1. Life
Edward Herbert, was born at Eyton in Shropshire on March 3, 1583. He
is the representative of a branch of the noble Welsh family of that
name, and the elder brother of George Herbert the poet. He
matriculated at University College, Oxford, in 1595, married in 1599,
and continued to reside at Oxford till about 1600, when he removed to
London. He was made a Knight of the Bath soon after the accession of
King James. From 1608 to 1618 he spent most of his time on the
continent as a soldier of fortune, occasionally seeking the company of
scholars in the intervals of his campaigns, chases, or duels. In 1619
he was appointed ambassador at Paris; after his recall in 1624 King
James rewarded him with an Irish peerage. He was created an English
peer as Baron Herbert of Cherbury in 1629. The civil war found him
unprepared for decision; but he ultimately saved his property by
siding with the parliament. He died in London on 20 August 1648.
2. Writings
His works were historical, literary, and philosophical. His account of
the Duke of Buckingham's expedition an his history of Henry VIII were
written with a view to royal favor. The latter was published in 1649;
a Latin version of the former appeared in 1658, the English original
not till 1860. His literary works — poems and autobiography — are of
higher merit. His poems were published by his son in 1665, and his
autobiography was first printed by Horace Walpole in 1764. His
philosophical works give him a distinct place in the history of
thought. His greatest work, De Veritate, was, he tells us, begun in
England and "formed there in all its principal parts.." Hugo Grotius,
to whom he submitted the manuscript, advised its publication; but it
was not till this advice had been sanctioned (as he thought) by a sign
from heaven that he had the work printed (Paris, 1624). To the third
edition (London, 1645) he added a short treatise De Causis Errorum, a
dissertation entitled Religio Laici, and an Appendix ad Sacerdotes. In
1663 appeared his De Religione Gentilium — a treatise on what is now
called comparative religion. A popular account of his views on
religion was published in 1768 under the title; although the external
evidence is incomplete, it may have been from his pen.
3. Truth
Herbert does not stand in the front rank of speculative thinkers; but
his claims as a philosopher are worthy of note. Like Francis Bacon he
was occupied with the question of method; and his inquiry went deeper,
though it was less effective upon philosophical opinion. Bacon
investigated the criteria and canons of evidence, whereas Herbert
sought to determine the nature and standard of truth. Descartes soon
afterwards referred to the question and put it aside, saying of
Herbert: "he examines what truth is; for myself, I have never doubted
about it, as it seems to me to be a notion so transcendentally clear
that it is impossible to ignore it" (letter of Oct. 16, 1639). The
problem which Herbert put before himself concerned the conditions of
knowledge; and it has bearing upon later thought, though it arises out
of traditional views. In the end of the following century Kant said
that his own new point of view was due to discarding the belief that
"all our cognitions must conform to objects," which had been "hitherto
assumed." This was, indeed the prevailing doctrine. Perception was
held to be a "passio mentis" produced by the activity of the object
which impressed its image (or, to use the term which Descartes and
Locke made familiar, an idea) upon the mind. this view was rejected by
Herbert as decidedly as by Kant, though he did not anticipate the
Kantian revolution by assuming that "objects must conform to our
cognition."
The distinction between mind and body had not yet been sharpened and
turned into antagonism by the Cartesian dualism. Man is a complex of
mind and body, and, according to Herbert, all that is passive in him
is body (De Veritate, 3rd ed., p. 72). — though body itself is not
purely passive. Mind, however, is never passive. It acts but is not
acted upon (ibid. p. 95). Things do not act upon it but are put within
the sphere of its operation (ibid. p. 95). Nevertheless, it requires
an occasion, or the presence of objects, to awaken its activity, even
in its highest operations (ibid. p. 91). Herbert's expressions are not
quite consistent, for this awakening of mental activity is itself an
effect upon mind; but perhaps he might have defended his doctrine by
appealing to the harmony which exists between faculty and object. For
in this lies his fundamental conception — different alike from the
traditional view that cognition must conform to objects, and from the
Kantian view that objects must conform to cognition. the mental
faculty supplies a form analogous to the object as it exists (ibid. p.
97); the object, again,, neither undergoes an alteration of nature nor
produces one, but only enters, as it were, into the faculty's range of
view. The whole process is only intelligible on the supposition of a
harmony between the world and the human mind. In this harmony the
human body, fashioned out of the material of the external world and
containing the sense-apparatus which lead to the "inner court" of
consciousness, forms the bond of union.
Herbert's doctrine of the nature of truth rests on this conception of
harmony. "Truth," he says, "is a certain harmony between objects and
their analogous faculties" (ibid. p. 68). Four kinds or degrees of
truth are distinguished by him: truth of the thing; truth of
appearance; truth of concept; and truth of intellect. These seem to be
arranged in an ascending scale. The first does not exclude the others;
the last includes all the preceding, being the 'conformity' of the
several 'conformities' they involve. The conditions of truth are also
made to explain the possibility of error, for the causes of error lie
in the intermediate stages between the thing and the intellect. The
root of all error is in confusion — in the inappropriate connection of
faculty and object — and it is for the intellect to expose the
inappropriate connection and so to dissipate the error.
