Abstract
While Swift was always open to the figurative potency of philosophical notions, he made it plain he was no fan of metaphysics. He received male in the third-year examination on Aristotelian physics, and whilst writing to his cousin Thomas about their studies at Trinity College, declared: ‘to enter upon causes of Philosophy is what I protest I will rather dy in a ditch than go about’.2 This attitude did not alter with age. In ‘The Dean’s Reasons for Not Building at Drapier’s Hill’ (1730?), Swift maintains his anti-metaphysical pose. The poem appears to be Swift’s last from the twenty-eight month period in which he stayed at the Gosford Estate with Sir Arthur and Lady Anne Acheson.3 As the title implies, Swift had purchased land there with a view to erecting a house, but his relations with Sir Arthur had apparently become increasingly frosty, although he claimed to Pope that his change of mind was the result of having ‘neither years, nor spirits, nor money, nor patience for such amusements’.4 The speaker associates Acheson’s aloofness with his philosophical interests, which are characterized as an unhealthy obsession:
Still rapt in speculations deep,
His outward senses fast asleep;
[…]
Beyond the skies transports his mind,
And leaves a lifeless corpse behind. (ll. 45–46, 49–50, in Poems, III, 900)
The world is wider to a Poet than to any other Man, and new follyes and Vices will never be wanting any more than new fashions. Je donne au diable the wrong Notion [tha]t Matter is exhausted. For as Poets in their Greek Name are called Creators, so in one circumstance they resemble the great Creator by having an infinity of Space to work in.1
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Notes
See Peter J. Schakel, ‘Swift’s Voices: Innovation and Complication in the Poems Written at Market Hill’, in Reading Swift: Papers from the Fourth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, eds Hermann J. Real and Helgard Stöver-Leidig (München: Fink, 2003), pp. 311–25.
See Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 87.
See J. P. Ferguson, Dr. Samuel Clarke: An Eighteenth-Century Heretic (Kineton: Roundwood Press, 1976), pp. 24–25.
Clarke, A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation, 2nd edn (London, 1708), p. 30. See Frank T. Boyle, ‘Profane and Debauched Deist: Swift in the Contemporary Response to A Tale of a Tub’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 3 (1988), 25–38, and Swift as Nemesis: Modernity and its Satirist (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 151–55.
See Steven Shapin, ‘Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clarke Disputes’, Isis, 72 (1981), 187–215 (p. 207), and Stewart, The Rise of Public Science, pp. 89–90.
Gay to Parnell, April–May 1714, in The Letters of John Gay, ed. C. F. Burgess (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 7.
See Marjorie Hope Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau, ‘This Long Disease, My Life’: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), esp. pp. 141–49.
Whiston, Primitive Christianity Reviv’d, 5 vols (London, 1711–12), I, ix, and see Scott Mandelbrote, ‘Newton and Eighteenth-century Christianity’, in The Cambridge Companion to Newton, eds I. Bernard Cohen and George E. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 409–30 (pp. 409, 412).
The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 3rd edn (London, 1726), trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 940. See Stephen D. Snobelen, ‘“God of Gods, and Lord of Lords”: The Theology of Isaac Newton’s General Scholium to the Principia’, Osiris, 2nd series, 16 (2001), 169–208 (esp. pp. 176–77, 180–86).
Larry Stewart, ‘The Trouble with Newton in the Eighteenth Century’, in Newton and Newtonianism: New Studies, eds James E. Force and Sarah Hutton (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2004), pp. 221–37 (p. 224).
See also Stewart, ‘Seeing through the Scholium: Religion and Reading Newton in the Eighteenth Century’, History of Science, 34 (1996), 123–65, and Scott Mandelbrote, ‘Eighteenth-Century Reactions to Newton’s Anti-Trinitarianism’, in Newton and Newtonianism, pp. 93–111 (p. 97).
PW, I V, 37, 63. See Roger D. Lund, ‘Introduction’, in The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750, ed. Lund (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 1–29 (pp. 6–9),
and Michael V. DePorte, ‘Contemplating Collins: Freethinking in Swift’, in Reading Swift: Papers from the Third Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, eds Hermann J. Real and Helgard Stöver-Leidig (München: Fink, 1998), pp. 103–15 (p. 103).
See Marcus Walsh, ‘Swift and Religion’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift, ed. Christopher Fox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 161–76.
Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), I, 135 (No. 304, December 1743),
and Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books, ed. Valerie Rumbold (Harlow: Longman, 1999), p. 331 (Book 4, ll. 459, 465–68). See TE, V, 385–86n.,
B. W. Young, ‘“See Mystery to Mathematics Fly!”: Pope’s Dunciad and the Critique of Religious Rationalism’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 26 (1993), 435–48,
and Arthur Friedman, ‘Pope and Deism’, in Pope and his Contemporaries: Essays Presented to George Sherburn, eds James L. Clifford and Louis A. Landa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. 89–95 (p. 92). In the Memoirs, Clarke is probably one of several philosophers ridiculed by the numerically inclined biblical speculations of Martinus and Crambe (Chap. VII, pp. 123–24).
James Noggle, ‘Skepticism and the Sublime Advent of Modernity in the 1742 Dunciad’, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 37 (1996), 22–41 (p. 23).
See Christopher Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians: Identity and Consciousness in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), esp. pp. 101, 107–108, and also Memoirs, pp. 280–93.
