Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England by Courtney Weiss Smith (review)

Announcing itself as a recovery project, this book discusses an interesting range of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century works as examples of an underestimated tradition of “meditative empiricism.” For Ms. Smith this is a body of writing that pays close attention to the particulars of the observable world, presenting fundamentally religious readings of the Book of Nature. She argues that increasing scientific knowledge did not displace the habit of finding moral analogies in the study of nature but did encourage more “modesty” (a recurrent word in this study) in claiming correspondences. Scientist and religious writer Robert Boyle is the paradigmatic case for Ms. Smith, and he dominates the first part of her study. Other authors considered include Locke (for his economic ideas), Defoe (Jure Divino), Gay (Rural Sports), John Phillips (Cyder), Addison (largely Tatler 249, “The History of a Shilling”), Charles Gildon (The Golden Spy), Thomson (his poem on Newton and the “Hymn to the Seasons”), Pope (An Essay on Man and the Epistle to Burlington), and Bolingbroke (Fragments or Minutes of Essays). That Bolingbroke should find a place in what Ms. Smith characterizes as a “Christian empiricist tradition” would amuse, or bemuse, Samuel Johnson, whose example of “irony” in the Dictionary is “Bolingbroke was a holy man.” Ms. Smith includes him, however, to compare his treatment of the origin of society with Pope’s.

This list suggests both the book’s ambition and idiosyncrasy. It is difficult to understand why a chapter on the georgic includes Cyder and Rural Sports but not Windsor-Forest and The Seasons. This example is not to suggest that the scope should be broader but that the explanation of what counts as devotional or meditative empiricism be more analytically specified. If Locke, Defoe, and Pope all “engage with meditative empiricism” because they “suggest that the external world contains meaningful hints and prompts to society, encoded by the God who created nature” and because they “believe that the political individual should try to subordinate himself to a supra-human order” to be discerned by “scrutinizing small things,” it is not easy to see who would be excluded. There are points where “meditative empiricism”—an interest in particulars as parts of larger patterns—seems to equal something as general as thoughtful observation. Presumably the category of thinking observers includes anyone we still read, so we need to look to Ms. Smith’s more particular emphasis on devotional observation for guidance, which brings us back to Boyle’s moral reflections as exemplifying the kind of “close, readerly attention” that can bring one from natural to theological understanding.

Many students of eighteenth-century literature today know Boyle’s meditations only because Swift parodied them in his “Meditation on a Broomstick.” Smith mentions this delightful hoax only as evidence of “broad public awareness of occasional meditation” and of Boyle’s collection. She does not entertain the possibility that Swift’s parody suggests that Boyle’s mode of moralized reading is beginning to look quaint, much as in A Tale of a Tub the rhetorical question, “What is man himself but a micro-coat?” suggests a radical shrinking of the microcosm. Smith rightly insists that empiricists often used poetic figures not only to say but also to see. Metaphors of course did not vanish, but metaphysical conceits largely did, and it would be worth learning more about subtle changes in the analogical contract.

Ms. Smith sometimes seems distracted from this kind of analysis by a felt need to make overly large claims for the unity and novelty of her project. She sees it as countering “the old but still pervasive story about secularization in the period,” a story in which the “rise of science and Enlightenment led inexorably to the decline of religion.” Elsewhere, this dominant narrative grows into the “hackneyed but remarkably persistent stories of secularization,” the “big stories” about “modernization as a steady process of dematerialization,” and, collectively...