The doctrine arrived at is summed up in seven propositions (ibid. pp.
8-12); and all these hinge upon the postulate that mind corresponds
with things not only in their general nature but in all their
differences of kind, generic and specific. Every object is cognate to
some mental power or faculty, and to every difference in the object
there corresponds a different faculty. Herbert attempts no account of
nature, and his psychology is only introduced in the interests of his
doctrine of truth; but it is clear that there cannot be fewer
faculties than there are differences of things. A faculty is defined
as any internal force which unfolds a different mode of apprehension
(sensus) to a different object (ibid. p. 30); and faculties are spoken
of as radii animae, which perceive objects, or rather the image given
out by objects, in accordance with mutual analogy. These images may be
conveyed by the same sense-apparatus and yet be apprehended by
different faculties, as is the case with figure and motion (ibid. p.
78). Hence countless faculties; but their very multiplicity suggests
that Herbert cannot have attributed to them the same degree of
independence as did the 'faculty-pschologists' of a recent generation.
They may be said to be simply modes of mental operation; and mind
operates differently as different kinds of objects are brought before
it, showing always an aspect of its cognitive power analogous to the
object.
Reflecting upon the various modes of mental activity, we may arrange
these faculties into four classes: natural instinct, internal sense,
external sense, and discourse or reasoning. These are not separate
powers; and, although Herbert may have sometimes spoken of them as
such, another doctrine may be found in his writings. According to this
doctrine all mental faculty is regarded as informed in less or greater
measure by the intellect, which is itself a manifestation in humans of
the universal divine providence. "Our mind," he says, "is the highest
image and type of the divinity, and hence whatever is true or good in
us exists in supreme degree in God. Following out this opinion, we
believe that the divine image has also communicated itself to the
body. but, as in the propagation of light there is growing loss of
distinctness as it gets farther from its source, so that divine image,
which shines clearly in our living and free unity, first communicates
itself to natural instinct or the common reason of its providence,
then extends to the numberless internal and external faculties
(analogous to particular objects), closes into shade and body, and
sometimes seems as it were to retreat into matter itself" (ibid. p.
78).
The name 'natural instinct' is badly chosen; but it is not difficult
to see what Herbert means by it. In particular, it is the home of
those 'common notions' (as he calls them) which may be said to
underlie all experience and to belong to the nature of intelligence
itself. Some of these common notions are formed without any assistance
from discourse or the ratiocinative faculty; others are only perfected
by the aid of discourse. The former class is distinguished by certain
tests or marks. Some of these tests are logical (such as independence,
certainty, and necessity); others are psychological (such as priority
in time and universality). but it is the last-named mark or "universal
consent" that is made by him "the highest rule of natural instinct
(ibid. p. 60), and "the highest criterion of truth" (ibid. p. 39).
This appeal to universal consent makes Herbert a precursor of the
philosophy of Common Sense, and lays him open to the criticism urged
by Locke that there are no truths which can satisfy the test, there
being nothing so certain or so generally known that it has not been
ignored or denied by some. Herbert made little if any use of the tests
by which he might have shown that certain common notions are
presupposed in the constitution of experience, and thus failed to
carry out the theory of knowledge of which at times he had a clear
view.
4. Deism
The common notions are practical as well as theoretical — yield the
first principles of morals as well as those of science. but he
attempted no complete account of them and limited his investigation o
the common notions of religion. To this portion of his work his direct
influence as a thinker is chiefly due, for it determined the scope and
character of the English Deistical movement. The common notions of
religion are, he holds, the following: (1) that there is a supreme
Deity; (2) that this Deity ought to be worshipped; (3) that virtue
combined with piety is the chief part of divine worship; (4) that men
should repent of their sins and turn from them; (5) that reward and
punishment follow from the goodness and justice of God, both in this
life and after it. These five articles contain the whole doctrine of
the true catholic church, that is to say, of the religion of reason.
They also formed the primitive religion before the people "gave ear to
the covetous and crafty sacerdotal order." What is contrary to the
'five points' is contrary to reason and therefore false; what is
beyond reason but not contrary to it may be revealed: but the record
of a revelation is not itself revelation but tradition; and the truth
of a tradition depends upon the narrator and can never be more than
probable.
A separate work — De Religione Gentilium — was devoted to the
verification of these results on the field of what is now called
comparative religion. In respect of this work the claim may be justly
made for Herbert that he was one of the first — if not the first — to
make a systematic effort after a comparative study of religions. but
he had no idea of the historical development of belief, and he looked
upon all actual religions — in so far as they went beyond his five
articles — as simply corruptions of the pure and primitive rational
worship.
5. References and Further Reading
* De Veritate, Prout distinguitur a Revelatione, a Verisimili, a
Possibili, et a Falso (1633)
* De Causis Errorum, De Religione Laici, Appendix ad Sacerdotes (1645)
* Expeditio in ream Insulam (1656)
* De Religione Gentilium Errorumque apud Eos Causis (1663)
* A Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil (1768)
* The Life of Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Written by Himself (1764)
No comments:
Post a Comment