The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University
Jonathan Edwards [1714], Scientific and Philosophical Writings (WJE Online Vol. 6) , Ed. Wallace E. Anderson [word count] [jec-wjeo06].
CONTENTS
Editorial Committee v Editor's Introduction 1 1. Biographical Background 2 Precollegiate Period, 3; Collegiate and Graduate Studies, 7; From New York to Northampton, 27; Northampton to Princeton, 34. 2. Edwards as a Scientist 37 3. The Development of Edwards' Philosophical Thought 52 The Refutation of Materialism, 53; The Necessity of Being, 68; The Structure of Being, 75; The World in Space and Time, 94; The Mind, 111. 4. Preparation and Editing of the Texts 136 5. Acknowledgments 141 Part I: The "Spider" Papers 145 Note on the "Spider" Papers 147 "Of Insects" 154 The "Spider" Letter 163 Part II: "Natural Philosophy" and Related Papers 171 Note on "Natural Philosophy" 173 "Natural Philosophy" 192 Cover-Leaf Memoranda 192 "Of the Prejudices of Imagination" 196 "Of Being" 202 ["Of Atoms"] 208 "Things to be Considered an[d] Written fully about" 219 Note on Papers on Nature and Natural Phenomena 296 "Of the Rainbow" 298 ["Of Light Rays"] 302 "Beauty of the World" 305 "Wisdom in the Contrivance of the World" 307 Part III: "The Mind" and Related Papers 311 Note on "The Mind" 313 "The Mind" 332 Note on Short Philosophical Papers 394 Outline of "A Rational Account" 396 ["Notes on Knowledge and Existence"] 398 Appendix A: "The Soul" 401 Note on "The Soul" 401 ["The Soul"] 405 Appendix B: The "Spider" Letter-Draft 407 Note on the "Spider" Letter-Draft 407 "Spider" Letter of
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
This volume of Edwards' scientific and philosophical papers brings together a large number of different manuscript writings from virtually every period of his life. Many of these have been previously published, some of them in several editions. "Natural Philosophy" and "The Mind" were first published in 1829 by Sereno DwightSereno E. Dwight, ed., The Works of President Edwards with a Memoir of His Life (10 vols., New York, 1829–30), 1, pp. 664–702 ("The Mind"), pp. 702–61 ("Natural Philosophy"). Dwight titled the latter "Notes on Natural Science." Hereafter cited as Dwight. and have since been reedited and published again, as a whole or in part, by others.Harvey Townsend, ed., The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards from his Private Notebooks (Eugene, Oregon, 1955) includes "The Mind" and "Of Atoms," "Of the Prejudices of Imagination," and "Of Being" from JE's "Natural Philosophy." Hereafter cited as Townsend. Leon Howard, ed., "The Mind" of Jonathan Edwards: a Reconstructed Text (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963) includes "The Mind" and the essays "Of Being" and "Of the Prejudices of Imagination." Hereafter cited as "The Mind" of JE. Dwight also first published "The Soul" (which he mistakenly took to be Edwards' work),Dwight, 1, pp. 20–21. For a discussion of the authenticity of "The Soul," see below, pp. 401–04. and the draft of his "Spider" letter.Dwight, 1, pp. 23–28. In 1890 Egbert C. Smyth added Edwards' "Of Insects" to the list of his published manuscripts"The Flying Spider—Observations by Jonathan Edwards when a Boy," Andover Review, 13, pp. 5–13. Smyth also includes in his paper a new edition of the draft of JE's "Spider" letter. and followed with "Of the Rainbow" in 1895."Some Early Writings of Jonathan Edwards," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 10 (1895), pp. 238–41. Hereafter cited as "Early Writings of JE." Smyth also includes new editions of "The Soul," the essay "Of Being," and an article titled "Colors" from "Natural Philosophy" in this paper. William P. Upham transcribed and published the shorthand notes in "Natural Philosophy" in 1902."An Account of the Shorthand Writings of Jonathan Edwards," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd series, 15 (1902), pp. 514–21. Finally, in 1948, Perry Miller included the short essay "Beauty of the World" in his edition of Edwards' "Images of Divine Things."Images or Shadows of Divine Things (New Haven, 1948), pp. 135–37. All these are presented complete in this volume, including in some cases passages or sections that were omitted in earlier editions.
In addition to these well-known writings, the reader will find several here which have not been previously published. Perhaps the most notable of these is the "Spider" letter itself, which Edwards actually sent and which is now presented with the permission of the New York Historical Society, where the manuscript is located. Also, an untitled fragment which is here given the title "Of Light Rays" is a significant addition to the published works resulting from Edwards' early scientific interests.MS in the Andover coll. The other shorter and hitherto unpublished papers include "Wisdom in the Contrivance of the World,"MS in the Yale coll. an outline for a treatise that Edwards planned to title "A Rational Account of the Main Doctrines of the Christian Religion,"MS in the Yale coll. and another late fragment of various philosophical notes which has here been titled "Notes on Knowledge and Existence."MS in the Yale coll.
1. Biographical Background
Although the manuscript writings in this volume span nearly the whole of Edwards' career, the larger part of them were written by the time he settled as assistant to his grandfather in the pastorate at Northampton, Massachusetts, at the age of twenty-three. From a biographical point of view this is perhaps the most obscure and problematic part of his life. Family and public records are far from complete and, except for some personal letters and a private diary kept for a few years which he devoted primarily to reflections upon his inner moral and spiritual life, Edwards' own extant writings of the time are almost devoid of autobiographical comment. Most important, he neglected to date any of the manuscripts connected with his private studies, so that all questions of the times and order of their composition have been left to the judgment of later scholars. Unfortunately, the dates that have been traditionally accepted for most of Edwards' early writings are quite mistaken. These dates were originally proposed by Sereno Dwight and Egbert Smyth, the earliest editors of Edwards' papers on science and philosophy. Subsequent accounts of Edwards' early life that are based upon the mistaken dates have consequently projected a distorted picture of his intellectual development, and they have unwittingly ignored some of the most significant features of the papers themselves. Such recently debated questions as the sources of Edwards' thought, the relations between his scientific and philosophical interests and his theology, and the modernity of his thought, are all affected by assumptions concerning the order and dating of his private manuscripts. In treating the biographical background of his scientific and philosophical papers, therefore, it will be necessary to correct some of the misrepresentations that have prevailed for well over a century, since Dwight and Smyth published their conclusions. Recent techniques in manuscript investigation, together with the discovery of some important new material bearing upon Edwards' early life, have yielded a much more accurate and detailed dating for his undated papers than has been possible hitherto.Thomas Schafer has conducted an intensive and exhaustive study of the dates of all wards early manuscripts. Most of the information concerning dating in this volume was disclosed by his investigations, and corroborated wherever possible by the editor. Schafer's own full account of the dating of Edwards' early writings will be presented in the introduction to his edition of JE's "Miscellanies," in this Yale edition of Edwards' works. Several important points remain open to question, but the main body of conclusions so far reached is sufficiently complete and well established to form a coherent picture of the course and background of his scientific and philosophical writings. Full discussions of the problems of dating the manuscripts may be found in the introductory notes that precede the texts of each work or group of related works below. In treating their biographical backgrounds in the present chapter it will suffice only to summarize the conclusions reached in those discussions, and to point out their variances from the dates that have traditionally been assumed. For our present purpose, Edwards' early life is most conveniently divided into three periods: his childhood from 1703 until the fall of 1716 when he matriculated at the Collegiate School (Yale College), his six years of undergraduate and graduate study from 1716 to 1722, and the period from 1722 to 1726 which included his New York pastorate, a year of study and preaching in Connecticut in 1723–24, and the two years of his Yale tutorship. This chapter will conclude with a summary of the relevant background of the scientific and philosophical writings dating from his settlement in Northampton in 1726 until his death in 1758.
PRECOLLEGIATE PERIOD: 1703–16
Jonathan Edwards was born on Connecticut, where he lived until he matriculated in Timothy Edwards had received his B.A. and M.A. from Harvard at the same commencement in 1694, just before he was called to East Windsor. Most of his preparation for the degrees, however, was made under the tuition of the Reverend Peletiah Glover of Springfield; he seems to have spent only his first year of college in residence in Cambridge.Sibley's Harvard Graduates, ed. C. K. Shipton (17 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1933), 6, pp. 93–94. Except for the military campaign to Canada in which he served as chaplain in 1711, and occasional visits to Harvard at commencement time to renew friendships with his former classmates,John Stoughton, Windsor Farmes: A Glimpse of an Old Parish (Hartford, 1883), pp. 105–106. Timothy spent his career quietly in East Windsor. His main published writing is the Election Sermon he delivered in Hartford in 1732. But he also made some other contributions to the literature of his time, and was publicly acknowledged by two prominent New England writers. His fellow townsman, Maj. Roger Wolcott, who was later governor of the Colony, published his volume, Poetical Meditations, in 1725. He added a lengthy dedication to "the Reverend Timothy Edwards of Windsor," in which he praised some verses of Edwards which have since been lost.Roger Wolcott, Poetical Meditations, Being the Improvement of some Vacant Hours, with a preface by die Reverend Mr. Bulkely of Colchester (New London, 1725), pp. i–ii. The third and fourth stanzas read: "Yet when you Censure, Sir, don't make the Verse / You pin'd to Glover's venerable Hearse / The standard for their Trial: nor Enact / you never will acquit, what's less Exact." Timothy Edwards conducted the grammer school for the parish, and so supervised Jonathan's earliest education. Candidates for the Collegiate School (it was renamed after Elihu Yale in 1718) were required to be "duly prepared and expert in Latin and Greek Authors both Poetick and oratorical As also ready in making Good Latin."Franklin Dexter, A Documentary History of Yale University, 1701–1745 (New Haven, 1916), p. 30. Jonathan was well along in his study of the classical languages before he reached his eighth birthday. In a letter dated Languages and elementary arithmetic were the principal content of grammar school instruction throughout colonial New England, and except for Timothy's emphasis upon writing, there is no evidence that Jonathan's earliest education included more than this. Logic and natural science, in particular, were subjects reserved for the collegiate curriculum. Nevertheless, Sereno Dwight and Egbert Smyth infer from Edwards' earliest writings a considerable acquaintance with both subjects before he entered college. Dwight judged that two of the papers presented in this volume, "The Soul" and Edwards' draft of his "Spider" letter, were written before he matriculated.Dwight, 1, pp. 20, 22–28. Smyth later assigned two others, the essays "Of Insects" and "Of the Rainbow," to this same early period."Flying Spider," pp. 3–4; "Early Writings of JE," pp. 224–25. Subsequent biographers have accordingly supposed that Edwards exhibited an astonishing genius for scientific investigation and philosophical argumentation even at that early age. The resulting picture of his life and activities in East Windsor proves to be unwarranted, however, for none of the four pieces can reasonably be assigned to this period. Indeed, the only precollegiate writing among Edwards' extant manuscripts is a letter to his sister Mary, which he dated Of these four pieces, "The Soul" has proved to be undoubtedly spurious. The manuscript itself contains evidence that it was actually composed much later than Dwight supposed, probably in 1725.See further in App. A below, pp. 403–04. By this time Edwards was a tutor at Yale College and can hardly be counted the author of so juvenile a production. The writer of "The Soul" was evidently some member of the Edwards household in East Windsor, but his or her identity is at present still in doubt. The other three manuscripts in this group are unquestionably in Edwards' hand, but "Of Insects" and "Of the Rainbow" were evidently written while he was a student in New Haven. The draft of the "Spider" letter was composed even later. Its date is conclusively fixed by that found on the "Spider" letter itself, which has only recently been located. The letter is dated The revisions in the dating of these pieces must lead to some significant reassessment of Edwards' early intellectual development. Although "The Soul" was probably not Edwards' own work, it might fairly be considered a reflection of intellectual life in the East Windsor parsonage. But the scientific papers are now to be associated with Edwards' later interests and educational experiences. Some of the mysteries which have hitherto been connected with these papers—for example, how Edwards could have learned of Isaac Newton's optical works at so early a time and in such a remote village—may now be dismissed altogether. Nor is there any longer much basis for supposing that even as a child he had an interest in and highly developed skill for minutely observing the phenomena of nature. His reputation as a scientific observer has been based almost entirely upon the essay "Of Insects." One passage in this essay refers specifically to his boyhood observations of flying insects during the late summer: "I remember that, when I was a boy, I have at the same time of year lien on the ground upon my back and beheld an abundance of them, all flying southeast, which I then thought were going to a warm country." But the systematically conducted observations of the manner in which spiders do their spinning were most probably made at a later time, not long before the essay itself was composed. In any case, Edwards' scientific efforts were never much directed to experimental inquiry; the observations reported in "Of Insects" are almost unique in his scientific writings in this respect.
It appears, in fact, that during his childhood Edwards roamed the woods and fields around East Windsor as much to commune with God as to satisfy curiosity. In the "Personal Narrative" which he wrote in later years,The "Personal Narrative" was written by JE some time after
"COLLEGIATE AND GRADUATE STUDIES". 1716–22
The course of Edwards' education after his matriculation in the fall of 1716 was directly affected by a controversy over the choice of a permanent site for the Collegiate School. The Trustees had only recently voted to remove the college from Saybrook to New Haven, where a new hall was to be built that would accommodate the students and faculty, and provide a suitable library for the large collection of books that had been sent from England by the colonial agent, Jeremiah Dummer. But the two dissenting trustees from Hartford, who were determined to secure the college for their own town, appealed to the Assembly to overturn the majority decisions. Throughout the ensuing controversy the scholars themselves were divided into two main groups. One met in New Haven in accordance with the directives of the Trustees, while the other gathered under their own tutors in the town of Wethersfield, in open defiance of the Trustees. Edwards belonged to the latter group. He came at first to New Haven where he matriculated, but within a month he and nine other freshmen from Connecticut River towns joined the contingent that had already formed at Wethersfield. The dissident party remained there throughout his freshman and sophomore years. In the meantime the Trustees' arrangements went forward in New Haven; the new hall was finished by the fall of 1718, and at the commencement that year the college was renamed after Governor Yale. Dummer's gift of books, which had remained in their crates in Saybrook, was brought over despite the opposition of some Saybrook partisans. And at about the same time, in It was during these last three years of study at Yale in New Haven that Edwards wrote his earliest scientific and philosophical papers. "Of Insects" was evidently done first, probably during his senior year in 1719–20.See below, pp. 147–51. The first parts of "Natural Philosophy" followed, probably during the first year of graduate study. The chronological order of this manuscript is particularly complicated, since it does not correspond to the sequence of articles on its pages.See below, pp. 176–81. Edwards began it with the series of propositions and corollaries we have entitled "Of Atoms," and with the first few entries in what is here called the long series (LS) of "Things to be Considered and Written fully about." These were followed by the beginning paragraphs in "Of Being" and "Of the Prejudices of Imagination"; the later parts of both essays were added after his New York pastorate. At about the time he wrote the twenty-seventh entry in the long series of "Things to be Considered," Edwards started a second series of notes, which we here call the short series (SS). He added new entries to both series concurrently throughout his second graduate year; by the time he left for New York he had written No. 44 in the long series and No. 21b in the short. Later articles in both were added after his return to Connecticut in the spring of 1723. Two other papers, both concerned with topics in optics, were also written during the second year of graduate study. "Of the Rainbow," which Smyth judged to be a precollegiate writing, is probably the earlier. The other, the surviving portion of an essay we have titled "Of Light Rays," is nearly contemporary with the entry No. 37 in the long series in "Natural Philosophy."See below, pp. 296–97. Sereno Dwight judged that Edwards began "The Mind" at an even earlier time, during his sophomore year while he was still in Wethers-field;Dwight, 7, pp. 39–40. but in fact he did not write the first entry in "The Mind" until after his New York pastorate. Dwight also mistakenly supposed that two other major series of notes, the "Miscellanies" and "Notes on Scriptures," were begun during Edwards' collegiate period.Ibid. p. 34. Evidence shows he started "Miscellanies" during his New York sojourn, and "Notes on Scriptures" during the year following it.Thomas Schafer has furnished these conclusions from his investigations of the dating of of JE's manuscripts. Hereafter the former series is cited as "Miscellanies" and its individual entries as Miscell. no. Having surveyed the course of Edwards' writing during this period, we may now examine in greater detail the nature and content of his educational experience. Once again, contemporary records are incomplete; public documents are largely concerned with political controversies surrounding the college, and personal records—for example, the autobiography of Samuel Johnson—are of doubtful value in some important details. Nevertheless, indirect evidence allows us to construct a fairly reliable picture of Edwards' course of studies, and his own writings give indications of the particular works that stimulated and shaped his earliest thought. Despite its irregular status, the collegiate operation at Wethersfield could hardly be judged inferior to the officially sanctioned school in New Haven. On the contrary, the schism brought a serious problem in retaining adequate faculty in New Haven, while at Wethersfield there was a full contingent of tutors who were held in high regard by all parties in the controversies. Elisha Williams, who headed the Wethersfield group, was already becoming a popular and influential figure in the Colony—"a man of splendor," Ezra Stiles later called him.Sibley, p. 591. See also the "Memoirs" in James Lockwood, Man Mortal: God Everlasting (New Haven, 1756), p. i. He had taken his B.A. in 1711 and his M.A. in 1714 at Harvard, where he was said to excel in classical learning, logic, and geography. In 1717, in the midst of the schism, the Trustees invited him to fill the vacant post of senior tutor in New Haven.Dexter, Documentary History, pp. 143, 145. In a later period he was to serve as rector of Yale College from 1726 until 1739. Samuel Smith, the senior tutor at Wethersfield, had been appointed senior tutor for New Haven in 1716, just before the schism developed. Despite his defection to Wethersfield, the Trustees tried to gain him for New Haven again the next year.Ibid., pp. 77, 144. Smith had received his B.A. from the Collegiate School in 1713 and his M.A. in 1716. Samuel Hall, the junior tutor, had taken his B.A. at the Collegiate School in 1716. According to records of tuition payments in Timothy Edwards' account book for these years, Jonathan received most of his instruction in Wethersfield from Smith and Hall.The account book, located in the Yale library, records payments for Jonathan's instruction to Smith on the dates By comparison, the New Haven institution was badly understaffed. The Trustees sought to appoint two tutors in addition to a resident rector before classes convened in the fall of 1716, but with Smith's refusal to occupy the senior tutorship, the only regular tutor in residence through that year and the following one was Samuel Johnson.Johnson was appointed junior tutor in the fall of 1716. Dexter, Documentary History, pp. 74, 76. He had received his B.A. from the Collegiate School in 1714, and had been teaching in Guilford, Connecticut, during the two previous years. The Reverend Joseph Noyes, who had formerly been a tutor and was now minister of New Haven, agreed to take the senior class until a senior tutor could be found. The college was still without a resident rector, and remained so until Cutler was appointed in 1719. These faculty arrangements were not improved until the fall of 1718, when Johnson's friend and classmate Daniel Browne accepted the junior tutorship.Ibid., p. 173. Johnson himself was then presumably given the senior post, and would have been in charge of Edwards' studies when the Wethersfield scholars returned briefly that winter, during his junior year. It was Johnson, in fact, whom the students cited as the cause of their quick return to Wethersfield.Ibid., pp. 189 ff. In the same volume Johnson's own detailed account is included in his "Some Historical Remarks Concerning the Collegiate School of Connecticut," pp. 159–163. Johnson departed to take the pulpit in nearby West Haven at the end of the term in 1719, and for the following three years of Edwards' residence as a student the Yale faculty consisted of Daniel Browne and Timothy Cutler. From a letter of Edwards to his father shortly after his arrival in New Haven in There are no extant records of the curriculum at Wethersfield, and accounts of the program in New Haven during this time are incomplete. Apparently the content of instruction in the latter underwent a major transformation in 1717 or 1718, when the modern scientific works in the new library were introduced. In both places the general curriculum was probably similar to that of Harvard at about the same time, though there were apparently some differences in the textbooks used. The Harvard program was described by one of the tutors in 1723.Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century (2 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1936–37), 1, pp. 146–47. Hereafter cited as Morison.According to this account, students began the freshman year with a review of Latin and Greek grammar, and studied rhetoric from William Dugard's Rhetorica Elementa or Thomas Farnaby's Index Rhetoricus et Oratorius.Both were standard texts in rhetoric in the seventeenth century. A seventh edition of students continued the languages, but their principal study was logic. They began with the system of Peter Ramus, then advanced to Franco Burgersdijck's Institutio LogicaeFirst published in 1626, Burgersdijck's Institutio Logicae remained a standard textbook in Aristotelian, as opposed to Ramist, logic. Its use at Harvard, together with the Ramist textbooks in logic, is discussed in Morison, /, pp. 187–93. and a manuscript logic, The New Logic, extracted from LeGrand and 'Ars Cogitandi', by tutor William Brattle.Brattle, who was a Harvard tutor from 1686–97, introduced his MS logic into the curriculum there in about 1686; it was used thereafter until late in the eighteenth century. At first it was circulated in student copies; but finally it was printed in Boston under the title Compendium Logicae in 1735, and again in 1758. In the published versions there are many footnotes discussing John Locke's and others' views on substance and other related topics.Brattle's textbook reflected the most recent developments in logic, based upon the Cartesian methods of inquiry. Later in the year sophomores began natural philosophy with Adrian Hereboord's Meletemata philosophica.This was first published in 1654; it remained in use at Harvard as late as 1740 (Morison, 1, p. 234). Hereboord was himself an early admirer of Descartes, who attempted to synthesize die Aristotelian and Cartesian approaches in his systematization of natural philosophy. Natural philosophy formed the principal study of the third year. Besides Hereboord's work, a manuscript manual by tutor Charles Morton, Compendium Physicae, was a standard textbook for Harvard students.Morton wrote his textbook in England, and brought it to Harvard when he came over to assume a tutorship in 1686. Because it incorporated many recent discoveries, the work was an important contribution to the understanding of die new science in the colonies. Compendium Physicae has been edited by Theodore Hornberger and published in Collections of the Historical Society of Massachusetts, 33 (1942). A good summary of the work is in Morison, 1. pp. 236–49. Juniors also studied ethics from Henry More's Enchiridion Ethicum,Enchiridion Ethicum (London, 1666). and learned "a system of geography" and "a system of metaphysics." In the senior year students were taught arithmetic and geometry, and studied astronomy from Pierre Gassendi's Institutio Astronomica.Institutio Astronomica (London, 1653) was used by JE in his senior year at Yale (see below, p. 21). Later in the year seniors reviewed the whole program of the arts and sciences. The upper three classes had weekly disputations upon their principal subjects, and each Saturday they read divinity from Wollebius' The Abridgment of Christian Divinity and William Ames' Medulla Theologica, both stable authorities for New England orthodoxy.For a discussion of die use of these works at Harvard in the seventeenth century, see Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), pp. 95–96.
