richard Cumberland in the History of Natural Law Doctrine

The Place of Richard Cumberland in the History of Natural Law Doctrine MURRAY FORSYTH OF THE TRIUMVIRATEof seventeenth-century natural law philosophers-Grotius , Pufendorf, and Cumberland--whose works Jean Barbeyrac so industriously translated and edited for the benefit of his contemporaries in the eighteenth century, Cumberland is by far the least known. Grotius, due more to the enthusiasm of those seeking a prophet in the arena of international relations than to the intrinsic merit of his works, has retained even today much of his renown. Pufendorf, who was undoubtedly the ablest of the three, may possibly be underestimated, but is by no means neglected. The English divine Richard Cumberland, however, has become a shadowy figure, lurking in footnotes and oblique references, a thinker who is rarely accorded direct consideration. Even in those modern studies specifically devoted to Thomas Hobbes's opponents, 1where Cumberland might have been expected to have come into his own, he remains characteristically on the fringe, someone to be looked at on another occasion. It is not my intention here to suggest that Cumberland should once more be accorded the status of a thinker of the first rank. Anyone who has glanced at his major work, the De Legibus Naturae, '~ will know that it is a ' John Bowie, in Hobbes and His Critics: A Study in Seventeenth Century Constitutionalism (London : Jonathan Cape, x950, mentions Cumberland only in the concludingbibliography; Samuel I. Mintz, in The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 196~), accords him less than half a page. De Legibus Naturae disquisitio philosophica, in qua earum forma, summa capita, ordo, promulgatio et obl~gatio e rerum natura investigantur; quinetiam elementa philosophiae Hobbianae, cum moralis tum [231 ~4 HISTORY OV PHILOSOPHY baggy, undisciplined study, lacking both the logical toughness and the style that mark the classic. It will never again attain the status of required reading. Nonetheless Cumberland has a distinct and important niche in the history of the development of natural law, one that it is worth pausing to define. His book, first published in x672, marks a significant turning point in the development of modern ethical philosophy, and it stands indeed at the head of a certain tradition of theorizing in this field that was particularly strong in the eighteenth century. It illuminates vividly the way in which the ideas of the early seventeenth century were transformed into those of the Enlightenment . It sheds light on the ideas of Cumberland's contemporaries. It is for these reasons above all that I wish to focus attention on Cumberland here, looking first at the chief distinguishing characteristics of his philosophy and then at his place in the history of ethical doctrines. The distinctive quality of Cumberland's concept of natural law may perhaps be most effectively indicated at the outset by the illustrative plate that his English translator, John Maxwell, inserted in the text of the De Legibus Naturae to help the reader. The plate consists of an anatomical drawing, taken from Thomas Willis's De Anatome Cerebri (1664) of the human nerve center, or plexus nervosus. The picture resembles a strange underwater plant. It is a curious print to find in a work on moral philosophy, and certainly not the kind of illustration one could imagine in either Grotius's treatise or that of Pufendorf, or indeed as a part of Hobbes's exposition of the laws of nature. In Cumberland's text, however, it is by no means out of place, for he discusses Willis's anatomical findings at considerable length. This leads us directly to the crux of the matter. For Cumberland, as for Grotius and Pufendorf, natural law was a moral law, a law dictating how men should behave toward one another. It was also a fixed, unchanging, and divine law. But for Cumberland, unlike the others, this law was to be discovered in the fundamental constitution of the physical universe. It could be understood by considering the findings of natural scientists such as Willis, Wren, or Huygens, and also by looking at human relationships from the perspective civilis, considerantur et refutantur (London, 1672). All references to the De Legibus Naturae...