Coxe, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, I, 275, and The Diary of Mary, Countess Cowper, Lady of the Bedchamber to the Princess of Wales, 1714–1720, ed. Spencer Cowper, 2nd edn (London: for John Murray, 1865), p. 17 (see also pp. 14, 74).
See A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, ‘Clarke and Newton’, Isis, 52 (1961), 583–85, and Domenico Bertoloni Meli, ‘Newton and the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence’, in The Cambridge Companion to Newton, pp. 455–64 (pp. 459–60).
See Alma: or, The Progress of the Mind, Canto III, ll. 334–41, in The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, eds H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), I, 509.
Carolyn Iltis, ‘The Leibnizian-Newtonian Debates: Natural Philosophy and Social Psychology’, British Journal for the History of Science, 6 (1973), 343–77 (pp. 347–48).
Shapin, ‘Of Gods and Kings’, p. 202. See also Larry Stewart, ‘Samuel Clarke, Newtonianism, and the Factions of Post-Revolutionary England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 42 (1981), 52–72.
See Ian Higgins, Swift’s Politics: A Study in Disaffection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 11, 151, 171, 186.
See Judith Colton, ‘Merlin’s Cave and Queen Caroline: Garden Art as Political Propaganda’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10 (1976), 1–20 (pp. 1–2),
Joanna Marschner, ‘Queen Caroline of Anspach and the European Princely Museum Tradition’, in Queenship in Britain, 1660–1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture and Dynastic Politics, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 130–42 (p. 133), and Pope to Gay, 2 October 1732,
in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), III, 318.
Swift had composed a far more explicit condemnation of the Hanoverians in about 1718, in a manuscript poem (acquired by Walter Scott) which dealt with the possible promiscuity of George I. See James Woolley, ‘Writing Libels on the Germans: Swift’s “Wicked Treasonable Libel”’, in Swift: The Enigmatic Dean – Festschrift for Hermann Josef Real, eds Rudolf Freiburg, Arno Loffler and Wolfgang Zach (Tubingen: Stauffenburg, 1998), pp. 303–16.
See Ezio Vailati, Leibniz & Clarke: A Study of their Correspondence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 170–72,
and Margula R. Perl, ‘Physics and Metaphysics in Newton, Leibniz, and Clarke’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 30 (1969), 507–26 (pp. 510–11). Clarke and Leibniz’s argument is, of course, a rehashing of an older and predominantly Epicurean dispute about the nature of matter; one which Swift utilized as an appropriate conceit in his assault on professional writing in the Tale (pp. 96–97). See also Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 420 (2 July 1712), in Bond (ed.), The Spectator, III, 576.
See B. J. T. Dobbs, ‘Stoic and Epicurean doctrines in Newton’s system of the world’, in Atoms, Pneuma and Tranquillity: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 221–38 (pp. 222–23).
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), II, 569.
See Margaret J. Osler, ‘The Intellectual Sources of Robert Boyle’s Philosophy of Nature: Gassendi’s Voluntarism and Boyle’s Physico-Theological Project’, in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–1700, eds Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft and Perez Zagorin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 178–98 (pp. 179–80), and Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy: Containing the Lives, Opinions, Actions and Discourses of the Philosophers of Every Sect, 2nd edn (London, 1687), Part XIII, Chap. VIII, p. 863.
See Nora Crow Jaffe, The Poet Swift (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1977), p. 53.
Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845), II, 629 (III. xxv. 12). See C. A. Patrides, ‘Renaissance and Modern Views on Hell’, The Harvard Theological Review, 57 (1964), 217–36 (p. 223).
See Paul C. Davies, ‘The Debate on Eternal Punishment in Late Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century English Literature’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 4 (1971), 257–76.
Dr. Faustus, v 124–26, in The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, eds Roma Gill and others, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987–1998), II, 19.
Philip C. Almond, Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 65, 176–77n124. In contrast, D. P. Walker argues that ‘What Newton and Samuel Clarke thought about the eternity of hell we know only through Whiston’: see The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 95.
Compare Louis A. Landa, who finds ‘no overt answer’ to whether Swift believed that ‘science enforced religious faith and truth or constituted in some way a challenge to them’. See Landa, Review of ‘Swift and Natural Science’, by George Reuben Potter, Philological Quarterly, 21 (1942), 219–21 (p. 221).
A True and Faithful Narrative of What Passed in London, in John Gay: Poetry and Prose, eds Vinton A. Dearing and Charles E. Beckwith, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), II, 473, 466. Regarding its authorship and dating, see esp. Nicolson and Rousseau, ‘This Long Disease’, pp. 178–82, G. S. Rousseau, ‘Wicked Whiston and the English Wits’, in Enlightenment Borders: Pre- and Post-modern Discourses: Medical, Scientific (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. 325–41 (pp. 330–33),
and Leland D. Peterson, ‘Jonathan Swift and a Prose “Day of Judgment”’, Modern Philology, 81 (May 1984), 401–406. 69. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. William Whiston, 2nd edn (London, 1753), p. 290.
See also Memoirs and Correspondence of Francis Atterbury, D. D., Bishop of Rochester, ed. Robert Folkestone Williams, 2 vols (London: W. H. Allen, 1869), II, 239.
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Lynall, G. (2012). Socinians and Queens: Samuel Clarke and ‘Directions for a Birthday Song’. In: Swift and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016966_6
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