From these textbooks it appears that Harvard students were not instructed according to a single rigid intellectual scheme, but were exposed to the variety of competing views current in the late seventeenth century. In logic both the Aristotelian system of Burgersdijck and the anti-Aristotelian system of Ramus were taught, and in addition students were given some exposure to the method of Descartes and the logic of Port Royal in Brattle's work. Gassendi's Institutio Astronomica presented the elements of astronomy and summarized the three main systems of the heavens as understood in the early seventeenth century, the Ptolemaic, the Tychonic,As formulated by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. He held that all the planets except Earth revolve about the sun, but the sun itself and the entire solar system revolve around the stationary earth. and the Copernican. Hereboord's Meletemata offered both the Aristotelian and the Cartesian systems of rational physics, and Morton's Compendium Physicae emphasized the experimental science that was promoted by the Royal Society of London. Although Morton organized his presentation according to standard scholastic distinctions, he devoted the contents of his chapters to explaining the discoveries of Galileo, Harvey, Boyle, Hooke, and other contributors to the modern era. By comparison, the intellectual diet that Edwards' tutors had received at the Collegiate School was apparently much more limited. Benjamin Lord, a classmate of tutors Smith and Johnson, later recalled studying Tully and Virgil, the Greek Testament and the Psalms in Hebrew, the logics of Ramus, Burgersdijck, and Hereboord, the rudiments of mathematics, and natural philosophy from a manuscript textbook by Abraham Pierson, the first rector of the college.Franklin Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, with Annals of the College History (6 vols., New York, 1885–1912), 1, p. 115. Pierson wrote this manual while he was a student at Harvard in the class of 1668, when Aristotelian science was still supreme there. Samuel Johnson scornfully described the same course of studies as "nothing but the scholastic cobwebs of a few little English and Dutch systems that would hardly now be taken up in the street, some of Ramus and Alsted's works was considered the highest attainments. They heard indeed in 1714 when [I] took [my] Bachelor's Degree of a new philosophy that of late was all in vogue and of such names as Descartes, Boyle, Locke and Newton, but they were cautioned against thinking anything of them because the new philosophy it was said would soon bring in a new divinity and corrupt the pure religion of the country." Johnson's writing of a "technologia" was his main scholastic achievement. He later described this work as "a little system of all parts of learning then known in nothing else but a curious cobweb of distributions and definitions which only served to blow [me] up with a great conceit that [I] was now an adept."Samuel Johnson, President of King's College: His Career and Writings, ed. Carol Schneider and Herbert Schneider (4 vols., New York, 1929), 1, pp. 6–7. Ramus' logic and such Ramist works as John Alsted's Encyclopedia Scientiarum Omnium gave the basis for these student technologiae. Although Johnson disavowed scholasticism when he read Bacon's Advancement of Learning, the substance of his knowledge still was that of the technologia; at first he probably had little more than that to offer his own students. The changes that he was partly instrumental in effecting were not begun until 1717 or 1718, and even then they could hardly have amounted to an instantaneous revolution in the curriculum. The instruction that Edwards received in Wethersfield during his first three years was probably superior in some respects. Elisha Williams, who presided there, would have promoted a program in conformity to his own Harvard training. Evidence that he did so is found in two volumes of hand-copied textbooks in logic and natural philosophy that Edwards received from his father, apparently for studies during his sophomore and junior years.The volumes are now in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the first catalogued as MS Downame, and the second as MS Partridge. JE still had them in his own library as late as 1751, when he again signed and dated them. These volumes had been prepared by a Harvard student, William Partridge, between 1686 and 1688. The first, which Edwards signed and dated 1718, contains a synopsis of the Ramist logic of George DownameUnder the title Expositionis Georgii Dounami, in Petri Rami Dialecticam Catechismus. and a copy of William Brattle's Compendium of Logic (the New Logic). Edwards' notes at the back of the book show he used the Brattle logic again while teaching the subject during his tutorship. The second volume, which he signed and dated 1719, includes William Ames' unpublished Ramist synopsis of physicsMorison, 1, p. 225. In his Technometria, Ames defines physics as "die art of doing the work of nature well." For an account of Technometria and its place in colonial education, see Lee Gibbs, "William Ames' Technometry," Journal of the History of Ideas, 33 (1972), pp. 615–24. and a collection of theses taken from Henry Gutberleth's scholastic Physicae, hoc est, Naturalis Philosophiae.Published in Herbornae Nassoviorum, 1613. This volume also contained an untitled copy of Charles Morton's manuscript Compendium LogicaeThis MS logic has apparently never been published. Perry Millergives a general description of it in New England Mind, pp. 122–23. and a copy of his Compendium Physicae. When Edwards and his Wethersfield classmates appeared in New Haven for the brief reunion of the college in They joined their utmost endeavors to improve the education of their pupils by the help of the new lights they had gained. They introduced the study of Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton as fast as they could and in order to this the study of mathematics. The Ptolemaic system was hitherto as much believed as the Scriptures, but they soon cleared up and established the Copernican by help of Whiston's Lectures, Derham, etc. Some opposition would probably have been made to these innovations if it had not been for the public quarrels about the college, and it was hoped these new and better instructions would promote the credit of it. Mr. Johnson greatly desired to study Sir Isaac himself but wanted mathematics, a study he was averse to; but finding it necessary to that purpose, he was resolved to overcome that aversion, and by laborious application he gained the mastery of Euclid, Algebra, and the Conic sections, so as to read Sir Isaac with understanding and his aversion turned into a great pleasure.Schneider and Schneider, Johnson: Career and Writings, pp. 8–9. Up to this time neither Locke nor Newton had been taught in any American college. The innovations at Yale were a major step forward into the intellectual life of the eighteenth century—if we credit Johnson, a single step from Ptolemy to Newton! He suggests that they were begun in 1717, but since Browne was not appointed until the following year this date might well be in error.Dates in Johnson's "Autobiography" differ from those in public records at certain points. At the same time, the published theses for the Yale commencement in 1718 suggest that some post-Copernican science had been taught during die previous year. Ut sol est Centrum nujus Systematis, sic stellae fixae aliorum, states the plurality of worlds hypothesis expounded by William Derham in his Astro-theology (London. 1714). Cometae sunt massae indigestae, Orbe parabolico circa Solem revolvestes, suggests a study of Whiston's Astronomical Lectures; and Mundus on est infinitum, sed indefinite extensus, states the thesis of Descartes which Henry More particularly disputed in their correspondence of 1648–49 (published by More in 1662). (Dexter, Biographical Sketches, p. 179.) It is more likely that the changes were only begun about the time the Wethersfield students came down in According to the report of Edwards' early life given by Samuel Hopkins, his friend in later life and his first biographer, Edwards had already studied Locke's Essay Concerning Human UnderstandingJohn Locke (1632–1704) has been known since the mid-eighteenth century as the founder of modern British empiricism, who set in motion a course of thought that led to George Berkeley's phenomenalistic idealism and then to David Hume's philosophical scepticism. Locke is often considered the single most important philosopher in the development of eighteenth century American thought (see e.g., Morton White, Science and Sentiment in America, [New York, 1972] ch. 1). The nature and extent of Locke's influence upon JE's philosophical views has long been the subject of investigation, particularly since the publication of Perry Miller's Jonathan Edwards (see especially pp. 54–61).
In his second Year at College, and the thirteenth of his Age, he read Locke on the human Understanding, with great delight and profit. His Uncommon Genius, by which he was, as it were by Nature, form'd for closness of Thought and deep Penetration, now began to exercise and discover itself. Taking that Book into his Hand, upon some Occasion, not long before his Death, he said to some of his select Friends, who were then with him, That he was beyond Expression entertain'd and Pleas'd with it, when he read it in his Youth at College; that he was as much engaged, and had more Satisfaction and Pleasure in studying it, than the most greedy Miser in gathering up handsful of Silver and Gold from some new discover'd Treasure.Hopkins, Life, p. 3. It should be noted that Edwards is here quoted as saying only that he read Locke "in his Youth at College"; that the exact time was during his second year could have been Hopkins' own inference. Every other discoverable fact about the introduction of Locke's work into New England stands as evidence to the contrary. The only copy of the Essay that I have discovered there as early as 1717 is that in the first edition of 1690 which was included in Jeremiah Dummer's gift of books for the Collegiate School.The complete inventory of the Dummer collection, as prepared by Louise May Bryant and Mary Patterson, is printed in Papers in Honor of Andrew Keogh (New Haven, 1938), pp. 432–92; cited hereafter as Keogh Locke's Essay is listed on p. 435. This copy would have been inaccessible to any of the students or tutors in Wethersfield, and might not have been available even in New Haven until the collection was brought over from Saybrook in the winter of 1718.The question of the availability of Locke's work was raised by Perry Miller, in Jonathan Edwards (New York, 1949), p. It is possible that Johnson had gone through the collection before, and removed such volumes as he had an immediate interest in and use for. A catalogue of the Harvard College library published in 1723 mentions none of Locke's works, though a 1725 supplement lists the three-volume edition of 1722.Catalogus Librorum Bibliothecae Collegii Harvardini (Boston, 1723), and Continuatio Supplementi Catalogi (Boston, 1725). Nor is the Essay mentioned in the inventories of any of the private libraries advertised for sale during this period.Ebenezer Pemberton's library was the most imposing of these. It contained Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity, with a Vindication and his Second Vindication, together with two volumes of his letters to the Bishop of Worcester, Nicolas Malebranche's Search After Truth, various works of Descartes, Antoine LeGrand, and Gassendi, Bayle's Critical and Historical Dictionary, Harris' Lexicon Technicum and Sprat's History of the Royal Society together with works of Ray, Derham and Woodward, and various volumes of Addison's and Steele's The Spectator and The Tatler. In view of the immediate popularity of Locke's Essay in England and elsewhere, it is almost surprising that Pemberton's library did not include it in 1717, when it was advertised for auction. See A Catalogue of Curious and Valuable Books Belonging to … Mr. Ebenezer Pemberton … to be sold by Auction (Boston, 1717). By 1726 Cotton Mather, the most articulate popularizer of the "new philosophy" in America at the time, could speak of the Essay as a work that was then "much in vogue,"Manaductio ad Ministerium (Boston, 1726), p. 36. but in his Christian Philosopher, which he published in 1721, there is no mention of Locke or his writings. Much the same report can be given of Newton's works in New England. The Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was published in 1687 and the Optics in 1704. Dummer's collection brought to Yale a second-edition copy of the Principia, which also contained Newton's System of the World, and a first edition of Samuel Clarke's Latin translation of the Optics, which appeared in 1706.The second edition of the Principia was published in Cambridge, England in 1713. Newton himself donated the copy of it, and that of the first Latin edition of Optics (London, 1706), which Dummer sent to the college (Keogh, p. 464). Isaac Newton received early recognition at Cambridge for his ability in the mathematical sciences. He was elected Lucasian professor of mathematics before his twenty-seventh birthday in 1669, after Isaac Barrow resigned the chair. When the Royal Society of London elected him a Fellow in 1672, Newton directly presented the body first with an account of a reflecting telescope he had newly invented, and then with the flrst of his several important papers on the composition of light. of 1723 lists only a first edition copy of the Optics. It must be added that Newton's contributions were well known, at least in Boston and at Harvard, well before this time. Thomas Brattle, brother of William, had communicated his observations of the comet of 1680 to the Royal Observatory, and they were used by Newton to confirm his theory of the comet's orbit.The observations are in Newton's Principia, Bk. III, prop. 41, prob. 21, ex. Cotton Mather had read the Optics by 1712, when he pronounced Newton "the Perpetual Dictator of the Learned World in the Principles of Natural Philosophy."Thoughts for the Day of Rain (Boston, 1712) p. iii. His knowledge of Newton did not go far, however; in The Christian Philosopher he discusses at length Newton's optical theories, but in writing on gravity he credits Newton only once, for calculating the difference between the earth's polar and equatorial diameters.The Christian Philosopher (London, 1721), p. 82. Besides the scarce volumes of Locke and Newton, Dummer's gift brought to Yale a collection of other recent works that made its library unrivaled in the colonies. There were included the major scientific works of Robert Boyle, the posthumous papers of Robert Hooke, John Harris' scientific encyclopedia Lexicon Technicum,John Harris' Lexicon Technicum (2 vols., London, 1704–10) was an important collection of short articles upon recent scientific discoveries and contributions. It was almost unique among the scientific works at Yale in that it made no attempt to organize the topics under any formal system, but arranged them alphabetically instead. various publications of the Royal Society,According to Dummer, in 1719 Elihu Yale also promised to donate "another parcel of books, part of which he has promised me shall be the Royal transactions in seventeen Volumes" (Dexter, Documentary History, p. 193). But Bryant and Patterson list none of the Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society in Keogh. Yale did contribute a copy of Museum Regalis societatis (London, 1681), however, as well as the library's copy of Locke's Essay. And the collection also included the Royal Society's Miscellanea Curiosa (London, 1708). See Keogh, pp. 435, 443. and Jacques Rohault's Physica, a widely used textbook in the Cartesian physics to which Samuel Clarke had added footnotes explaining Newton's corrections of and improvements upon Descartes' theories.Rohault's Physica (London, 1697) with Clarke's annotations, was an important instrument in the dissemination of Newton's scientific method and physical theories in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; it clearly exhibited the conflict between the Newtonian and the Cartesian approaches to physical science. The Yale library's copy was of the third edition, 1710. Whiston's Astronomical Lectures and William Derham's Astro-theology and Physico-theology are the works Johnson refers to as being used to "clear up and establish" the Copernican system at Yale.Whiston's Astronomical Lectures read in the Public Schools at Cambridge (London, 1715) provided a quite thorough and systematic introduction to astronomy, including Newton's celestial mechanics. Derham's Astro-theology and his Physico-theology (1713; London, 1715) attempted to demonstrate "the being and attributes of God from his works of creation," as the subtitle of the latter declares. Because of the footnotes into which he compressed vast amounts of current scientific information and opinion, Derham's books were an important and popular vehicle for disseminating the new science in the early eighteenth century.
