An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature by Nathaniel Culverwell, and: The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature by Samuel Pufendorf (review)

167 mercury, originally communicated in a letter to Boyle, was so thorough and precise that when a Latin translation of part of it was found among Newton’s papers it was mistakenly ascribed to Newton himself on the assumptionthat‘‘suchprecision was unknown in alchemy.’’ That such precision was in fact both known and practiced before Newton, notwithstanding Boyle’s self-serving disparagement of the alchemical/chemical tradition , can no longer be denied. Nicholas Halmi University of Washington NATHANIEL CULVERWELL. An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, ed. Robert A. Greene and Hugh MacCallum. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001. Pp. xxi ⫹ 252. $20; $12 (paper). SAMUEL PUFENDORF. The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature, ed. and introd. Ian Hunter and David Saunders , trans. Andrew Tooke; including ‘‘Two Discourses and a Commentary by Jean Barbeyrac,’’ trans. David Saunders. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003. Pp. xviii ⫹ 381. $20; $12 (paper). Culverwell scholarship has come a long way since John Tulloch first raised grave doubts about the Cambridge writer ’s sanity, back in 1872. While Culverwell was once relegated to the ranks of the minor Cambridge Platonists, his Discourse—first written c. 1645–1646 and published posthumously in 1652—is now praised as one of the earliest statements of a reason-based ethics in seventeenth -century England. Far from being a typical member of the Cambridge school, Culverwell diverges from his Platonist contemporaries in his rejection of innate ideas, his value for sensory experience , and the voluntarist overtones of his conception of God. In all these respects —and in his emphasis on reason as a guide to natural law—he anticipated and perhaps even influenced Locke’s moral views in his Essays on the Law of Nature (first written in the 1660s). Culverwell ’s thought represents a bridge between the old natural law theory, articulated by Aquinas and Suárez, and its modern manifestations in Locke. The republication of this impressive edition will encourage the ongoing study of Culverwell as a significant figure at the genesis of modern ethical thought. The University of Toronto Press volume (1971) is republished here with all its principal features bar the editors’original Introduction. In recent times, Messrs. Greene and MacCallum’s scholarly Introduction has been roundly praised for being balanced, informative, and useful. Although Mr. Greene’s new Foreword indicates the present state of Culverwell scholarship,andprovidesahelpful(albeit short) list of post-1971 readings, it fails to give a detailed account of Culverwell’s philosophy in its wider historical-intellectual context. (Mr. Greene does not, for example, discuss the question of parallels with Locke.) Here the obvious question isthatifoneisgoingtorepublish an already brilliant volume (presumably in order to make it more widely available ), then why not include one of its brightest ornaments? On this subject (as Culverwell would say of the divine mysteries ), we are left in the dark. While Culverwell’s Discourse straddles both scholastic and early modern natural law theory, Pufendorf’s work ‘‘on the duty of man and citizens’’ is firmly situated in the late-seventeenth century’s modern school of thought. Some readers may question publishing yet another edition of Pufendorf’s classic work. A new 168 English translation of De officio hominis et civis (1673) was, after all, published in 1991 and is still widely available. But Messrs. Hunter and Saunders’s volume should be welcomed as the first modern republication of the fifth and final edition of the original English translation(1735). Initiallypublishedin1691,Tooke’stranslation provides a unique insight into how Pufendorf’s political ideas were wrested for an English audience. This remarkably unfaithful text diverges in many significantrespectsfromtheoriginal :Tookeand his later (anonymous) English editors substitute ‘‘community’’for ‘‘state’’(civitas ), they avoid Pufendorf’s use of the term ‘‘sovereignty,’’ and there are many notes from Jean Barbeyrac’s 1707 French translation, a work that attempts to mitigate Pufendorf’s secularization of civil ethics. With these revisions,thetranslator and editors tried to make Pufendorf’s ideas palatable to Whig sensibilities and a parliamentary legislative power. Unlike their biased eighteenth-century forebears, Messrs. Hunter and Saunders are careful and meticulous. In their many detailed footnotes, they point to the disparitiesbetweentheoriginalLatinandthe English translation. Their Introduction provides a short but beautifully...