Philosophical Writings by Catherine Trotter Cockburn (review)

237 Farquhar’s—was innovative and vibrant . Kevin J. Gardner Baylor University CATHERINE TROTTER COCKBURN. Philosophical Writings, ed. Patricia Sheridan . Peterborough, Ont: Broadview, 2006. Pp. 270. $24.95. Earning sneers from both Mrs. Manley in the New Atalantis and Leslie Stephen in the DNB, Catherine Trotter Cockburn showed what a woman could do in the early eighteenth century. Having succeeded as novelist, playwright (four tragedies and a comedy), and controversialist (defending Locke in 1702), she then married (in 1708). Twenty years after her marriage, pushing fifty, she answered Winch Holdsworth on Locke’s behalf (1727). Past sixty, she bloomed, supporting Clarke, correcting Warburton, Leibniz, and Law (1743). Warburton secured the publication of her Remarks upon . . . Rutherforth’s Essay (1747), prefacing it with a genderneutral introduction that praised the author ’s ‘‘fine genius and infinite superiority in reasoning.’’ Corresponding with a niece who admired Shaftesbury and Joseph Butler, she began to speak of ‘‘my scheme’’ and doctrines as ‘‘mine,’’ dropping her cover as commentator on men’s ideas. She died two years before Thomas Birch brought out her collected works, four months after her clergymanhusband . There is much of interest in Cockburn ’s work. As a moral philosopher, she affirmed a morality free of the will of God, founded in the eternal relations of things, such that if God were malevolent , he would be owed no worship or gratitude. Unlike some modern evolutionary theorists who deny that altruism exists when genes are shared, she took the relation of parent to child, specifically mother to child, as illustrating intrinsic ‘‘benevolent affections.’’ She even affirms that atheists could be virtuous . Insisting with Locke on the fundamental sociability of human nature, she recurs to the maternal bond, a rare move among philosophers, that motherless breed. She finds Hobbes’s ‘‘principles . . . absurd,’’ yet suspects her readers’ good will sufficiently to write from a male perspective. So ‘‘the disloyalty of a wife’’ is one of the ills humanity inherits, like the gout or stone or the misbehavior of children. Writing on behalf of ‘‘the honest labourer’’ who wears himself out for his family, she knows that children are ‘‘troublesome.’’ Disliking without actively opposing slavery, she locates it along a color line that lacks any other differences: ‘‘those wretched slaves of our own species, who differ from their masters in nothing but complexion’’ (the Constitution of Carolina, 1669, also specified ‘‘negro’’ slaves). While she gains more confidence as she ages, a touching aspect of her earliest work is the sense of liberation Locke gave her, dispelling ‘‘unintelligible jargon’’ and breaking open ‘‘this sanctuary of vanity and ignorance ,’’ by setting out ‘‘the bounds of human understanding.’’ Limits create possibilities. She does not address the status of women directly, but she has an ironic sense of the double jeopardy facing female writers. The philosophical work of a woman would be devalued before it was read (so she insists her Defence of Locke be published without reference to her sex). If, however, a woman published a work that forced admiration and could not be depreciated, men were sure to say she had not written it or had re- 238 ceived such helps as made the work not really hers (defending Lady Masham). Defiantly productive, women dedicated their works to sympathetic women or took other intellectual women as correspondents , in Cockburn’s case, her niece. More unexpected is Cockburn’s admiration for Pope, to whom she ‘‘inscribes ’’ her work of 1743 as ‘‘an admirer of his Moral Character.’’ Unperturbed by To a Lady (1735), she often quotes the Essay on Man, even using its arguments about animals. Pope’s tribute to his mother in the Epistle to Arbuthnot moves her deeply: ‘‘[H]is affectionate regards for her, (more than even religion required of him) give us such a proof of disinterested piety and gratitude, as is, I think, irresistible.’’ For a female contemporary , Pope’s persona, like his philosophy and his politics, made a moral contribution to his time and place. The edition’s deficiencies are small, but corrosive. The editor gives her subject ’s dates as 1679–1749 and then tells us twice that she died at the age of 71. It does not compute. Puzzling misprints are frequent: what...