Dummer's gift also included Galileo's Systemata Cosmicum,Published in Augustae Treboc in 1635. Christian Huygens' Celestial Worlds Discover'd, Whether the remote stars might have systems of planets like that of our sun, which might be inhabited by rational creatures like ourselves, was a subject of much popular scientific speculation in the late seventeenth century. Huygens' contribution was published in an English translation in London in 1698. and David Gregory's Elements of Astronomy.Gregory was a close associate of Newton, who recommended him for the Savilian professorship of astronomy at Oxford. His two-volume Elements of Astronomy was published in London in 1715. Besides Derham's works, modern physico-theology was represented by John Ray's The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation. Ray, a noted seventeenth-century biologist and Fellow of the Royal Society of London, published this popular work in natural theology in London in 1691. The Yale library's copy was of the sixth edition of 1714. and Whiston's New Theory of the Earth.Whiston, Newton's successor as Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, published this work in 1696 as a scientifically updated version of the Biblical account of world history, from the creation through the deluge, and even to the final conflagration. In 1710 Whiston was charged widi Arianism and expelled from the University. The Yale library received a second edition of his Theory of the Earth (1708); an eighth edition was published as late as 1755. Philosophical works of the modern period had been almost as scarce as those in science in the Colonies. The Yale library now possessed not only Locke's Essay, but the works of Bacon and Descartes, Gassendi's Disquisitio metaphysica anti-Cartesianas, Gassendi attacked the Cartesian system and its philosophical foundations, first in his objections to Descartes' Meditations (published with the Meditations itself in 1641 as the fifth of the seven sets of Objections with Descartes' Replies), and then in this extended critique which appeared in Amsterdam in 1644. Jean LeClerc's Opera Philosophica,Jean LeClerc was a prominent figure among the Remonstrants in Amsterdam in the late seventeenth century, and a friend and correspondent of John Locke. His Opera Philosophica (3rd ed., Amsterdam, 1704) includes his writings on logic, ontology, and pneumatology. Nicolas Malebranche's Search after Truth,The first volume (Books I–III) of Malebranche's Recherche de la Verité was published in Paris in 1674, and appeared in an English translation by Thomas Taylor in London in 1694 as Father Malebranche's Treatise concerning the Search after Truth. His detailed examination of sensation and imagination were important contributions to the current literature on the mind. His occasionalist metaphysics, and his doctrine that we see all things in God, were topics of critical philosophical discussion by Locke, Arnauld, Leibniz, Berkeley, and others. Probably the most important of Malebranche's disciples was the English idealist John Norris, whose Essay towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World (2 vols., London, 1701–04) was also included in the Dummer collection. and major works of the later seventeenth-century English Platonists, especially the philosophical and theological works of Henry More, which were to have an early and lasting influence upon Edwards' thought. Seventeenth-century rational theology was further represented in works by Stephen Charnock, Edward Stillingfleet, and others. In addition to many older works in ethics, the eleven volumes of The Tatler and The Spectator,Sir Richard Steele presented copies of The Tatler (4 vols., London, 1710, 1711) and The Spectator (7 vols., London 1712, 1713) which were included in the Dummer collection. and Shaftesbury's Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times,Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks (3 vols., 1711; London, 1714). The work is a collection of various discourses he had written during the previous several years. Its popularity can be measured by the fact that it appeared in its eleventh edition in 1790. The Yale library received a copy of the second edition of 1714; unless otherwise noted, this edition is used here throughout. JE refers to the work in one of his later notes on the cover of "Natural Philosophy" (see below, p. 194). afforded views of the direction of moral thought and sensibility in the early eighteenth century. Such matter offered Edwards a much wider and richer field of literature to explore than any of his predecessors at Yale had found. Indeed there is every appearance that his studies during his last three years in the college stimulated a major intellectual awakening. From his writings of this period it is clear that he enthusiastically devoted himself to the scientific works. It is doubtful, however, that his earlier studies had prepared him to go far in this field on his own. In a letter to his father written shortly after he arrived in New Haven for his senior year, Edwards lists the books and supplies Cutler had advised him to acquire for his studies: "Alsted's Geometry and Gassendus' Astronomy; with which I would entreat you to get a pair of dividers, or mathematician's compasses, and a scale, which are absolutely necessary in order to learning mathematics; and also, the Art of Thinking, which, I am persuaded, would be no less profitable, than the other necessary to me."Dwight, 1, pp. 31–32. The original letter is in the Andover coll. The Yale library contains a copy of Antoine Arnauld, The Art of Thinking, ed. John Ozell (London, 1717), that bears JE's signature; it is undoubtedly the one he received from his father on this occasion. Arnauld first published the famous Ars Cogitandi, together with Pierre Nicole, in 1662. He had already made his philosophical mark by his astute objections to Descartes' Meditations (published with it as the fourth set of the Objections, with Descartes' Replies), and would later be an important critic of Malebranche (Traité des Vraies et Fausses Idées [Paris, 1683]) and of Leibniz (The Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence, ed. H. T. Mason and G. H. R. Parkinson ([Manchester and New York, 1967]). Despite these critical challenges to major figures in the developing stream of continental rationalism, the logic of Arnauld and Nicole is in many respects a classic in the modern rationalist tradition. It incorporated much from Descartes' Regulae and Discours, and from Pascal's De l'Esprit Geometrique. Following the general spirit of the rationalist movement, The Art of Thinking is aimed primarily at the training of the judgment so that error and uncertainty may be avoided in reasoning. Accordingly, the forms of syllogistic reasoning are not insisted upon, but presented as a useful aid to accurate reasoning. The "topics" of the Ramist logic are treated even more slightly, as being relatively less useful. On the other hand, the Cartesian distinctions between sensation, imagination, and conception, the methods of analysis and synthesis, and the notions of clarity and distinctness as marks of intelligibility and certitude, are emphasized. had probably studied Morton's textbook in physics, his lack of mathematics would seriously hinder any systematic reading of Newton's Principia. In fact, it appears that Edwards never acquired much skill in mathematics, and his reading of Newton was largely confined to the more general and philosophical discussions. Again, the request for Gassendi's Institutio Astronomica shows that he had not yet begun astronomy by that time. The writings of his first graduate year indicate that he was only then reading Whiston's Astronomical Lectures. The succession of Edwards' own writings through the following three years gives some evidence of the course of his scientific studies and interests. He does not appear to have been interested in biology; even "Of Insects" is primarily concerned with the physical explanation of the spider's flight. When Edwards wrote this paper during his senior year he had read something of Newton's theory of the "incurvation" of light, but evidently had not yet studied the copy of Optice in the college library.The term Newton uses for light diffraction in Optice is "inflexio" (in the English editions, "inflection"). The paper shows his early interest in optical questions, which might have been stimulated in part by his study of astronomy. "Of the Rainbow," which he probably wrote near the start of the next year, indicates his actual reading in Newton's work; but it, like "Of Insects," also suggests a study of Descartes' Dioptrics or some Cartesian treatment of optics based upon it. The fragment "Of Light Rays" draws from Huygens' conjectures concerning the plurality of worlds, which Edwards might have known about from reading Huygens' own Celestial Worlds Discover'd or Derham's Astro-theology. The scientific notes in "Natural Philosophy" indicate that during his two graduate years he also studied Whiston's Astronomical Lectures and perhaps his Sir Isaac Newton's Mathematick Philosophy more easily Demonstrated,Although this work is not listed in the inventory of the Dummer collection, there is some evidence in his writings that JE might have used it. The work, which appeared in London in 1716, is one of the earliest expositions of die Newtonian physics to follow upon the publication of the Principia. Derham's Physico-theology, and most especially Newton's Optice.
Edwards was particularly stimulated by the Queries that Newton added at the end of the Optice. He was interested in the variety of unusual and experimentally discovered phenomena that Newton mentioned there, and jotted notes upon several of them with his own proposals about their correct explanation. His hypotheses reflect his excitement over one of Newton's main suggestions in the Queries, that many phenomena cannot be explained by mere mechanical collisions among particles of matter, but must arise from attractive and repulsive forces by which the particles act upon each other without surface contact. It is clear that Edwards never mastered the mathematics of Newton's theory, any more than most of his contemporaries who soon championed it. But he seems from the outset to have had a unique appreciation of the theory's revolutionary implications for the fundamental framework of concepts that had traditionally been used to interpret the intelligible order of the world. In some respects the intellectual stage had already been set for Edwards' ready response to Newtonian physics. Not long before, probably during his senior collegiate year or early in the first year of graduate study, he had read some of the metaphysical works of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More.Henry More (1614–87) was one of the leaders of the Cambridge Platonists, a group of scholars and divines that included Ralph Cudworth, John Smith, and Benjamin Whichcote. By his own account, he rejected Calvinism in his early youth, and after a bout with scepticism during his student years in Cambridge, he found both philosophical and spiritual direction from the works of Platonic writers, Plotinus, Hermes Trismegistus, Marsilius Ficinus, and from the mystical Theologia Germanica (author unknown). In about 1646 More read Descartes' Principles of Philosophy (Amsterdam, 1644), and for a time was the most enthusiastic champion of Cartesianism in England. In 1648 More was persuaded to enter upon a philosophical correspondence with Descartes, which ended only with the latter's death in 1650. After Clerselier published Descartes' letters in 1657 and 1659, More published his own to Descartes in A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (London, 1662). The same volume included second editions of his earlier works, notably, An Antidote against Atheisme, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, and The Immortality of the Soul. A copy of this volume was included in the Dummer collection for the Yale library, and might have been the edition of More that JE studied. It is used as the edition of reference here. Philosophy" show how More influenced Edwards' thought concerning the general problem of the refutation of metaphysical materialism. Edwards' arguments in "Of Atoms" and the opening paragraphs of "Of Being" incorporate conceptions of matter, space, and time that are urged by More in his An Antidote against Atheisme and The Immortality of the Soul, and Edwards' line of demonstration is quite similar to that of More. Newton too, at an early stage of his career, had been much influenced by More's ideas concerning matter and space,In one of his early MS notebooks (1661) Newton wrote, "Yt Matter mayx be so small as to be indiscerpible the excellent Dr More in his booke of ye Soules immortality hath proved beyond all controversie" (Portsmouth Colls., Cambridge, Add. MSS 3996, no. 8). and the Newtonian concept of force quite readily lent itself to Platonistic and spiritualistic interpretations during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. There remains the major question whether Edwards might have read Locke's Essay during these final three years while he was a student in New Haven. Certainly, none of the writings we have discovered to belong to this period bear any obvious and outward marks of a receptive exposure to the Essay. The essay "Of the Prejudices of Imagination," where such marks might be expected to appear, reflects none of the characteristic ideas or vocabulary of Locke. On the contrary, this paper is thoroughly rationalistic in tone and emphasis; Edwards was much more likely to have been inspired to it by reading the discussion of clarity and distinctness, and the obscurity and confusion of ideas, in Arnauld's Art of Thinking.See Pt. I, ch. 9, "The clearness and distinctness of ideas and their obscurity and confusion." Indeed, we find Edwards' earliest dateable reference to Locke's Essay appears in his "Catalogue," or list of books he was interested in studying or acquiring. He began this list about the time he left New Haven for his New York pastorate,Thomas Schafer has provided this approximate dating for the beginning of JE's "Catalogue." The MS is in the Yale coll. but he did not include Locke's Essay until later, probably in the early part of 1724 after returning from New York.The fifteenth entry on the first side of a letter-sheet which JE inserted into the "Catalogue" is "Lock [sic] of Human understanding." It is immediately followed by the entry "Art of Thinking." These entries were evidently made early in 1724. JE's reference to Locke in "The Mind," No. 11, might date from about the same time. It is interesting, too, that JE included "Lock of Education" and "Mr. Locks Four Letters of Toleration" in an earlier part of his list (p. 1, nos. 27 and 37). Of course, the lateness of his listing of Locke's Essay may not of itself be significant; Henry More's works are not listed in the "Catalogue" at all, although textual evidence establishes that he studied More as a student. Moreover, the fact that the Essay and the Art of Thinking are listed together on p. i may give some reason to think that in this list JE was recording the books he actually owned. There is some additional reason to think that he did acquire a copy of Locke's work for his own use while he was writing "The Mind." There is nothing in this to indicate that he seriously studied the work during any part of the period of his undergraduate and graduate study. There is nevertheless some significant evidence that Edwards was exposed to the Essay during his student years. He could hardly have resided at the college during those three years as a student without being aware that a rare copy of Locke's work was at hand; and in view of his apparent excitement with works that represented the new science, it would be astonishing to learn that he had had no interest in Locke's work at that time. There are also some possible signs of his reading it in "Of Atoms": the concept of solidity treated there might have been derived partly from Locke's discussion of that property and our idea of it;Essay, Bk. II, ch. 4. and there seems to have been no other work actually available to Edwards from which he could more readily have formed the notion of "the certain unknown substance which philosophers used to say subsisted by itself," the notion he so explicitly and finally rejects in this early piece.See below, p. 215. Locke criticizes the notion in Essay, Bk. II, ch. 23, no. 2. Subsequent writings also indicate that Edwards might have read Locke's Essay earlier, during these student years. In Miscell. no. aa, which he wrote in New York, he discusses faith as a unique mode of apprehension of the "complex idea" of God; the expression itself might point to his earlier reading of Locke's account of how we form that idea.Ibid., nos. 33–35. More important, when we at last find clear and unmistakable evidence of the influence of Locke, in early articles in "The Mind," it appears that Edwards might not have been reading Locke for the first time when those articles were written. From the sequence of passages that show his attention to Locke's views, it seems that he was at least not reading through the work systematically, as one would expect for the first reading, but was instead considering passages and discussions in several different parts of the Essay.For example, "The mind," Nos. 2 and 3 seem to reflect passages in Locke's Bk. II, ch. 23; No. 10 pertains to Locke's discussion in Bk. IV, ch. 1; No. 11 to Bk. II, ch. 27, etc. Moreover, from the fact that he comments on Locke's views concerning personal identity in "The Mind," No. 11, it is evident that Edwards was using a copy of the second or a later edition of the work; and it might well have been one he had acquired for his own use.The chapter on identity and diversity (Bk. II, ch. 27), with its discussion of personal identity, was added to the second edition of the Essay in 1694 (see An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch [Oxford, 1975], p. xxi). The evidence of Edwards' reading Locke while he was yet a student, then, is mixed and indecisive at best. But the very character of this evidence is, by itself, an indication of a much more important desideratum. If Edwards had in fact read the work during this time, as Hopkins has reported, then it is obvious that he did not respond to it in the way Hopkins' report suggests. For he certainly did not, in any of his collegiate writings, express any of that greedy zest of the miser for Locke's "way of ideas" that Hopkins' statement has led us to suppose. Overall, then, Edwards' main interests and endeavors during this time were directed upon two different levels. He explored the new science, particularly that of Newton, for its explanations of natural phenomena, and formed his own general conception of the system of physical nature and its laws from these studies. Again, he addressed himself to metaphysical questions concerning the foundations of physics, and through treating the problem of materialism under the influence of More formed initial views concerning the nature and grounds of matter, space, and physical causation. Some of these views were to be reshaped significantly in later writings; but his main conclusions—that matter neither exists nor acts by itself, but depends immediately on the immaterial divine Being—were to remain fixed centers of his thought. These conclusions relate to the doctrine of God's absolute sovereignty in the moral and spiritual world, which Edwards came to accept at the time of his religious conversion, during his first year of graduate study. There is no mention of the event in any of his extant writings of that time, but he writes in his "Personal Narrative" about its effect upon his beliefs. From his childhood he had harbored doubts about the sovereignty of God "in choosing whom he would to eternal life, and rejecting whom he pleased, leaving them eternally to perish and be everlastingly tormented in Hell. It used to appear like a horrible doctrine to me." On the occasion in question, however, Edwards found himself entirely ready to abandon his doubts, not as the result of any reasoned proof or explanation, he writes, for he "never could give an account how, or by what means, I was thus convinced; not in the least imagining at the time nor for a long time after, that there was any extraordinary influence of God's spirit in it, but only that now I saw further, and my reason apprehended the justice and reasonableness of it. However my mind rested in it, and put an end to all those cavils and objections."Hopkins, Life, p. 25. Although Edwards arrived at the one conviction by argument and the other through a spiritual experience, his belief that God is sovereign in the physical order of the world remained as unshakeable as his acceptance of the doctrine of God's sovereignty in the moral and spiritual order. Many of the developments of his later thought may be seen as efforts to define the constitution of these two orders, and to show the manner of their dependence upon divine providence.
FROM NEW YORK TO NORTHAMPTON: 1722–26
During the summer of 1722 Edwards accepted a call from a small Presbyterian church near New York City. He left Connecticut to take up his pastorate there at the end of August. The struggling church survived only until spring, however, and he returned to East Windsor at the end of April. During the following year he preached in various Connecticut churches, sometimes as a ministerial candidate, and engaged himself in private study. He wrote his M.A. thesis during the summer. In When he went to New York Edwards probably left his manuscripts of "Natural Philosophy" and the other essays behind, for there is no evidence of further writing in them until he returned to Connecticut. His sojourn there was primarily a time of moral and spiritual, rather than scientific and philosophical, reflection. He compiled a series of resolutions for the governance of his thoughts and conduct, and maintained a diary to keep account of his progress in the observance of them.JE's "Resolutions" and "Diary" were first published, in part by Samuel Hopkins (Life, pp. 6–9, 10–21), and in full by Sereno Dwight (1, pp. 68–73, 74–94, 99–106). Except for the cover leaf of the "Diary," which is in the Yale coll., both MSS are now missing.
