The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 241 weighing of first-hand sense experience over testimony as a source of knowledge, and the conception of scientific explanation as the subsumption of particular events under general empirical laws (the so-called covering law or nomological-deductive model). Hume's first tenet is at odds with the social nature of knowledge recognized by seventeenth century scientists and reaffirmed in our time by Wittgenstein and many others influenced by him. In applying it in his argument against reports of miracles, Hume overlooks the fact that most of our knowledge of laws of nature is not derived from personal experience, but, equally with our historical knowledge, rests upon testimony. The main difficulties with Hume's second tenet are that it leaves no work for theory to do and no place for teleological explanations. It does seem that Hume's model of scientific explanation as generalization upon passively accumulated experience precludes the sort of creative, insightful thinking represented by Newton's law of universal gravitation, Darwin's theory of natural selection, and Einstein's theory of relativity. In order to meet Burns's challenge, it will have to be shown that on Hume's theory human cognition is something more than what Antony Flew called the "automatic... operation of a sort of experiential computing machine" (quoted by Burns, 183). As for teleological explanations, it may be said against Hume that without recourse to them we are unable to account for the purposive or intentional acts of human agents. These issues, concerning the nature of scientific explanation and how human behavior is to be covered by it, are complex and controversial, as Burns allows and indeed shows by an intormed and intelligent review of contemporary discussions of them. Whether or not they will ever be resolved, and, if so, in Hume's favor or not, is unsure. Even if a final verdict goes against him, it is not as obvious to me as it is to Burns that his position on miracles would be threatened thereby. It may be decided that inductive generalizations are not enough for science, and that we need imaginative hypotheses in order to reach the laws that govern events in the world, and that these must accommodate for some events the factor of human volition. However, the God hypothesis, introduced to account for otherwise inexplicable events reported by interested witnesses, may seem to many of us altogether too imaginative. And the extrapolation from human to divine volition involves a leap which only the faithful are fit to make. JAMES NOXON McMaster University Margaret C. Jacob. The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981. Pp. xiii + 312. NP. This volume by one of the present leading social and intellectual historians throws some most interesting light on a corner of the Enlightenment that has usually been overlooked. The Enlightenment in England has usually been seen mainly in terms of the development of Newtonianism, empiricism, and deism, in France as an outgrowth of Science and anti-Catholicism. In both countries, it has been seen mainly as 242 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 22:2 APR i984 a movement atnongst upper class intellectuals. In England Ncwtonianism spawned political views supportive of establishment compromises in religion and politics growing out of the Glorious Revolution. In France the Enlightenment became anti-clerical but not really politically revolutionary until the end of the eighteenth century. Professor Jacob introduces us to a small group of radical thinkers in Masonic circles in The Hague who were connecting some of the most pantheistic ideas of Italian Renaissance thinkers like Giordano Bruno with some of the most republican thoughts that had surfaced in the Puritan Revolution, along with the progressive scientilic and unchristian views circulating among Newtonians and deists. This small group would be a curiosity, a splinter branch of the Free Masons, were it not fi)r the fact that it contained some very important figurcs--zJohn Toland, the deist; Prosper Marchard, the major publisher of much avante-garde literature; Bernard Picart, the great engraver and illustrator; Jean Roussy de Missy, the political radical, among others--and that they interacted with the progressive circle around Prince Etlgcne of Savoy in The...