The Philosophy of Anthony Collins: Free-Thought and Atheism by Jacopo Agnesina (review)

In his conclusion, Mr. Agnesina summarizes his argument: "The philosophical positions sustained by Collins are crystal-clear and … obvious: the denial of God by denial of divine attributes, the denial of his [that is, God's] intelligence and design, the denial of substance duality, with the affirmation of materialistic monism, the affirmation of a mechanicistic [sic] and determined philosophy, etc." He then adds, significantly, that "Collins was more attached to freedom of thought than to his own convictions." As demonstrated in perhaps his best-known work, Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729), Collins would have enjoyed the irony of his convictions being "crystal-clear" to his modern interpreter.

Still, Mr. Agnesina does us an extraordinary service, first, in taking Collins seriously as a student and follower of Locke, and second, in demonstrating that the basis of his infamous exchanges with theologians was philosophical. Even his attack on scriptural authority and the priesthood originates in the argument that explanations are either reasonable or contrary to reason, but never above reason. The Boyle lectures make a good starting point, since the attempt to reconcile the new science with Christianity marks the century's fault line in terms of defending belief. Against the argument of James O'Higgins and others that whatever else Collins was, he was not an atheist, Mr. Agnesina posits the combined influence of Bayle, Spinoza, Toland, and Leibniz along with Lockean epistemology to argue he was indeed an atheist, although he resented Toland's blatancy, preferring his own subtleties.

The distinction between contrary to reason and above reason was essential to scientist-theologians like Robert Boyle: God's knowledge and human knowledge were on very different planes. Locke understood this problem for religious belief, and hence defined what was above reason as matters of faith. However, faith had to withstand the test of reason, and the validity of testimony (testament) became determinative, exposing an exploitable vulnerability for John Toland and Pierre Bayle. Collins followed them with a series of essays in the Independent Whig (1732), arguing we cannot give rational assent to what we do not understand: "Men who trust in mysteries are of two types: 'learned Parrots and unlearned Parrots: to the first whereof, Absurdity is the peculiar Privilege; and to the latter, Ignorance."' Collins was, a point Mr. Agnesina stresses, a splendid rhetorician.

The chapter on Collins's exchanges with Samuel Clarke is the most important in the book. From the early eighteenth century to the present, the issues seem much the same: "the emergence of thought, consciousness and personal identity, materialism." Whether the soul is material or immaterial moved these philosophical issues into the realm of theology, but Mr. Agnesina is astute in showing how Collins built his argument from Lockean premises. For Clarke, it was essential that the soul differ from matter; matter was compound and divisible, the soul, one and entire. Following Locke's argument that the soul is "superadded by God to organized matter," Collins extends the idea to argue that "consciousness is a property that arises from the complex organization of matter into textures, a property that the parts, taken individually, do not possess but that is present in the whole." Clarke rejects this: "the Individual Power of consciousness presupposes an Individual Being which cannot be matter, because matter is subject to composition, whereas the soul or the consciousness, being individual, cannot be divisible in any way." Put otherwise, for Clarke, identity is in the soul; for Collins, as for Locke, it is in "the flow of consciousness."

Underlying this debate is disagreement about materialism. Clarke is certain that in opposition to material substance ("not Self-existent, but Dependent, Finite, Divisible, Passive") there is an immaterial substance, which is "Self-existent, Eternal, Infinite." Collins responds that this requires demonstration, either that matter is not self-existent or that it came from nothing. Since neither is demonstrable, human knowledge must content itself with the "most coherent hypothesis," namely, a denial of dualism...