The "Diary" for Neither are there many signs in his "Catalogue" or book list of a continued interest in philosophical and scientific study during this period. Entries at the beginning of the list, which he probably set down just before or soon after going to New York, include (John Harris') "Lexicon Technicum" and "Sir Isaac Newton's Principia and Opticks."These two entries are nos. 11 and 12 on p. 1 of the bound MS, the page on which JE began the list. The first twenty-four entries on p. 1 were probably written before the end of 1722, and nos. 11 and 12 might have been put down just before or just after he went to New York. Under the heading "Books to be enquired for" he lists "the best Dictionary of the Nature of Bayle's Dictionary,"Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire Historique et Critique was published in 1697. The Dummer collection of books for the Yale library included the English translation of the Dictionary (4 vols., London, 1710). and "the best History of Lives of Philosophers."The Yale library had received a copy of Thomas Stanley's The History of Philosophy: containing the lives, opinions … of the philosophers of every sect (3rd ed., London, 1701). It was probably not until he returned to Connecticut that he added "The Gentleman's library and Ladies library Published by Sir Richard Steele," "Lock of Education," "Jenkins's Reasonableness and Certainty of the Christian Religion,"Robert Jenkin, The Reasonableness and Certainty of the Christian Religion (2 vols., 3rd ed., London, 1708). "Mr. Cheyne's Religious Philosophic book,"George Cheyne, Philosophical Principles of Religion, Natural and Revealed (London, 1705). "Sr. Isaac Newton's Mathematic Philosophy more Easily Demonstrated … by Mr. Whiston," "Mr. Whiston's Astronomical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion," "Mr. Lock's Four Letters of Toleration," "the Earl of Shaftesbury's Characteristics," and "Whiston's Theory of the Earth."Of this latter group of entries, the first is no. 26 and the last is no. 41 on p. 1 of the "Catalogue." Several of these entries appear to have been copied from advertisements. While he was in New York Edwards began his "Miscellanies." He continued to write articles in this series from time to time throughout the rest of his life, until it extended to nine manuscript volumes. Taken together, this series probably comprises one of the most complete and continuous records in existence of the intellectual history of a single person. Edwards regularly drew material from his "Miscellanies" for use in his sermons and lectures. Its articles show the background of thought and reading that he brought to his published works, and they reveal aspects of his theological and philosophical ideas that would otherwise have remained undetected. The import of many passages in other private writings, especially in "The Mind," can best be judged by considering them together with related articles in "Miscellanies." Upon returning to East Windsor in the early summer of 1723 Edwards entered a period of intense study and intellectual growth. He worked upon his M.A. thesis during the summer, regularly added entries in his "Miscellanies," and took up writing in "Natural Philosophy" again. Before the year's end he had also begun three new note series, "Notes on Revelation," "Notes on Scripture,"Professor Schafer dates the beginnings of both of these notebooks in the period following JE's New Yorkpastorate. and "The Mind." The course of development of his philosophical thought during this period can be traced by considering certain articles in "Miscellanies" which are closely related to his renewed activity in "Natural Philosophy" and the beginning of "The Mind." Edwards' first step in a new philosophical direction may be seen in Miscell. no. pp, which he wrote shortly before his return to Connecticut. "We know there was being from eternity," he writes, "and this being must be intelligent. For how doth one's mind refuse to believe, that there should be being from all eternity without its being conscious to itself that it was."The article is printed in Townsend, p. 74. When he returned to East Windsor in the summer he picked up the thread of this idea, and in an addition to "Of Being" in "Natural Philosophy" he developed it more fully and attempted a demonstration of its most provocative consequence, that the material world "can exist nowhere else but in the mind, either infinite or finite."Below, p. 75. For further discussion, see below, pp. 186–87.For all the perplexities this claim would generate about such matters as the status of space and time, the nature of causal dependence, and especially the received views concerning the union of mind and body in the human person; and indeed, for all his reluctance to submit the claim to public scrutiny in his published writings, Edwards seems to have remained fast in his conviction that consciousness, involving perception and knowledge, is necessary for the existence of anything whatever. Shortly after he set forth his new principle in "Of Being," Edwards undertook an examination of the concept of excellency which was to give rise to another, and perhaps even more fundamental, principle.
Many "Miscellanies" entries written during the summer of 1723 show that the ideas of order, harmony, and excellency were becoming central to his conception of the relations between God and the world, and his understanding of God's purposes in the creation of it.For example, Miscell. nos. 29 (see Townsend, pp. 153–54), 32, 34 (ibid., p. 241), 42 (ibid., p. 238), and 64. Sometime in the fall, probably shortly after the commencement in which he received his M.A. degree, Edwards began Miscell. no. 78 on the subject of excellency itself. His purpose was to give an analysis and explanation of it. After writing a few sentences he transferred the discussion to another paper, to make it the first article in "The Mind."See below, pp. 325–26. After a preliminary analysis of harmony and proportion with respect to their beauty, Edwards turned to the question of why proportion is always "pleasing to the mind" and disproportion always displeasing. In order to explain this fact he introduces a general metaphysical theory, in which the central proposition, as Edwards himself states it, is: "In identity of relation consists all likeness, and all identity between two consists in identity of relation."Below, p. 334. The idea expressed in this line seems to have burst upon him as a fresh and fundamental insight. He devoted much of the remainder of the essay to comments upon its ramifications and upon instances that seem to confirm it. He concluded that the relations of a thing to others are the fundamental condition of its existence, and that "being, if we examine narrowly, is nothing else but proportion." After he completed the main essay he made several additions to it through the autumn and following winter, as new implications for the concept arose in connection with the development of his theological views in "Miscellanies."See below, p. 320. In the meantime, Edwards resumed his writing in other parts of "Natural Philosophy." He began to form a definite plan for the composition of a general treatise, setting down his memoranda concerning its style and organization on the cover leaf of the manuscript.Below, pp. 192–95. He advised himself with regard to the presentation of "things exceedingly beside the ordinary way of thinking," and determined to state every matter clearly and distinctly, without confusion and ambiguity, "so that the ideas shall be left naked." The whole would be organized so that the easiest, most intelligible, and most general propositions came first "according to the dependence of other things upon them." The several postulata which he added to the essay "Of the Prejudices of Imagination" during this time suggest the manner in which he intended to conduct his arguments.Below, pp. 199–201. And his fresh additions to both the long series and the short series of "Things to be Considered" in "Natural Philosophy" probably concerned the topics he intended to discuss in the work. In addition to the questions in optics and astronomy that he had commented upon before, Edwards' new entries discuss at length such subjects as the causes of mountains and the valleys among them, the nature of the atmosphere, and the structures and means of propagation of plants.In die short series, these entries run from No. 22 to No. 28, the last in this series. In the long series, the post-New York entries begin with No. 45. In the meantime, in At some earlier time Timothy Edwards had communicated with Judge Paul Dudley of the Superior Court of Massachusetts, who was a colonial Fellow of the Royal Society of London. Dudley got from the elder Edwards an account of a remarkable pumpkin vine that had flourished untended in his pasture, and had incorporated some of the details of the report into a paper on the powers of vegetation which he communicated to the Royal Society. The paper did not appear in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society until 1724,"Observations on some of the Plants in New-England, with Remarkable Instances of their Nature and Power of Vegetation," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, (1724), 194 ff. Cited hereafter as Philosophical Transactions. TE's contribution is quoted below, p. 163, n. 3. but Dudley apparently wrote Edwards in the summer of 1723, probably to notify him that it was forthcoming and to thank him for his contribution. At any rate, the letter contained a postscript inviting the report of any other wonders of nature that might be worthy of Dudley's attention. Although Dudley's letter is no longer extant, it is referred to at the beginning of Jonathan's "Spider" letter. He responded to the opportunity, worked up the observations in "Of Insects" in his now famous letter, and presented them with all the modesty his "Natural Philosophy" memoranda had counseled. He began, "If you think, Sir, that they are not worthy the taking notice of, with greatness and goodness overlook and conceal," and ended, "Pardon me if I thought it might at least give you occasion to make better observations on these wondrous animals, that should be worthy of communicating to the learned world." He sent the letter on Edwards joined the Yale faculty as junior tutor in From the few entries in his "Diary" for this period, Edwards found his tutorial duties difficult and distracting. Nevertheless he continued to add new articles to his notebooks, during the first year at least. Memoranda added on the cover of "Natural Philosophy" show his further reflections about the treatise he was planning, and the unnumbered series of articles (US) in the last section of that manuscript dates from this time. Several of these articles indicate his further attention to works of Newton, Whiston, and others that he had read during his student years. For the most part, his scientific interests still were directed toward problems in physics; the articles on ice and elasticity, which he produced by periodic additions of passages over quite a long time, show him employing the concept of gravity to explain the phenomena, as he had in earlier discussions. US No. 8, is particularly significant, for the axioms in this entry show how Edwards proposed to apply the principle of sufficient reason to infer an immaterial cause of certain motions of bodies. "The Mind" includes several articles that show a definite relation to Edwards' teaching of logic during his tutorship. Notes at the back of his copy of Brattle's Compendium of Logic, which he probably used in the classroom, are in some instances directly correlated with comments and discussions in "The Mind." It is even more evident, however, that he was engaged in a study of Locke's Essay. Many of the articles near the beginning of "The Mind" seem to have been inspired by passages in this work, and "The Mind," No. 11 refers to Locke directly. This article, as has been noted, shows that Edwards was using a second or later edition of the work, for it refers to the theory of personal identity which Locke did not take up in the first edition.See above, pp. 25–26. Again, there does not seem to be conclusive evidence as to whether Edwards had read the work before, while he was a student at the college. The biographical question thus still seems open to discussion. But if the articles in "The Mind" reflect Edwards' first exposure to Locke's work, then we can no longer think of Locke's influence upon him as though it were the intellectual ravishment of a schoolboy busy at his logic lessons. The discussions in "The Mind" are well anchored by the metaphysical principles that Edwards had already settled, and he was not likely to be blown far from those moorings. Examination of the articles themselves tends to bear this out. In most questions where Edwards may be seen responding to Locke, we find he either rejects or consciously modifies Locke's express claims. It also appears that Edwards found his more recent insights into the nature of existence demanded some significant revisions in those metaphysical conclusions he had arrived at earlier in "Of Atoms" and "Of Being." Several articles on the existence of bodies and the necessity and reality of space indicate how he accomplished these revisions, and how far he considered and responded to objections to his astonishing doctrine that the whole material world exists nowhere but in the mind.For further discussion, see below, pp. 97–111. It appears that Edwards might have found the study of Locke to be more pertinent to his efforts to develop a theory of mind. On and glory of God, is as clear a knowledge of the manner of God's exerting himself with respect to spirits and mind, as I have of his operations concerning matter and bodies."Dwight, 1, p. 105. But even in "The Mind," No. 11, where he approvingly refers to Locke's theory of personal identity, Edwards shows that he rejects Locke's concept of the status of the mind. Other passages throughout the series indicate that Edwards took a quite different view from Locke's with regard to the acts and operations of the mind, as well.For further discussion, see below, pp. 119–22.
NORTHAMPTON TO PRINCETON: 1726–58
A brief sketch of the remainder of Edwards' life will be sufficient to complete the history of his composition of the papers in this volume.For a more complete and detailed account of Edwards' life from the beginning of his Northampton pastorate, see Winslow, Jonathan Edwards, chs. 5–15. In the fall of 1726 Edwards accepted the call to Northampton to become a colleague of his grandfather, the Reverend Solomon Stoddard. He was ordained on In 1748 a dissension began in his Northampton congregation, which led to his dismissal in 1750. Edwards preached his farewell sermon on Virtue" and "Concerning the End for which God Created the World" which were published posthumously in 1765.In The Works of President Edwards, ed. by S. Austin (8 vols., Worcester, 1808–09), "The Nature of True Virtue" is in Vol. 2, pp. 395–471, and "Concerning the End for which God Created the World" is in Vol. 6, pp. 9–124. Original Sin was completed near the end of the Stockbridge period, and published in 1758, the year of his death.Edited by Clyde A. Holbrook and published, as Original Sin in Works (Yaleed., 1970), 3. In 1757 he was invited to succeed his son-in-law Aaron Burr as president of the College of New Jersey. He took the oath of office in During the first few years of his residence in Northampton, probably up to the time of Stoddard's death in 1729, Edwards continued to pursue his scientific interests, though at a considerably reduced rate. Several final memoranda on the cover of "Natural Philosophy" indicate that he was still working toward the composition of his treatise in 1726, at about the time he left Yale.Nos. 15–21 on the inside page. The first of these refers to the Earl of Shaftesbury, whose Characteristicks. JE might then have been reading. See below, pp. 194–95. Two entries in the unnumbered series in this manuscript were probably written in that year, several more in the next, and the last two in late 1728 or 1729.These include all the entries numbered 27–40 in this series. See below, pp. 294–95. These last articles were probably connected with his reading of Henry Pemberton's A View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy,JE listed the work in his "Catalogue," p. 2, no. 39. It was published in London and Dublin in 1728. a work which Edwards cites in the last of the short series of notes he titled "Wisdom in the Contrivance of the World."See below, p. 309. These notes, which he wrote in late 1732, and the essay "Beauty of the World" that precedes them on the same separate leaf and which was written in 1726,See below, p. 297. show how Edwards' interests in nature extended beyond what we now regard as the proper domain of the scientist. One of these other interests is in the foreground in the series titled "Images of Divine Things" which Edwards probably began in late 1727 or early 1728 and continued until nearly the end of his life. Since the manuscript of "The Mind" has been lost, judgments as to the times at which its later entries were made are considerably less certain than for his other notebooks and papers. Comparisons of the content of articles in "The Mind" and those in "Miscellanies" indicate that Edwards had probably written "The Mind," No. 45 by the time he settled in Northampton in late 1726.See below, p. 327. "The Mind," Nos. 46 through 60 were most likely written by the time of Stoddard's death in 1729 or soon afterward. Several of the articles written during this time indicate that Edwards had read George Berkeley's An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision.Listed in JE's "Catalogue," p. 3, no. 24. See below, pp. 123–24. He might have begun to plan his treatise on the mind during this period.With regard to die "Subjects to be Handled in the Treatise on the Mind," Dwight comments, "The preceding articles were set down from time to time at the close of the work, in two series; the first, ending with No. 26" (Dwight, 1, p. 664). But by 1731 it appears that he had laid "The Mind" aside for the time, because he removed blank paper from the notebook to use in writing sermons.See below, pp. 327–29. In the meantime, however, he had begun a rough plan for yet another major work, "A Rational Account of the Main Doctrines of the Christian Religion Attempted."See below, p. 394. The topics to be handled in this work suggest that he intended to organize the principles he had set forth and explored in his earlier manuscript writings in such a way as to develop a major system of philosophical theology. The plan was still alive for him in the mid-1740s when he jotted a memorandum concerning its preface: "To shew how all the arts and sciences, the more they are perfected, the more they issue in divinity, and coincide with it, and appear to be as parts of it." By about 1747 he had evidently added several other articles to "The Mind," those numbered 61–69. In that year or the next he formed a new index for the series to correspond with a new organization of the manuscript.See below, pp. 316–22, 328. Articles up to "The Mind," No. 69 were cited in the original composition of this index; but since the references to Nos. 70 and 71 appear to have been added afterward, and No. 72 is not referred to at all, it seems likely that these three were written after the index was first drawn up. "The Mind," No. 72, in particular, might have been written in Stockbridge when Edwards was developing his argument concerning personal identity for Original Sin.See below, p. 329. One further passage, the quotation from Cudworth's Intellectual System which is found at the end of "The Mind," No. 40, was probably added in late 1756 or 1757, when Edwards inserted passages from the same book in his "Images of Divine Things" and in "Miscellanies.""Images of Divine Things," nos. 208, 209, 210; "Miscellanies," no. 1359.
The untitled piece which we here call "Notes on Knowledge and Existence" was probably also written in Stockbridge, perhaps in 1756 or 1757.See below, pp. 394–95. These notes might have been set down in planning a philosophical dissertation. They are of particular interest in showing how, at this late date, Edwards was ready to reaffirm that idealistic phenomenalism and the principles underlying it that he had explored so long before in "The Mind" and other manuscript writings. The piece also contains an important and illuminating comment upon immaterial substance and its relation to bodies.
2. Edwards as a Scientist
With the above biographical sketch, several mistaken impressions that have been widely held concerning Edwards' scientific interests and objectives may be rectified. In the first place, his early essays, the notes in "Natural Philosophy," and his "Spider" letter were all written at a later time, and his work on them extended over a much longer period, than has generally been supposed. They represent his serious and continued efforts to add his own contributions to the body of current scientific knowledge. His communication of his discoveries concerning the spider's flight to Paul Dudley, and his preparations to compose a treatise on natural philosophy, bear witness to the scope of his ambitions as a scientist. In the second place, Edwards found no conflict between his scientific interests and his religious convictions and vocation, and his interest in science did not flag after his conversion. On the contrary, the major body of notes and discussions in "Natural Philosophy" were written after his conversion, and he wrote the "Spider" letter and began to plan his treatise at the very time that he was actively seeking a pulpit, during the summer and autumn of 1723. During the same period he was deeply engaged in theological and biblical studies, as is shown by the large number of entries he added to his "Miscellanies," and by his "Notes on Scripture" and his "Notes on Revelation," which he began during this time. He did not finally abandon the treatise on natural philosophy until several years after he had settled in Northampton, when the burden of pastoral duties probably took both his time and interest from the project. It is hardly likely, in any case, that Edwards could ever have realized the full scope of his ambitions in science. The advent of Newtonian mechanics with its mathematical demands soon brought the age of the amateur scientist, or at least physicist, to an end. In the light of Edwards' background, education, and circumstances, it is in fact remarkable enough that he accomplished what he did in his notes and essays. During his student days, the science taught at Yale was still predominantly scholastic. If Samuel Johnson's testimony is to be credited, only the first faltering step was then being made toward the teaching of modern science, and that step was made by tutors whose own formal training in science was minimal and probably thoroughly scholastic in content. What Edwards achieved by way of understanding must have been mainly through his own efforts. Nor did he have the advantage, so important to fostering the valuable contributions of amateurs in England and on the continent, of a circle of collaborators, interested correspondents and critics to whom he could turn for stimulation and direction. It is likely that the colonial intellectual atmosphere in which he worked was more indifferent than hostile to science. Several prominent New Englanders, indeed, were known correspondents of scientists in England, and some made significant contributions of their own. John Winthrop, Jr., the first governor of Connecticut, a noted chemist and metallurgist, was a charter member of the Royal Society when it was formed in 1663. Thomas Brattle, a Harvard tutor, communicated his observations of the comet of 1680 to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, whence they were received by Isaac Newton and used by him to compute the comet's orbit.Brattle was Newton's observer in "Boston, in New-England." See Newton, Principia, Bk. III, prop. 41, problem 21, example. Brattle also published observations of lunar and solar eclipses in the Philosophical Transactions. Zabdiel Boylston, a Boston physician, successfully administered inoculation against smallpox, for the first time in the western world, to large numbers of his townsmen during the epidemic of 1720. And Cotton Mather encouraged and publicly promoted the inoculation, even though the other Boston clergymen condemned the practice.Otho Beall, Jr. and Richard Shryock, Cotton Mather. First Significant Figure in American Medicine (Baltimore, 1954). Mather's The Christian Philosopher greatly encouraged popular acceptance of new ideas, and his communication to the Royal Society of his own and others' scientific observations led to his election as a member in 1713.See G. L. Kittredge, "Cotton Mather's Election into the Royal Society," Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 14 (1912), pp. 81–114. Paul Dudley, to whom Edwards sent his "Spider" letter, published twelve papers in the Philosophical Transactions,The complete list of Dudley's papers in the Philosophical Transactions is given in Sibley's Harvard Graduates, 4, p. 54. mostly on natural history and agriculture, and, like Mather, solicited reports of observations of natural phenomena from neighbors and friends. But although almost all these contributors, and other New Englanders who are known to have cultivated scientific interests, lived in or near Boston, they did not form a cohesive circle to whom Edwards could have looked for support and recognition.In the 1660s Increase Mather had organized a circle in Boston to promote scientific activities in the new world, but it lasted for only a few years. Later efforts to organize a society failed until 1743, when the American Philosophical Society was formed. See Brook Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789 (Chapel Hill, 1956), pp. 59 ff. For all of them, the center of the "learned world" was England. Edwards was well aware of this disadvantage when he reminded himself, in planning his treatise, that "the world will expect more modesty because of my circumstances, in America, young, etc."JE's notes for a treatise on natural philosophy, No. 6. See below, p. 193. Edwards appears to be nearly unique among colonial scientists in the early eighteenth century, in that while their contributions were overwhelmingly in the fields of natural history, agriculture, and medicine, his primary interests and efforts were directed to problems in physics. In his early essays and throughout "Natural Philosophy" he attempts to formulate and apply explanatory hypotheses to account for such phenomena as the appearance of the rainbow and other meteors, the evaporation of water, combustion, respiration, the circulation of blood, the freezing of ice, elasticity, and the reflection, refraction, and diffraction or "incurvation" of light. His "Spider" papers might appear to be an exception; they have been widely praised, not only by students of Edwards' thought but by professional scientists as well, for their contributions to the natural history of the spider. Benjamin Silli-man reprinted the draft of the "Spider" letter in his journal as an appendix to an important article on North American spiders by the noted arachnologist N. M. Hentz,Appendix to Hentz, "On North American Spiders," American Journal of Science and Arts, 21 (1832), p. 109. and two other well-known entomologists, Henry McCook and Alpheus S. Packard, have credited Edwards with original discoveries in several points in his observations of spiders.McCook's remarks are in American Spiders and their Spinning Work (3 vols., Philadelphia, 1889–93) 1, pp. 68–69, and 2, pp. 280–83. See also his paper, "Jonathan Edwards as a Naturalist," Presbyterian and Reformed Review, 1 (1890), pp. 393–402. A. S. Packard's comments are quoted by Egbert Smyth in "Flying Spider," pp. 2–3. The originality of JE's discoveries has been questioned more recently by David Wilson, "The Flying Spider," Journal of the History of Ideas, 32 (1971), pp. 447–58. Wilson notes correspondences between Edwards' account and descriptions that had been published in Philosophical Transactions by Martin Lister and Francois Xavier Bon. It is highly unlikely that Edwards was acquainted with these papers when he wrote "Of Insects" at Yale in 1719 or 1720, though he might have read Cotton Mather's reference to Lister on the subject in The Christian Philosopher (London, 1721), p. 149, not long afterward. But a careful study of "Of Insects," the earliest of the papers and the foundation of the others, shows that Edwards' primary, and original concern was to discover the physical principles that would account for the flight of this wingless insect. The essay merits further comment, for it is in many respects typical of Edwards' other scientific efforts, though it is untypical in the respect for which it is best known. Edwards begins "Of Insects" with a rough classification of spiders, in order to call attention to the bridging and ballooning of the kind that "keep in forests, upon trees, bushes, shrubs, etc." They are often observed to pass from one tree or shrub to another on bridges of web, and Edwards confesses his astonishment at seeing them sail aloft on long strings of web. His objective is to explain these phenomena. The observations that he so admirably describes are not in fact an explanation, but his account of how he arrived at one. He repeatedly watched a spider spin out a web into the air; when the web caught upon a tree or bush it formed a bridge, and when it trailed out free to a great length it carried the spider aloft. From these observations Edwards formed the hypothesis he offers as an explanation: the spider feels, when its web is anchored upon another object, as though the web itself were a nerve, and so hazards to use it as a bridge. And the web must be lighter than air, so that when it has reached a sufficient length the spider is swept aloft by it, according to the principles of buoyancy, as a swimmer is lifted in water by a plank of wood. Further observations discover how the spider expresses the web; these are described in fine detail and illustrated with diagrams. Since Edwards supposed that ballooning and bridging are basically voluntary, he offers a further hypothesis to explain how the ballooning spider controls its descent, and adds a corollary to remark the goodness of God in providing his creatures with such an extraordinary means for their recreation and pleasure. The observations reported in this part of "Of Insects," as has been mentioned, are quite atypical of Edwards' scientific endeavors. In a few instances elsewhere his descriptions of phenomena are evidently from first-hand experience, for example, the length and varying pitch of the sound of thunder in "Natural Philosophy," SS No. 18, the potholes in river beds in SS No. 23, the flakes of frozen fog in SS No. 26, and the plants he describes in LS No. 48. But none of these involved his conducting experiments, even of the rudimentary sort reported in "Of Insects." In "Of the Rainbow" he mentions several experiments that can demonstrate that a rainbow is caused by sunlight reflected from drops of water, and he probably tried some of these, but they were all suggested to him by a few lines in Newton's Optics.Bk. I, pt. 2, prop. 9 (in 1706 ed., pp. 139–40). His casual attitude toward experiments in science is strikingly revealed by US No. 4 where he asserts the compressibility of water solely on theoretical grounds, despite the acknowledged fact that experimental tests indicated the contrary.Dwight speaks of JE's inference as a discovery that was later confirmed and published (Dwight, 1, p. 53). "A sounder and more critical judgment is offered by Clarence Faust in JE as a Scientist," American Literature, 1 (1929–30), pp. 399–400. Again, in SS No. 21b, Edwards' observation of the color of sunlight filtering through the leaves of a tree is striking enough; but though he speaks of it as an experiment, he noticed the phenomenon by chance rather than design. And although it might have suggested several easily contrived experiments, he apparently never considered performing them. Instead, from this single observation he infers a series of very general conclusions about the nature of light, conclusions which are based essentially upon a previously assumed theory. "Of Insects" is more typical of Edwards' other scientific writings in its pursuit and elaboration of the explanations of phenomena within the framework of acknowledged laws of nature or of a previously accepted physical theory. The principles of hydrostatics are invoked again to explain the ease with which blood can circulate in LS No. 19, and in his treatment of the composition and formation of the atmosphere in LS No. 56. In SS No. 27 he assumes the theory that cold is constituted by frigorific particles, a theory of Pierre Gassendi which Cotton Mather commended,In Christian Philosopher, p. 73. in explaining the cold of the polar regions. Newton's principle that all bodies or parts of matter gravitate toward each other is used by Edwards to explain the size and shape of the world (LS Nos. 1–3), the emission of light and heat (LS Nos. 18 and 19), the cohesion of any two atoms that "touch by surfaces" (LS No. 20), the reflection, refraction, and diffraction of light (SS Nos. 1 and 9; LS No. 46), elasticity (US No. 9), and various other phenomena. The compressibility of water in US No. 4 is deduced from the fundamental conception that water, like any other compound body, is composed of atoms. Although Edwards addresses himself to a very wide range of topics in his scientific writings, various problems in optics were of particular interest to him throughout. The interest is first manifested in a further passage in "Of Insects." Having noticed that the webs of ballooning spiders are often quite visible at great distances, but nearly invisible when held near the eye, he proposes to find an explanation for this unusual fact. He first proposes the Cartesian account of why luminous bodies appear larger at a distance as an hypothesis;See René Descartes, Dioptrics, Discourse 6. Descartes published Dioptrics with his Discourse on Method (Paris, 1637). For a recent English translation, see Descartes: Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, trans. Paul J. Olscamp (Indianapolis, 1965). JE might have gathered the explanation from Descartes' work, or from Whiston's Astronomical Lectures, p. 24. but because of disanalogies between such cases and the instance of spiders' webs he abandons the account and refers the phenomenon instead to "that incurvation of the rays passing by the edge of any body, which Sir Isaac Newton has proved." At the time he wrote this passage Edwards had probably not yet studied Newton's Optics, but had picked up the idea of the "incurvation" of light from his reading of William Whiston or William Derham in connection with his study of astronomy. When he turned to Newton's work soon afterward optics became a central area of his scientific interests, and his reflections upon the theory of light led to a more general conception of the nature of the physical world. Throughout his discussions of optics Edwards supposes that light consists of small particles of matter, which are emitted at great speeds from luminescent bodies, and are acted upon by other bodies to cause the phenomena of reflection, refraction, and diffraction. To this extent, his conception is like that outlined by Newton in Query 29 in the third book of his Optics.In the 1706 edition JE would have used, this Query was no. 21. In earlier articles, however, his view does not conform to Newton's in specific points, but suggests the prior influence of Cartesian optics. In "Of the Rainbow" Edwards bids the reader to study Newton's account of the reflection and refraction of light, but his own explanation of these phenomena involve the conceptions of "perfectly reflexive" and "imperfectly reflexive" bodies that are foreign to Newton. His illustrations of these notions are reminiscent of the analogies in Descartes' Dioptrics of a ball's rebounding from a surface to explain reflection, and its breaking through the surface to explain refraction.Dioptrics, Discourses 2 and 3. Although Descartes rejects the particulate theory of light, he, and Edwards after him, assumes the phenomena follow from the actual impingement of light upon physical surfaces according to the laws of collision; but Newton explicitly rejects this conception and offers a demonstration to the contrary.Optics, Bk. II, pt. 3, prop. 8: "The cause of reflection is not the impinging of Light on the solid or impervious parts of Bodies, as is commonly believed."
When Edwards wrote "Of the Rainbow" he apparently had read little more than the beginning sentences of Newton's account of the bow, and studied the diagram which shows how sunlight is reflected from the interior concave surfaces of the raindrops. His own diagram represents the reflections according to his own theory, and imitates Newton's in this respect. But he failed to note the refractions of the rays within the drops, or to understand their importance in determining both the shape of the bow and the arrangement of its colors. At the end of the essay Edwards raises the question of the colors of the rainbow, which he remarks has been "almost answered already," apparently by the hypothesis of reflections he had already given. But he stops short of giving his explanation, and only after several years, in "Natural Philosophy," US No. 2, he notes that the separation of rays into their several colors is the result of refraction within the drops, not reflection from their concave surfaces. "Of the Rainbow" indicates that Edwards did not read Newton's Optics systematically, and that his own theory of light was largely fashioned from ideas gleaned from other sources. He did, however, study the Queries at the end of Newton's work with particular care, and from them he derived the idea of gravity as force by which every body is attracted to every other body. In "Natural Philosophy," SS No. 1, Edwards writes, "To observe that incurvation, refraction, and reflections from concave surfaces of drops of water, etc., is from gravity," probably taking the suggestion from the context of Newton's discussion in the Queries of the role of attractive and repulsive forces in explaining optical phenomena. Edwards follows with SS Nos. 18 and 19, suggesting how the emission of light can be explained by the gravitation of particles of matter. In LS No. 46 he argues that as refraction is caused by the attraction of the rays, and since rays of different colors are differently refrangible, the differently colored rays must have different densities. Differences in density are then explained by differences in the speeds or degrees of vivacity with which the rays proceed. In US No. 23 Edwards explains the selective reflection by which a body appears colored from the same principles. Despite major differences between Edwards' conception of light and the views of Descartes, Huygens, and Newton, he shares with them the assumption that light is comprised of the same homogeneous matter as gross physical bodies; as he holds a corpuscularean theory, he argues that it differs from other bodies only in the size and speed of the particles of which it is composed. Otherwise, it conforms to the same universal laws of nature as all other material things. In a corollary to LS No. 46 he reasons: "Because there is such a difference in the density of rays of light, it appears that the atoms of which the rays of light are compounded are immensely less than the rays themselves." In the earlier fragment, "Of Light Rays," he attempts a calculation of the size of the particles of light that are emitted from a fixed star. As many as there are at the surface of the star "within the space that the least mote [fills]," they still will not fill that space, for they cross each others' paths freely and without mutual obstruction. The rays themselves, he concludes, and the bodies that compose them, must be incalculably small, and the human eye must be exquisitely sensitive to be stimulated by so narrow and rarefied a stream of rays as it receives from the star. In all these discussions, and in his treatment of other topics, Edwards' chief interest is in developing a reasonable explanation for the phenomena in question, based upon a general theory concerning the fundamental nature of matter and the operation of physical causes. His account of various optical phenomena begins, not with experimental inquiry, but with a conception of the nature of light itself and of the causes of its refraction and reflection. He does not hesitate to introduce apparently arbitrary hypotheses and assumptions into his explanations, provided they conform to the basic theory. In "Of Light Rays" he supposes that 10,000 light rays are received by the eye in a sixtieth of a second of time, without pausing to explain or defend this figure. In US No. 4 he supposes a great abyss of water lying under the earth's crust, and that this water is denser and heavier than that on the surface. In several articles he argues from experience: his account of the growth and propagation of plants arises in part from observations that the seedlings of every species are similar and regular in their arrangements of leaves, buds, etc. (LS No. 48); and he rebuts a theory of the cause of the freezing of water on the ground that it implies that ice has a greater density than water, whereas in fact it floats on water (US No. 12). But even here Edwards does not contrive further experiments or make detailed observations to establish the facts pertaining to his subject. In most instances, the experimentally discovered phenomena to which he refers were gleaned from his reading of Whiston, Derham, and above all, Newton's Optics. The theory of nature upon which Edwards depends in most of his scientific demonstrations is the theory of atomism. All bodies are composed of indivisible, solid particles of a homogeneous matter; they have various sizes and shapes, and various positions and motions in the void of empty space; and they combine and separate, collide and rebound, and otherwise interact according to fixed universal laws. The gross bodies of the world, their properties, and all the observable phenomena in the physical universe are thus determined by the precise character of this system of atoms. Edwards introduces this conception of nature in the earliest pages of "Natural Philosophy," demonstrating its principal ideas by a purely a priori argument drawn largely from the writings of the seventeenth-century Platonist Henry More. Although Edwards' basic physical theory is thus similar to that of such mid-seventeenth-century "Epicurean" mechanists as Gassendi and Charleton, it differs fundamentally from theirs by the introduction of the concept of gravitation. Upon reading Newton, especially the Queries at the end of the Optics, Edwards took up the idea of universal gravitational attraction with enthusiasm, applying it wherever he could in cosmology, physics, and optics. In LS No. 14 he proposed to show "how the motion, rest and direction of the least atom has an influence on the motion, rest and direction of every body in the universe." After applying Newton's law in LS No. 20 to prove that two atoms touching by surfaces must gravitate to each other with an infinite force, he asserts in LS No. 22 that "in some sense, the essence of bodies is gravity." It is therefore folly to seek a mechanical cause of gravity; it is "no way diverse from a principle by which matter acts on matter." In all these articles Edwards uses the terms "gravity" and "attraction" as equivalent, generally understanding by them any force by which bodies tend toward each other.In Principia, Bk. I, prop. 69, Scholium, Newton writes, "I here use the word 'attraction' in general for any endeavor whatever, made by bodies to approach each other." Like Newton, he regards gravity as universal in nature, and so his conception is very far from that of earlier physicists, who supposed gravity to be a tendency of bodies toward the center of the earth, or a property of only one kind of matter, viz., earth. But Newton hesitated to speculate about the cause of gravity, at least in his published works, and did not rule out the possibility that the forces in nature may have mechanical causes.In the famous statement in his General Scholium to the Principia, Newton writes, "I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses." In letters to Richard Bentley he earnestly denies having ever asserted that gravity is essential to bodies.Four Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Doctor Bentley (London, 1756), Letter II, p. 20; Letter III, p. 25. The argument of LS No. 20, upon which Edwards' position depends, gives a good indication of the extent to which he comprehended the specific points of Newton's mathematical formulation and application of the laws of force. He supposes two atoms, equal in size and shape and touching along a common surface, are each divided ad infinitum in the same manner into parts in a continued proportion. Each part of one of the atoms, he argues, will attract a corresponding and equal part of the other. By applying Newton's law of gravitational force to these pairs of corresponding parts, he calculates that the members of every such pair will attract each other with the same finite quantity of gravitational force. But since there are an infinite number of these pairs of corresponding parts, he concludes, the whole force with which the two atoms attract each other must be a finite force taken an infinite number of times, or an infinite force. Not only does Edwards err in calculating the force attracting the parts of each of the pairs in the case he describes (the quantity will not be the same for every pair of parts); he also mistakenly assumes that the attraction between two bodies taken as wholes is simply the sum of the attractions of each part of the one to some corresponding part of the other. Among other things, this assumption neglects to take into account the fact that any part of a body is attracted to the other parts of the same body (or atom).Principia, Bk. I, prop. 88. Newton demonstrates that the attraction of all the parts of a body of whatever size or shape for another external body, is equal to the attraction of a globe of similar and equal matter having its center at the common center of gravity of the parts. For physicists and philosophers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, there were serious conceptual difficulties in the supposition that gravity is an original or essential property of bodies. Edwards himself, in US No. 31, acknowledges that the point is not intuitively evident, for we can conceive a body without conceiving its attracting any other. Nevertheless, he still takes his former arguments to be sufficient for the claim. But the major problem with the doctrine lay in its implication that bodies as such may act upon and affect each other at a distance, even through empty space. This thesis was directly contrary to the mechanistic theory of motion, which, it was held, could only be produced or altered in a body by its actual contact with some other external body. Edwards would not have been moved by this reasoning, for even by the time he read Newton on gravity, he had adopted a very different metaphysical position concerning matter and motion. In essence, his position required that the mechanistic theory be taken merely as the form or manner in which the system of nature operates; it does not express the real causes by which natural events occur. Hence, in LS No. 61 he remarks that action at a distance in space has no greater difficulties than action at a distance in time, as when each successive position of a moving body is determined by its position at the preceding but no longer existent moment. Thus Edwards' physical theory, however contrary to the prevailing views concerning the status of attractive forces, was anchored in this respect in more basic metaphysical doctrines. In its basic conception, Edwards' theory of the nature of the physical world belongs decidedly to the modern rather than the medieval age. Throughout his scientific writings, his masters were Descartes, Gassendi, Boyle, and Newton, though in most cases he knew their contributions through secondary sources. For all his failures to grasp the full ramifications of their theories, to master the necessary mathematical tools for modern physics, and to submit his various hyphotheses to experimental tests in the manner demanded by Baconian science, he nevertheless adopted with a whole heart their conception of a scientific explanation of the phenomena of nature. Although he undoubtedly studied scholastic science to some extent during his undergraduate years, his writings show little or no traces of it. He never appeals to the virtues, qualities, or entelechies of natural bodies in his explanations, nor distinguishes between natural and violent motions, nor even adopts the divisions of things into various natural kinds in the manner of the scholastic textbooks. In matters of specific information as well, Edwards drew heavily and almost exclusively from modern sources. Even some of the more obscure proposals in the earlier parts of "Natural Philosophy" may be traced to his reading in the various books we have mentioned. There are, indeed, some exceptions, but they have a dubious value in proving him a scholastic. In LS Nos. 32 and 56 (§12) Edwards comments upon the physical basis for judicial astrology, a science that was generally treated with scorn by mechanical philosophers of the early eighteenth century, and, indeed, by Cotton Mather himself.Christian Philosopher, p. 24. Nevertheless, the physician Richard Mead published a paper in the Royal Society's Miscellanea Curiosa in 1708, in which he argued that celestial motions might have medical effects upon the bodies of terrestrial animals."A Discourse concerning the Action of the Sun and Moon on Animal Bodies, and the Influence this may have in many Diseases," Miscellanea Curiosa (3 vols., London, 1708) 1, pp. 371–401.
A more perplexing instance appears in US No. 4, where Edwards claims that "the water of the sea at a very great depth is found not to be salt." This opinion was attacked by Robert Boyle in a minor tract that Edwards had probably never seen."Observations and Experiments about the Saltness of the Sea," in Works, ed. T. Birch (6 vols., London, 1772) 3, p. 765. Boyle attributes the opinion to Julius Scaliger, a sixteenth-century humanist whose work on physics had been used as a textbook at Harvard earlier in the seventeenth century. But probably the oddest of all the remarks Edwards offers concerning the phenomena in nature is that near the end of "Of Insects," that flying insects are "little collections" of "the corrupting nauseousness of our air." Providence has so fashioned them, he tells us, and has suitably arranged for their destruction in the sea at each summer's end. This passage in "Of Insects," which is devoted to the providential "use" or end of spiders is in some respects typical of Edwards, as it was of many scientists and scientific writers of the early eighteenth century. Similar passages are, indeed, relatively infrequent through most of his writings. He gave much more attention to this aspect of the investigation of nature at a relatively late time, near the end of his tutorship and during the first years of his Northampton pastorate. It was then that he began his series, "Wisdom in the Contrivance of the World"; and Edwards abandoned this series after only seven entries. In his earlier papers his specifically teleological improvements, where they appear, are not offered as causal explanations of the phenomena in question. In "Of Light Rays," for example, he turns to admire God's handiwork in fashioning the rays and contriving the eye only after attempting to calculate how subtle the rays are that we can see. This manner of treating final causes is, in fact, quite within the spirit of many of the theistic scientists of the time, especially in England. Robert Boyle, for example, writes, "I see not why the admitting that the Author of Things design'd some of his Works for these or those Uses, amongst others, may not consist with the Physical Accounts of making these things."A Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things (London, 1688), pp. 22–23. At the end of his Optics. Newton observes, "So far as we can know by natural Philosophy what is the first cause, what Power he has over us, and what Benefits we receive from him, so far our Duty towards him, as well as that towards one another, will appear to us by the Natural Light."Optics, Query 31 (1706 ed.: Q. 23, p. 348). When in LS No. 8 and again in US No. 40 Edwards remarks the use of comets, he is probably only offering an improvement on fact theory Newton offered in his Principia,Bk. HI, prop. 41, ex. (in 1713 ed., p. 472): "For the conservation of the seas, and fluids he planets, comets seem to be required, that, from their exhalations and vapors condensed, wastes of the planetary fluids spent upon vegetation and putrefaction, and converted into Y earth, may continually be supplied and made up." which Henry Pemberton repeated in his A View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy.Pemberton discusses the use of comets in Bk. II, chap. 4, §19. Edwards read Pemberton's work in Northampton. Edwards' thoughts were much more given to reflection upon the nower and wisdom of God in contriving the whole system of nature, than to searching out the special benefits brought by particular things in it. "Natural Philosophy" contains a series of articles on this theme, beginning with LS No. 14, where Edwards notes "the great wisdom that is necessary in order thus to dispose every atom at first, as that they should go for the best throughout all eternity; and in the adjusting by an exact computation, and a nice allowance to be made for the miracles which should be needful." Each of the succeeding passages on the theme, like this one, takes its departure from the conception of nature as a system of atoms which is exactly determined by universal laws. In them Edwards celebrates, not only the regularity and beauty of the world, but the manner in which the succession of events has unfolded from the first creation, and will continue to unfold to the end of the world, according to an original plan of providence. Hence, in the original creation of the chaoses of atoms, God so ordered that, "without doing any more, the chaoses of themselves, according to the established laws of matter, were brought into those various and excellent forms adapted to every of God's ends—omitting the more excellent works of plants and animals, which it was proper and fit God should have a more immediate hand in" (US No. 6). These passages are not merely theological "improvements" upon the scientific conception of nature, in the manner of Cotton Mather's The Christian Philosopher. Nor are they expressions of occasional and tangential spasms of religious piety. Edwards rather views the whole course of natural causes, as the scientist investigates them, in a theological setting. His own inquiries set out from the metaphysical position articulated in "Of Atoms": "Hence we see what's that we call the laws of nature in bodies, to wit, the stated methods of God's acting with respect to bodies, and the stated conditions of the manner of his acting" (Prop. II, Corol. 15). Mather undertook to show that "Philosophy is no Enemy, but a mighty and wondrous Incentive to Religion."
This view was shared by many scientists of the early eighteenth centuryRichard Westfall treats the subject in detail in Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, 1958). and was publicized in such works as John Ray's The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, Whiston's Astronomical Principles of Religion, Natural and Revealed, and Derham's Astro-theology and Physico-theology. Edwards not only endorsed, but went beyond it: in a treatise he planned to entitle "A Rational Account of the Main Doctrines of the Christian Religion Attempted," he would argue that "all the arts and sciences, the more they are perfected, the more they issue in divinity, coincide with it, and appear to be as parts of it." It would probably not be far wrong to suggest that Edwards held to this point of view throughout his scientific inquiries. But one must be wary of leaping to the conclusion that Edwards' scientific efforts were prejudiced by the doctrines of his Calvinist theology. They certainly were not thereby biased in favor of the scholasticism that still held sway through most of New England. He had no anxiety of the sort that Samuel Johnson mentions, that "the new philosophy would bring in a new divinity and corrupt the pure religion of the country." Nor was Edwards insensitive to the presence of prejudice around him. In "Of the Prejudices of Imagination" he asserts the claims of reason against that habit of thinking that "makes the vulgar so roar out" upon hearing the discoveries of science. "Old men," he observed in his "Diary," "seldom have the advantage of new discoveries, because they are beside the way of thinking to which they have been so long used. Resolved, if I ever live to years, that I will be impartial to hear the reasons of all pretended discoveries, and receive them if rational, how long soever I have been used to another way of thinking.""Diary" for Monday, The treatise that Edwards planned to write upon natural philosophy promised to give great weight to his metaphysical doctrines, and it was these that he expected would receive the strongest objections. In a note on the cover of his manuscript of "Natural Philosophy," he advised himself to propose them as modestly as possible by way of questions, and to conceal his real conviction concerning them. In his most developed plan for the treatise he proposed to employ many axioms "prepare the way" for his exposition, beginning with the clearest and most general, and adding others as desired at the beginning of each part. The axioms in US No. 8 might well have been intended for the start of the treatise, and his use of axioms in the article on ice, US No. 12, probably illustrates the manner in which he intended to employ them in the several parts of the work. Otherwise, according to his memoranda, he planned to add confirming corollaries after his various propositions, such as we find in many articles in "Natural Philosophy." The whole treatise, therefore, was probably planned to be organized in the manner of a deductive system, beginning with the most general and fundamental aspects of physical theory, and descending from these to more specific problems. This is, as we have seen, much the way in which Edwards' reasoning proceeds in "Natural Philosophy." He warns himself several times in his memoranda, however, to avoid making undue pretenses to certainty, or including disputable claims, in the course of his reasoning. For the most part, Edwards seems to have developed his conception of the plan of the treatise from the various rules and examples given in Pt. IV of Arnauld's The Art of Thinking, though he takes suggestions from other sources as well: he refers specifically to Richard Steele's The Ladies Library and Shaftesbury's Characteristicks. The contents of Edwards' treatise can be known only from the notes and articles in "Natural Philosophy" itself. Judging by these, it promised to give considerable space to general physics, beginning with Edwards' theory concerning the nature and reality of matter, and going on to treat gravity and such phenomena as light, heat and cold, cohesion, and elasticity that were to be explained by attractions among atoms. Both optics and astronomy would have been treated at length. Among terrestrial phenomena Edwards would have discussed the atmosphere and such meteors as clouds, the rainbow, lightning, halos and parahelia; the formation and causes of mountains, valleys, and plains, as well as the cycle of seasons on the earth; and the seas, rivers, springs and fountains, which would probably have been treated in connection with the subterranean abyss. In biology Edwards' manuscript contains discussions of the morphology, growth, and propagation of plants, and respiration and the circulation of blood in animals. He could probably have devoted a separate section to man, discussing the organs of perception, the nervous system and animal spirits, the rain, and the union of the soul and the body. In sum, it promised to be a complete system of natural philosophy. Whether Edwards abandoned the project out of timorousness, or loss of interest in it, or from a sense of inadequacy for the task, can hardly be guessed. Assessments of Edwards as a scientist have varied, some rating him for what he did achieve in these papers, and others for what he would have achieved if he had not abandoned his projects. But it is probably less important to judge Edwards as a scientist, than to find in his papers the manifestation of some significant but as yet unstudied aspects of the reception of the new science in Calvinist and scholastic New England. Thomas Brattle and others were content to contribute the shillings and guineas of their discoveries to the coffers of the learned; Benjamin Franklin worked with his hands as well as his mind to satisfy his curiosity about nature and to draw the worldly profit of his knowledge; Cotton Mather found the discoveries of others "a mighty and wondrous incentive to Religion," and pitched himself against the theistic fatalism of his fellow townsmen in promoting inoculation against smallpox. Edwards was governed by motives of a different character, to undertake a different and more ambitious project: the construction of a complete system of natural philosophy, one which he feared, even from the start, to publish, and which he finally abandoned after several years of work in preparing the considerable body of materials that are presented below.
3. The Development of Edwards' Philosophical Thought.
Although both "Natural Philosophy" and "The Mind" are connected with Edwards' early efforts to compose major philosophical treatises, neither of these notebooks presents the substance of those treatises in an organized and systematic manner. The contents of the manuscript notebooks, as we know them, were produced by the occasional additions of comments and articles over extended periods of time. They are more properly to be regarded as philosophical journals which show the progress of his thought as he worked forward on his projects, than as even partial drafts of the works as he planned them. Many doubts remain concerning the final form in which he intended to set forth his principles and conclusions in those treatises; but the more accurate dating of the manuscript notebooks and their contents now makes it possible to study the development of his philosophical thought as it is reflected in them. When the passages in "Natural Philosophy" and "The Mind," and other related articles in "Miscellanies," are examined in the order in which they were written, it is possible to discover how Edwards' most fundamental ideas first began to take definite form, and how through subsequent exploration and revision they came to function as fixed principles in his thought. The present chapter will be concerned primarily with this evolution. From the chronological order and biographical circumstances of these writings, it is evident that they represent at least two major stages in the early development of Edwards' thought. The first is reflected in the beginning portions of "Natural Philosophy," especially in "Of Atoms," the opening part of "Of Being," and several entries in the long numbered series of "Things to be Considered and Written fully about." In this stage, while he was stilt a graduate student at Yale, he was particularly concerned about the challenge of metaphysical materialism, and about the nature of being in general and the grounds of its necessity. His early treatment of these topics will be examined in the first two sections below. The idealistic phenomenalism of "The Mind" clearly belongs to the second major stage in the development of Edwards' thought. This stage is introduced by two important passages, both written in the latter part of 1723. One is the addition to "Of Being" in which he argues that nothing can exist without being perceived or known. The other, his first article in "The Mind," examines excellency, or "being's consent to being," as a necessary condition for the existence of any object. The third section of this chapter will examine the content and context of these two passages. The last two sections will then discuss Edwards' subsequent views concerning the physical world, its relation to mind, and the nature and status of mind itself, so far as his thought on these matters is reflected in "The Mind" and in certain related passages in other writings.
THE REFUTATION OF MATERIALISM
In No. 26 of the long series in "Natural Philosophy" Edwards reflects upon the arguments he had formulated in his earlier "Of Atoms." He reminds himself "to bring in an observation somewhere in a proper place, that instead of Hobbes' notion that God is matter, and that all substance is matter, that nothing that is matter can possibly be God, and that no matter is, in the most proper sense, matter."See below, p. 235. Despite its appearance of expressing a mere afterthought, this remark brings into focus the main conclusions of his earliest philosophical arguments in "Of Atoms," "Of Being," and several earlier notes in the long series: contrary to the materialist claim that there is no substance except matter, Edwards finds God alone is substance while matter is the immediate effect of the exercise of God's infinite power. It follows that God himself cannot be material. The contrasts between Edwards' early metaphysical conclusions and the claims of the materialists deserve careful study, not only because he himself often calls attention to them, but because he consciously undertook to develop a metaphysics that would be a conclusive answer to materialism. In later life he confessed that he had never read Hobbes,In Freedom of the Will, Pt. IV, §6. See Works (Yale ed.) 1, p. 374. and there is no evidence that he studied the work of any recognized materialist during the period of his collegiate and graduate study when these arguments were drafted. He learned about Hobbes through reading Hobbes' critics, especially Henry More and the theistic followers of Isaac Newton; and he developed his own arguments through reflection upon their rebuttals of materialism. Like them, he was an advocate of the sciences, their procedures, and their well-established conclusions. Also like them, he recognized the threat of materialism to orthodox Christian natural theology, and joined his efforts to theirs to establish by argument the reality and the spiritual nature of God, and to show how the finite world, even as understood in the sciences, depends upon God's infinite wisdom and the free and purposeful exercise of his infinite will for its creation and preservation. The doctrine that all substance is matter was seen as a direct contradiction to these basic tenets of Christian natural theology. Hobbes' metaphysics was taken by his critics to imply either an outright atheism, or else the radically heterodox thesis that God is material. It denied the independent reality of any intelligent and voluntary spirits, and so, by implication, the independent reality of an omniscient, omnipotent, and beneficent being. Materialism proposed that the universe is a complete, autonomous, and self-sustaining system of unthinking bodies that are subject only to inherent, necessary, and mathematically exact laws of mechanical causation; and so it ruled out the conception of a divine and providential government of the world. And it held that all phenomena whatever are reducible to or explainable by the properties and motions of bodies alone, so that even the moral sciences are to be treated as a special branch of mechanics. Threatening as the materialist metaphysics was to orthodox natural theology, Hobbes' opponents were by no means agreed how it was to be combated. Materialism had achieved a new plausibility in learned circles during the seventeenth century. The rejection of scholastic metaphysics and science, which was everywhere concurred with, had been stimulated in part by the rediscovery and study of the works of the ancient materialists, especially the atomists Lucretius and Epicurus. Even while Hobbes was under attack the works of Pierre Gassendi, the principal modern exponent of atomism, were widely and respectfully read.Gassendi was the main figure in the seventeenth-century revival of Epicurus' mechanistic physics of atoms and void. Gassendi's most important work was Syntagma Philosophiae Epicuri (Lyons, 1649), which set forth a system of atomistic physics that was the chief competitor to the Cartesian physics in the later seventeenth century. His principal English disciple, Walter Charleton, made Gassendi's views well-known in that country through the publication of Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletoniana in 1654. In England Ralph Cud worth undertook to demonstrate that it was Moses himself who had originally formulated the doctrine of atomism;In his True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678), Cudworth argues that atomism was first propounded by one Mochus, a Phoenician physiologer spoken of by Jambhchus. Cudworth agrees enthusiastically with the conjecture of several others that "this Mochus was no other than the celebrated Moses of the Jews" (ch. 1, §10, p. 12). It is Cudworth s main contention that the original tradition of theistic atomism stemming from Mosaic times gave way in the classical period to two schools, each preserving a part of the ancient truth: atheistic atomism, as in Democritus, Leucippus, and Epicurus, and theism, as in Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato. and even in New England the "corpuscularean philosophy" was openly assented to by some members of the Mather circle.Nathaniel Mather argued the thesis, "There is a vacuum" at his master's commencement in 1688, and after his death the same year, his brother Cotton Mather reported that he had demonstrated "his Intimate acquaintance with the Corpuscularean (and only right) Philosophy." See S. E. Morison, The. Intellectual Life of Colonial New England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1960), pp. 268–69. In the meantime the competing Cartesian mechanistic physics was enjoying its greatest vogue throughout Europe. On all hands it was acknowledged that the physical sciences were concerned with the laws of matter and local motion, not with the union of matter and substantial form as the Schools had taught. And with this general agreement the concept of matter itself assumed a new importance in physical theory. Although its real nature and its relation to space and time were the subject of major controversies, matter was no longer considered to be the mere formless substratum, the principle of potentiality and passivity of scholastic theory, but was regarded as having a real essence of its own, and as being sufficient by itself to account for the actual existence and properties of bodies.So Descartes contrasts his own conception of matter with that of the scholastics in his early unpublished essay, "Le Monde" (1633). See in Ralph Eaton, ed., Descartes: Selections (New York, 1927), pp. 318–19. In addition it was generally conceded that bodies sustain and transmit motion to each other by themselves, without the operation of immaterial causes, according to fixed mathematical and mechanical laws; and that the purely physical world can thus be conceived as an entirely autonomous, self-sustaining, and deterministic system. In view of these admissions it could hardly be denied that matter is fundamental to the physical world, that it is the ground of the objective existence of the bodies that compose that world, and that it is therefore a real substance in a proper and metaphysical sense. Edwards himself, throughout his scientific writings, appears as an advocate of this new physics. He assumes that phenomena in nature are to be explained by the sizes, shapes, and motions of material particles, by the impulses and other forces that affect their motions, and the universal laws that govern them. He assumes a strictly deterministic universe in which every body affects every other according to those laws, and infers that God must have arranged the atoms with infinite care and wisdom in the first creation in order that all subsequent events, even miraculous ones, should follow according to the divine plan.See "Natural Philosophy," LS No. 14 (below, p. 231). In view of all this, his denial at the same time that matter is a real substance would have struck most of his informed contemporaries as paradoxical. Edwards' own statement in LS No. 26, that "no matter is, in the most proper sense, matter," is a reflection of the paradox. The significance of his denial, and the background of ideas from which he developed it, can hardly be appreciated without further consideration of the efforts that were made during the later seventeenth century to refute Hobbes' doctrine and to defend the main doctrines of natural theology. The threat of materialism was primarily felt by those who were ready to grant that matter is a real substance. They generally considered that Hobbes' doctrine was an unwarranted extension of this truth, for he claimed that matter is the only substance. Accordingly, the most widely accepted rebuttals of Hobbes were those that attempted to prove that there is some other substance that is incorporeal and autonomously capable of thinking, willing, and acting. The spiritual nature and perfections of God, as well as the spiritual and moral dignity of man, it seemed, could only be defended through some form of mind-body or spirit-matter dualism. In the literature Edwards had studied, the arguments that attempted to establish or confirm such a dualism tended to exhibit one or the other of two general patterns. The first undertook to show that certain dicoverable phenomena or recognized facts about the world cannot be explained by matter and motion alone, but testify to the presence and operations of a spiritual substance. The Cartesian demonstration of mental substance from one's own conscious thinking was of this sort,In Meditation VI Descartes argues, "Because, on the one side, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself inasmuch as I am only a thinking and unextended thing, and as, on the other, I possess a distinct idea of a body, inasmuch as it is only an extended and unthinking thing, it is certain that this I [that is to say, my soul by which I am what I am], is entirely and absolutely distinct from my body, and can exist without it." E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, eds., Philosophical Works of Descartes (2 vols., 1955), 1., p. 190. Cited hereafter as Philosophical Works.and so too were the arguments to confirm God's governing wisdom and power from the general appearances of a contingent order, design, and purposefulness in the world as a whole.Henry More's An Antidote against Atheisme is devoted to proving the existence of God as an incorporeal being. Bk. II presents his arguments from the phenomena of nature. Collection of Several Philosophical Writings, pp. 37–85. The second kind of arguments attempted to prove that, although matter is a substance, it cannot exist absolutely and by itself, but must depend upon an independent, immaterial, and self-subsisting being. Thus, from a theory of time according to which the existence of a temporally enduring substance at one moment is not sufficient for its existence at the next successive moment, Descartes argued that all bodies and all finite minds as well must depend upon God's timeless creative operation for their conservation or continual recreation at every successive moment while they endure.In Meditation III. Descartes writes, "All the course of my life may be divided into an infinite number of parts, none of which is in any way dependent on the other; and thus from the fact that I was in existence a short time ago it does not follow that I must be in existence now, unless some cause at this instant, so to speak, produces me anew, that is to say, conserves me… . So far as my parents [from whom it appears I have sprung] are concerned, although all that I have ever been able to believe of them were true, that does not make it follow that is they who conserve me, nor are they even the authors of my being in any sense, in so far as I am a thinking being." Philosophical Works, 1, pp. 168, 170. In Principles of Philosophy, Pt. I, nos. 51–52 he holds that both body and soul are substances in the sense that "they are things which need only the concurrence of God in order to exist." Ibid., 1., pp. 239–40. And Henry More maintained that the existence of both minds and bodies depends upon an independent, immaterial, infinite, and necessary space.In Divine Dialogues (2 vols., London, 1668), 1, p. 106, More writes, "I have always been prone to think of this subtle Extension (which a man cannot dis-imagine but must needs be) a more obscure shadow or adumbration, or to be a more general and confused apprehension of the Divine Amplitude. For this will be necessarily, though all matter were annihilated out of the world. Nay indeed this is antecedent to all matter, forasmuch as no matter nor any being else can be conceived to be but in this. In this are all things necessarily apprehended to live and move and have their being."
As these examples suggest, the arguments of both sorts involved highly speculative and controversial assumptions about such questions pertaining to the foundations of physics as the essence of matter, the nature of physical causation, the ontological foundation of the laws of nature, and the status of space and time. Edwards was well aware of the importance of these assumptions as they pertained to physical theory and to metaphysics, and he knew and acknowledged those that were implicit in and essential to the developing tradition of rebuttals of materialism. He argued that the design of the world and the regular order of events in space and time cannot be attributed to the nature and operation of purely mechanical causes alone, but presuppose at least an intelligent and purposeful contrivance of the world machine in its original creation. Moreover, although his views on the nature and status of space, time, and the laws of physics changed as his thought developed, he argued from the outset that they are not absolutely grounded in the inherent nature of matter and motion, but are due to the presence and voluntary operations of an omnipotent being. The Newtonians whom Edwards read gave a special emphasis to this latter view. They directly associated the absolute space and time of Newton's theory with the divine Being;In Optics, Query 28, Newton writes, "… does it not appear from phenomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite space, as it were in his sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself." and they argued that the principle of universal gravitation cannot be explained by merely mechanical causes, but is a contingent principle by which bodies are ordered in the world that can have arisen only from the voluntary dispensation of an intelligent and omnipotent creator.Helene Metzger discusses the arguments of Samuel Clarke, George Cheyne, William Derham, Andrew Baxter, and Joseph Priestley, in Attraction Universelle et Religion Naturelle chez quelques Commentateurs Anglais de Newton (Paris, 1938). Edwards echoes these claims in his early comments that "infinite wisdom must be exercised in order that gravity and motion be perfectly harmonious," and that "it is universally allowed that gravity depends immediately on the divine influence.""Natural Philosophy," LS Nos. 9, 23a. See below, pp. 230, 234–35. But these arguments served only to show that the regularity of the world, the "manner of existence" of bodies, depends upon God, where as the main point of Edwards' response to materialism is that the "very existence" of bodies depends immediately upon the divine Being, that bodies do not exist by themselves as substances at all. In taking this position Edwards not only fashioned a rebuttal of materialism, but in doing so he undermined the assumptions of the metaphysical dualism of Descartes and the Newtonians as well. The possibility of his doing so arose from considering certain philosophical problems that were generated by dualism itself. Despite the wide appeal of dualistic theories of metaphysics in the seventeenth century, it soon became apparent that such theories offered major theological and philosophical difficulties. First, not every dualistic metaphysics was satisfactory from a theological point of view. Despite its demonstrations of the existence of God and the immateriality of the soul, the Cartesian metaphysics so extended the scope of the mechanistic system of matter and motion as to explain all animal and the most overt human behavior by mechanistic principles alone; and it so limited the role of God's operations in nature as to rule out all possibility of recognizing divine providence in the world. In England, at least, the new philosophers had a decided preference for a metaphysics that endorsed manifestations of divine government in nature. John Ray pronounced Descartes a "mechanic theist,"In Wisdom of God (5th ed., London, 1709), pp. 43–48. and Henry More dubbed the Cartesians "nullubists" for denying that spirit has any amplitude or location in space; they thereby challenge God's omnipresence and even imply God does not actually exist: "Sulking Atheists, on pretense of extolling the Nature of God above the capacity of being so much debased as to be present with anything that is extended, have thus stretched their wits to the utmost extent to lift the Deity quite out of the Universe."Divine Dialogues, 1, p. 137. Indeed, the Cartesian theory, resting as it did upon the conception that thought and extension are entirely distinct and independent essences, had the consequence of dividing the world into two independent and autonomous systems of things. More's own metaphysical views were largely motivated by a conviction that minds and bodies together belong to a single unified causal order, and that the divine Being is intimately and actually present in that order and continually governs it. His criticisms of both Hobbesian and Cartesian metaphysics, and his own constructive metaphysical views, exercised an important influence upon subsequent English thought.
Because Edwards' earliest philosophical writings also show the direct influence of More, it is appropriate to devote some further space to More's position. In More's view, the basic error of Cartesianism lay in the claim that extension is the essence of material substance, and that space and matter are identical. Because space necessarily exists, he argued, it follows that matter too exists necessarily and independent of God. Furthermore, it follows that spirits cannot act upon bodies, that there can be no final causes or divine government in the world, nor any independent power of will to produce good or evil."Publisher to the Reader," ibid., summarizes many of More's main objections to the Cartesian metaphysics. On the contrary, More maintained, extension and amplitude are necessary for all actual existence, and actual presence in real space is a necessary condition for a causally unified system of things. Bodies and spirits alike, therefore, are extended, present to each other in space, and capable of motion from place to place. They differ in that minds are indivisible ("indiscerpible"), capable of penetrating bodies, and are self-active, capable of moving themselves and causing motion in other things; while bodies are divisible, impenetrable, and passive, capable only of receiving, sustaining, and mechanically transmitting motion.Immortality of the Soul, Bk. I, ch. 3, in Collection, pp. 21–22. The causal action by which spirits move bodies thus arises from the power of spirits themselves; but the exercise of that power requires the actual presence of a spirit in the place of the body. More found evidence of such spiritual presence and action, not only in human and animal behavior, but in the apparitions and other psychic phenomena reported to him by others.More devoted Bk. III of Antidote against Atheisme to suchevidences. See Collection, pp. 86–142. In addition to this, he argued that the purely mechanistic physics must fail even in its main objectives. A large number of the most regular phenomena in the physical world, for example, the revolutions of the planets, and the presence of weight, elasticity, cohesion, and magnetism in terrestrial bodies, cannot be accounted for mechanistically solely by the motions and transmissions of motion of particles of matter. They must result, he concluded, from the universal presence and regular operations of an immaterial spirit of nature or "hylarchic principle."See Divine Dialogues, 1, pp. 31 ff; in Enchiridion Metaphysicum (1671), chs. 9–23 are devoted each to a different proof of the existence and operation of an immaterial spirit from some regular phenomenon or property in bodies. His inference was a prototype of the argument Newtonians later used to infer God as the ground for the principle of universal gravitation. As for space itself More held it to be real and entirely distinct from matter, omnipresent, penetrable, and immovable, a necessary and infinitely extended being: "This distant Space cannot but be something, and yet not corporeal, because neither impenetrable nor tangible; it must of necessity be a Substance Incorporeal necessarily and eternally existent of itself: which the clearer Idea of a Being absolutely perfect will more punctually inform us to be the Self-Subsisting God."An Appendix to the Foregoing Antidote against Atheisme, ch. 7, no. 6; see Collection, p. 165. More's criticisms of the Cartesian philosophy serve to exhibit some of the difficulties that were found in a dualistic metaphysics as such. To the extent that the basis of causation was laid in the essence of a substance, it seemed impossible to explain how substances with different essences, minds and bodies, could have any causal interaction or stand in any other real relation. And to the extent that causation was based upon an interaction between substances, as in More's incorporation of a spirit of nature as causal agent, the assumption of mechanical or mathematical regularity in nature was no longer warranted and the explanatory power of substantialist physics was considerably reduced. In addition, seemingly unresolvable disputes over the real nature of minds and bodies gave rise to a considerable scepticism with respect to the essence of substance. The development of an empirical methodology in England led scientists away from the Cartesian view that the laws of physics should be derived from a clear concept of the essence of matter, or from any other metaphysical principles. For Newton, the discovery of the presence of gravitational force in all bodies came through an analysis of observed phenomena; it did not depend upon a knowledge of the essence of any substance, which in any case, Newton held, we do not have: "In bodies, we see only their outward figures and colors, we hear only the sounds, we touch their outward surfaces, we smell only the smells and taste the savors; but their inward substances are not to be known by our senses, or by any reflex act of our minds: much less, then, have we any idea of the substance of God. We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes."Principia, General Scholium (1713 ed., p. 483). John Locke pressed the point even further, arguing that from the ideas derived from experience we can form no concept whatever of the substance or real essences of minds and bodies as they are in themselves. We have only a relative notion of substance as an unknown substratum or support of the qualities and powers of things; and neither reason nor experience can discover the real essences of things upon which their perceivable qualities and powers depend.Essay, Bk. II, ch. 23, nos. 3–4, 30. Despite their scepticism with respect to the extent of our knowledge, Locke and Newton continued to think of matter as a substance. The perceivable properties of bodies cannot subsist by themselves, but must inhere in something else, a substratum or subject which supports them but is not in turn supported by anything else.Ibid., nos. 4, 5: "When we talk or think of any particular sort of corporeal substances, as horse, stone, etc., though the idea we have of either of diem be but the complication or collection of those several simple ideas of sensible qualities, which we use to find united in the thing called horse or stone: yet, because we cannot conceive how they should subsist alone, nor in one another, we suppose them existing in and supported by some common subject; which support we denote by the name substance, though it be certain we have no clear or distinct idea of that thing we suppose a support." So far from throwing suspicion upon the claims of metaphysical materialism, therefore, such scepticism with regard to our knowledge of substance could only serve to undermine the dualist's arguments against materialism. Locke himself rejected the Cartesian view that thinking is the essence of mental substance, holding instead that it is only an operation of the mind.Ibid., ch. 1, no. 10. And since we are as much in ignorance of the substance of mind as of the substance of bodies, it is impossible for us to prove or assert with certainty that matter itself cannot think.Ibid., Bk. IV, ch. 3, no. 6. George Berkeley summed up the matter both accurately and succinctly in a note in his Philosophical Commentaries:. "Matter once allow'd. I defy any man to prove that God is not matter.""Notebook A," no. 626. See A. A. Luce, ed., The Works of George Berkeley (9 vols., London, 1948), 1, p. 77. Berkeley's remedy for materialism was to argue that matter does not exist; Edwards' first and major step, on the other hand, was to argue that matter is not a substance. The ancient problem underlying Edwards' argument in "Of Atoms" is whether matter is infinitely divisible, given that it is continuously extended and that continuous extension is infinitely divisible. Descartes held that extension is the essence of matter, and deduced its infinite divisibility from this.Principles of Philosophy, Pt. II, no. 20. Descartes here demonstrates the falsity of atomism from the Simple premise that extension is infinitely divisible. Historically this consequence was seen to involve a paradox, for it implied that the smallest parts of bodies are infinitely small, that is, mere mathematical points which are altogether devoid of extension; but not even an infinite number of such unextended entities could comprise the real extension of a body. Henry More produced a similar argument against the Cartesian view in The Immortality of the Soul: what lacks extension altogether, as a mathematical point, is a nonentity, and real matter cannot be composed of nonentities.Collection, p. 3. More concluded that the smallest divisible parts of bodies must have some real extension, though these "indiscerpible" parts are so small that they could not have any less extension, or be actually divided into any lesser parts, and still be real. Edwards had studied More's argument and depended upon it for some of the main points of his own. A solid body cannot be broken into infinitely small parts, or "in every part," without being annihilated."Of Atoms," Prop. 1; below, pp. 208–10.But while More interprets the notion of solidity in terms of size, that is, the having a finite real extension, Edwards interprets it as the having a continuum of parts. A perfectly solid body is one that is "an absolutely full, a solid body, that has every part of space included within its surface solid or impenetrable." In such a body, all the parts are so conjoined that they touch other parts "by surfaces," and not only in "some particular points or lines of their surfaces."Below, pp. 212–13. And if two bodies should happen to come together so as to touch by surfaces, they become parts of one single body."Of Atoms," Prop. 2; below, p. 213. Any body whose parts are so conjoined is everywhere equally full and solid, Edwards argues, so that whatever its size or shape, if it could be divided into any of its parts, it could be divided into every part and so be annihilated. Again, because a body perseveres or continues to exist only so far as it resists being divided through its continuously extended parts, its being or essence must consist in such a resistance. Indeed, resistance to division and solidity are the same, and they are the same as body itself. All the real properties of bodies are modes of or dependent upon solidity; the extension of a body, as distinct from that of space, results from solidity; shape is a modification of the extension, and mobility is the communicability of solidity from one to another part of space.Ibid., Prop. 1, corol. 4; below, pp. 211–12. A body in fact perseveres and resists annihilation by any finite force or power, Edwards assumes. Its solidity must therefore consist in an infinite power of resistance to any division or separation through its continuously extended parts. Again, two solid bodies that happen to touch by surfaces so as to become continuous cannot be separated again by any finite power. But at the same time, the mere continuum of parts, their "touching by surfaces," cannot account for such a power, "for it is self-evident that barely two atoms being together, and that alone, is no power at all, much less an infinite power." The power by which the bodies persevere, or by which their solid parts cohere together and resist separation, must be the infinite power of God.Ibid., Prop. 2, corols. 1–3; below, pp. 213–14. In drawing this last conclusion Edwards evidently follows More's view that matter is completely passive, in itself entirely indifferent to any state of motion or rest, and so by itself incapable of resisting a division into its real or extended parts. It was on this ground that More objected to the Cartesian explanation of cohesion among the particles in compound bodies, namely, that it is only the state in which the particles are at rest relative to each other. More found the solution sophistic, for it does not explain why such a state occurs and persists. The cohesion among particles or indivisible atoms—and in Edwards' argument, the cohesion even among the parts of a single atom—cannot arise from passive matter, but must depend upon the active power of an immaterial agent. In developing his argument Edwards might also have considered Locke's explanation of solidity, the property among all others that Locke considered to be necessary to body.Essay, Bk. II, ch. 4. Solidity, he held, is that whereby we conceive a body to fill space, that is, a resistance by which it keeps all other bodies out of the space it occupies so long as it remains there. This resistance, he maintained, is so great that no finite power can surmount it. Furthermore, solidity is that whereby the extension of body is distinguished from the extension of space, and that upon which the mutual impulse, resistance, and protrusion of bodies depends. Edwards goes beyond Locke in this point, however, in maintaining that solidity is the essence of body in a Cartesian sense; all the other real properties are dependent upon it. It is through his analysis of the essence of body as resistance, and his claim that such resistance can only be accounted for by the power of God, that Edwards finally turns to the question of substance. First, he asserts: "Solidity results from the immediate exercise of God's power, causing there to be an indefinite resistance in that place where it is," and bodies are preserved in being by the constant exercise of God's power. Hence "all body is nothing but what immediately results from the exercise of divine power in such a manner.""Of Atoms," Prop. 2, corol. 9; below, p. 215. But because solidity and body are the same, "it follows that the unknown substance, which philosophers used to think subsisted by itself, and stood underneath and kept up solidity and all other properties, which they used to say it was impossible for a man to have an idea of, is nothing at all distinct from solidity itself; or, if they must needs apply that word to something else that really and properly does subsist by itself and support all properties, they must apply it to the divine Being or power itself."Ibid., corol. 11; below, p. 215. Locke again is the most likely source of Edwards' reflection upon the unknown substance that supports the properties of bodies. Edwards infers that there is no such thing, or else that it be taken to mean God or his power. In either case, his argument seems to be that, because the essence of bodies immediately and continually depends upon the exercise of divine power, there is no other supporting substratum of the properties of bodies. The actual existence of a body involves no more than the divine power, the solidity or resistance that immediately results from the exercise of that power, and the part of real space in which the power is exercised. The account is remarkably similar to one proposed as an hypothesis by Isaac Newton in an early unpublished essay, De Gravitatione et Equipondio Fluidorum, in order to represent his objections to Cartesian metaphysics.This essay has been published in A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, ed. and trans., Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1962), in Latin, pp. 89–121, and in English, pp. 121–156. Against Descartes, Newton holds that real extension or space is neither a substance nor the attribute of a substance, but an infinite, eternal, and immutable "emanent effect of God." Parts of this space may thus be empty, neither being nor containing a substance. As we, by our will, can move our bodies into such empty spaces, so God, by his omnipotent will, can prevent any body from entering a certain space, and so make that space impervious or impenetrable. Such a space would then manifest all the properties of a body, even though no substance was there. If the impenetrability were transferred from place to place continuously according to certain laws, all the effects of a moving body would be consequent. "And so if all this world were constituted of this kind of being, it would seem hardly any different."Ibid., pp. 131–140. In order to construct Edwards' view of bodies, it appears sufficient to add to this of Newton's the further proviso that any quantity of continuous extension that God so makes impenetrable should remain the same and undivided throughout all changes or transferences of it. It is especially important to note that the conception of body that Newton here briefly proposes, and that Edwards claims to have established, diverges sharply from the traditional concept of substance as assumed in materialist and dualist theories. The causal basis for solidity or resistance, and the other properties of bodies that are consequent upon it, is no longer taken to be the subject to which the resistance and those properties belong as attributes. It is not God that is solid or resists, even though solidity or resistance immediately depends upon the exercise of his power, and does not arise from anything else. So far as substance is understood to be the subject to which properties belong and in which they are conjoined, Edwards asserts there is no such subject apart from solidity itself. At a later point, in "The Mind," No. 27, after further reflection upon the concept of resistance itself, Edwards found it necessary to change this view and to specify the thing that can be said to resist. But even then he maintains, as he does at first in "Of Atoms," that the subject that resists does not contain the causal basis of its resisting; nor is that subject something that could exist by itself.See below, pp. 95–96. Edwards' reasoning seems to be entirely cogent within the framework of certain generally accepted assumptions about substance and its essence, namely, that the essence of a substance is that upon which all its other properties depend but which in turn neither depends upon nor arises from any other property. The actual resistance of a body, he argues, is something that needs a causal explanation, and therefore cannot be the essence of a substance. Nevertheless, he holds, resistance is the essence of bodies: it depends upon no other property of bodies, but all the other real properties of bodies depend upon it. It follows, therefore, that bodies cannot be substances, and cannot exist by themselves, but must depend upon some other substance which causes their resistance. Edwards describes this cause as God's infinite power, and resistance is the immediate effect of God's voluntarily exerting his power, or his "acting in that particular manner in those parts of space where he thinks fit." Resistance is not to be conceived as an extraneous product of such action as though something made by it, for it endures only so long as God's action continues. Resistance results immediately from God's acting rather as a performance results from the performing of it, for example, as the raising of an arm results from the act of raising it. It is in this way that Edwards understands God and his power to be the substance of bodies, and indeed to be ens entium, the substance of all things. His predecessors thought of substance as the owner of properties; while Edwards thought of substance as the doer of deeds. So he took God to stand to the physical world as its creator, sustainer, and governor; not as something he has made and continues to manage, but as something he has done, and is doing and will do, in a particular manner. Such a conception of substance and of bodies in relation to substance makes the materialist's notion of mechanical causation among bodies untenable. Bodies and their motions are God's actions, and while those actions may be connected by fixed rules according to the will of the actor, the actions do not affect each other, for actions cannot themselves act. Edwards concludes his argument with just those points: the laws of nature in bodies are "the stated methods of God's acting with respect to bodies, and the stated conditions of the alteration of the manner of his acting…. Hence there is no such thing as mechanism, if that word is taken to be that whereby bodies act each upon other, purely and properly by themselves.""Of Atoms," Prop. 2, corol. 16; below, p. 216. He suggests a related point in his long series, in connection with the argument in LS No. 20 to establish that the essence of a body is the force of gravity among its parts.Below, pp. 232–33. Because the very being of a body therefore depends upon gravity, gravity itself cannot arise from a mechanical cause as the materialists assert (LS No. 22). Taken as a principle of order in the physical world, "it is universally allowed that gravity depends immediately upon the divine influence" (as in fact such Newtonian followers as Richard Bentley and George Cheyne argued). Hence again, "we may infallibly conclude that the very being, and the manner of being, and the whole of bodies depends immediately on the divine power" (LS No. 23a).Below, pp. 234–35. Although "Of Atoms" is the earliest of Edwards' philosophical writings, its main conclusions concerning the ontological status of bodies and their immediate dependence upon God's power and will remained fixed points in his metaphysical system. Even when he revised his views concerning the nature of bodies and their relation to space, his arguments expressly involved or presupposed these early established claims. But on almost all occasions Edwards is careful, as he was at first, to point out that his general metaphysical remarks about substance and essence were intended to apply to bodies only; minds or spiritual beings, he implied, should be considered differently. After pointing out that instead of matter being the only substance it is truly nothing at all "strictly and in itself considered," he goes on to speak of spirits by way of contrast. They are "nearer in nature" to God, and so are more properly beings, and more substantial than matter.Below, p. 238. Edwards does not seem to have attempted to form a more detailed theory of mind until later, after his New York pastorate. THE NECESSITY OF BEING In "Of Atoms" Edwards addressed himself to the question of the nature and status of bodies. From the argument there he derived a concept of God as a real being, the only substance properly so called, and the substance of all other things. The absolute sovereignty of God in relation to the world was thereby asserted, and in a manner explained. Within a short time after he set down that argument, Edwards went on to another but related philosophical project, the proof of the absolute and inherent necessity of God's existence. His first effort at a demonstration is found in the early part of the essay "Of Being" in "Natural Philosophy." Subsequent restatements, refinements, and uses of the argument followed for years afterward, in later additions to the same essay, in "The Mind," and in his "Miscellanies." In all these places it appears as a form of the so-called ontological argument for God's existence, but with differences that are immediately apparent. The first and most important difference is that, whereas St. Anselm's original formulation of the ontological argument, and most of the subsequent versions offered in the seventeenth century, turn upon the idea of God as the most perfect or greatest conceivable being, Edward's argument attempts to demonstrate God from the conception of being per se, or being in general, alone. Although he affirms the perfection of God in many other places, this argument does not treat God with respect to perfection. In virtue of this difference, Edwards had no obvious need to deal with one of the major questions raised by the argument in its standard versions, namely, whether we have in fact an idea of the subject of the argument. Doubts whether we have an idea of a most perfect conceivable being, and whether this idea is sufficiently adequate and clear for purposes of the argument, were historically a major source of difficulties for the ontological argument. But Edwards could hardly have found occasion to doubt whether we have a conception of being. As a college sophomore he learned that the idea of being is necessary to all thought and reasoning. Logic textbooks in the Aristotelian tradition took up the categories as the most general kinds of being. The account of the categories typically began with the distinction between substance, or what exists by itself, and accidents, or what exists by inherence in some substance as its subject; the main Aristotelian categories of accidents—quantity, quality, relation, and so on—were then explained in turn. The familiar diagram of Porphyry's tree showed the distribution of substance into its several kinds and ranks. Being itself was discussed as a transcendental concept, not assignable to any one category, but presupposed by all the categories in common.William Morris has argued that the Aristotelian logic of Franco Burgersdjck was an important influence in JE's conception of being. See "The Genius of Jonathan Edwards," in Jerald Brauer, ed., Reinterpretation in American Church History (Chicago, 1968), pp. 37–8. In a note at the back of the textbook he used while tutoring in logic at Yale, Edwards takes being to be the most abstract of our ideas.Quoted below, p. 340, n. 2. And the central principle upon which Edwards' argument depends, in all his statements of it, pertains to the doctrine that all thought and reasoning are about what is. In short Edwards might reasonably have claimed that none of the resources needed for his proof involved any inherent obscurity; they were all to be found in a standard logic manual. In spite of this, Edwards himself found the argument extremely difficult to state coherently; he returned repeatedly to reformulate it and to explain its foundation. Some of the difficulties came from attempting to express the underlying logical principle without asserting an implicit contradiction; and some seem to have arisen from the effort to utilize a logical notion of being in general in order to explain the necessary being of God. The latter difficulties were closely related to traditional semantic problems in speaking or thinking about God. Edwards might well have noted that Charles Morton, in his manuscript manual of logic, discussed 'being' as a term which is not perfectly, but only analogically, univocal: "Analogicalls have the same name and nature (as univocals), but not Equally, and depending one of the other. So being: it is a Common name for Substance and Accident, but Substance hath more of being then Accident, and Accident would have no being but as depending on Substance. So God and Creature are both Said to be beings.""Of Antepredicaments," Compendium Logicae, Pt. I, ch. 3. This quotation is from the copy in JE's textbooks (discussed above, pp. 14–15).Moreover, Morton maintained, only finite things can be distributed under the categories or predicaments, "for infinite are excluded whether they be positive or negative: Positive, as God, who can have no Genus or common nature with any of his creatures; Negative (which may rather be called Indefinite yn Infinite), as not a man, not a horse, etc. Now these words signifie nothing certain, and therefore can be referred to no certain order of things.""Of Predicaments in General," ibid., ch. 4. Such claims left open to serious question how far the being of God is amenable to logical consideration at all. In Edwards' earliest form of his argument in "Of Being," the existence of a necessary, infinite, and eternal being is inferred directly from the fact that the concept of being has no contrary; "nothing" or a "state of absolute nothing" is inconceivable and utterly impossible. "It is the greatest contradiction, and the aggregate of all contradictions, to say that there should not be." Indeed, it is impossible to explain this point, he adds, for " 'nothing' is that whereby we distinctly shew other contradictions. But here we are run up to our first principle, and have no other to explain the nothingness or not being of nothing by."Below, p. 202. Later, in "The Mind," No. 12, Edwards writes that it sometimes seems strange "that there should be being from all eternity." Nevertheless, "that necessity of there being something or nothing implies it."Below, p. 343. But the logical problem remains in this statement: if "nothing" is the first principle by which contradictions are shown, we cannot explain how the expression 'there is nothing' is a contradiction. It is this point that leads Edwards to further discussion of the idea of nonbeing in later entries in "Miscellanies" and in his final additions to "Of Being." In these passages he undertakes to make a distinction. We can indeed conceive of nothing, he allows, when we are thinking of particular things—for example, ourselves or the world—for "there is another way besides these things having existence." So nothing does have a being "when we speak of nothing in contradiction [to] some particular being." But taken in an absolute sense, 'nothing' does not express a logically possible alternative. Because there is therefore no alternative to being, considered absolutely, "the stating the question is nonsense, because we make a disjunction where there is none. 'Either being or absolute nothing' is no disjunction.""Of Being," below, p. 207. Hence, with regard to God's existence, "there is no second to make a disjunction; there is nothing else supposable."Miscell. no. 587, in Townsend, p. 81. From this final form of the argument it is possible to gather a better idea of the logical background of Edwards' conception of the necessity of being, and consequently the necessity of God's existence. When a genus is distributed into its several species, the species may be seen as the several alternative ways for something to belong to the genus. Thus it is possible but not necessary that an animal be a man, because the other species of animals are alternative ways of being an animal. On the same grounds, it is possible but not necessary that there are no men; as Edwards comments in Miscell. No. 880, "What we do when we think of absolute nihility (if I may so speak) is only to remove one thing to make way for and suppose another."Townsend, p. 87. In this way, all contingent possibilities are understood as applying only to what falls under a genus where distinct alternatives are rationally conceivable. But being itself is the highest genus; it falls under no other genus and therefore it admits of no rationally conceivable alternative. Above all, "not-being" is not a genus correlative to being. The conception of God as being in general implies that all reality is included in God, and Edwards himself makes this implication explicit in many places. In Miscell. No. 27a he writes, "We have shewn that absolute nothing is the essence of all contradictions, but being includes in it all, that we call God who is and there is none else besides him";Ibid., p. 74.in "The Mind," No. 15, "we always find this, by running of it up, that God and real existence are the same";Below, p. 345.in Miscell. No. 880, "God is the sum of all being and there is no being without his being."Townsend, p. 87. A quite similar treatment of the necessity of God as being in general was given by the seventeenth-century Platonist Nicolas Malebranche in a brief passage in his Recherche de la Verité. Malebranche writes that God, or "Being without any limitation, Being infinite, and in general," is necessarily present to the mind, and even affects it more strongly than the presence of finite objects. The mind "cannot divest itself absolutely of this general Idea of Being; since 'Tis impossible to subsist out of God… . The mind in considering any Being in particular, does not so much separate and recede from God, as approach near some of his Perfections, if I may be so permitted to speak, by removing farther off from others."Recherche, Bk. III, Pt. 2, ch. 8. Quoted from Taylor, Search after Truth, p. 124.Both Malebranche and Edwards used the idea of the highest genus to express God's all-inclusive nature; both took this to mean not only that God is the sum of all particular existent things, but that his being includes the contingent possibility of particular things. Edwards also holds that God is not only a necessary being, but the ground of all other necessity: "A state of nothing is a state wherein every proposition in Euclid is not true, nor any of those self-evident maxims by which they are demonstrated; and all other eternal truths are neither true nor false.""Of Being," below, p. 206. But there is a significant dissimilarity between Edwards' statements and the above quoted remarks of Malebranche. Malebranche, in speaking of the manner in which particular things are in God, explains that the essences of particular things are a partial and limited presentation of God's unlimited perfections. Being in general, for Malebranche, is the necessary unity of all perfections, and each real thing included in it is some finite and limited set of perfections. In contrast, the language which Edwards uses in speaking of being in general and of God is singularly free of the term "perfection." As will be discussed later, Edwards significantly transforms the concept of reality as a system of beings hierarchically ordered according to their inherent perfections. The theory of excellency, through which Edwards finally comes to terms with the Platonic and Augustinian notion of perfection, differs from it in the fundamental respect that excellency is a relational concept: "One alone, without reference to any more, cannot be excellent.""The Mind," No. 1, below, p. 337.Before that theory can be adequately treated, it is necessary to clarify what, in Edwards' view, is included in infinite and necessary being, and more specifically, in what manner the created world of bodies and spirits is included. These, in fact, were apparently among the questions Edwards put to himself after reaching his first conclusions, that bodies are only the solidity which immediately results from God's exertion of his power in certain parts of space, and that God himself is universal being. Edwards' earliest answer to those questions is found in the passages in "Of Being" immediately following his opening demonstration of God's necessary existence; they seem to have been written on the same occasion. The attribute by which God is understood is omnipresence. "Absolute nothing" and "where" are contradictory terms, so that being is everywhere, and, by implication, every being is somewhere in space. Space, he continues, is itself necessary, for we can think of any other thing being or not being otherwise, but we cannot remove the idea of space from our thoughts or conceive it not to be. "I had as good speak plain," he concludes, "I have already said as much as that space is God."Below, p. 203. Both the argument and its conclusion are a clear reflection of Henry More's doctrines concerning space and God's omnipresence. The view fully agrees with the concept of God as immediately present to the bodies he causes and governs, and it explains how all things are included in the being of God, that is, by having spatial location. But the theory, taking it literally from Edwards' own words, involves equally serious difficulties. More does not claim that space literally is God, but that the concept of space is a confused representation of God. Edwards himself warns against the "gross conceptions we have of space," but does not go on to explain. In any event, the idea of space itself having an infinite power, and of acting to bring about resistance in certain places as it wills, hardly agrees with any recognized concept of space. Still, for More, actual presence in some part of space is a necessary condition for real existence; and the Newtonian physics posits a real absolute space as the locus of bodies and the scene of their actual motions and interactions. The laws of motion and gravitation govern those actual motions, and not the relative motions of things as observed by finite perceivers from some fixed point of view. Like More, Newton is ready to ground the reality of this space in the divine Being. But for Newtonian theory, the problem of understanding real space is that of making intelligible the connection between it and the space which is relative to our observations of bodies and their properties and motions. One of Newton's efforts to explain an intelligible connection involves an analogy between real and relative space; as relative space is the presentation of an ordering of objects in the experience of a finite observer, so real space is the ordering of objects in the experience of an infinite observer, namely God. Space, Newton suggests, is God's sensorium: "Does it not appear from phenomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite space, as it were in his sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself: of which things the images only carried through the organs of sense to our little sensoriums, are seen and beheld by that in us which perceives and thinks."Optics, Query 28 (1706 ed.: Q. 20, p. 315). Both absolute and relative space, Newton suggests, involve the "point of view" and conditions of perceptual experience of observers. They differ in that relative space is the spatial ordering that finite observers perceive among mere images of objects, as these images are caused in their own bodies, located in particular places in real space; absolute space is the spatial ordering that an infinite observer perceives among the very objects themselves. Edwards may well have pondered these suggestions of Newton during the year or two after he wrote the opening sections of "Of Being," for they seem to form the connecting link between his early declaration that space is God and the alternative thesis he set before himself in the summer of 1723, namely, that things exist only as they are actually perceived or known, either in the experiences of finite minds, or as they are known by God. During the ensuing years of his tutorship he explored this new conception of being, traced its consequences, and considered some of the main difficulties it presented. From that time forward the proposition that reality consists in knowing and being perceived or known formed a central doctrine of Edwards' metaphysics.
BEING KNOWN AND BEING LOVED: THE STRUCTURE OF BEING
Edwards' earliest statement of the doctrine that nothing can be without being known is found in his "Miscellanies," in the entry numbered pp, which he wrote in early 1723 near the end of his New York pastorate: We know there was being from all eternity; and this being must be intelligent. For how doth one's mind refuse to believe, that there should be being from all eternity, without its being conscious to itself that it was; that there should be being from all eternity and yet nothing know, all that while, that anything is. This is really a contradiction; we may see it to be so, though we know not how to express it. For in what respect has anything had a being when there is nothing conscious of its being? For in what respect has anything had a being, that angels, nor men, nor no created intelligence know nothing [of], but only as God knows it to be? Not at all more than there is sound where none hears it, or color where none sees it. Thus for instance, supposing a room where none is, none sees the things in the room, no created intelligence: the things in the room have no being any other way than only as God is conscious [of them]; for there is no color there, neither is there any sound, nor any shape, etc.Townsend, p. 74. A few months later Edwards restated the main points of his doctrine and began to elaborate his defense of it in an addition to the essay "Of Being."Below, pp. 203–06. It is impossible that anything should exist and nothing know it, he maintained, for "nothing has any existence anywhere else but in consciousness. No, certainly nowhere else, but either in created or uncreated consciousness." Things that are not perceived by created minds can exist only as God knows them. But neither is this simply an expression of the traditional doctrine of God's omniscience. "Let us suppose, for illustration, this impossibility, that all the spirits in the universe to be for a time deprived of their consciousness, and God's consciousness at the same time to be intermitted. I say the universe for that time, would cease to be of itself; and not only, as we speak because the Almighty could not attend to uphold the world, but because God knew nothing of it." The introduction of the thesis that nothing whatever can be without being known, as Edwards asserts it in these passages, marks a major turning point in his thought. That his most complete exposition of the thesis should be written as an addition to his earlier essay on being in general shows that he considered it to be a fundamental metaphysical principle, one to which our understanding of all things must conform. So far forth, the thesis determined a major philosophical program. Our conception of God must incorporate the idea that he is necessarily conscious of himself; and our understanding of the created universe and its relation to the Creator must conform to the principle that the universe can exist only as it is perceived by finite and created minds, or as it is known by God. Many articles in "The Mind," and others in "Miscellanies," show the extent to which Edwards was occupied with this project during the subsequent years. He reconsidered and revised his earlier views concerning matter, space, and the general constitution of the physical world. He also made a critical examination of certain claims and assumptions concerning the nature of spirits and their relations to bodies, and explored the foundations for a general theory of mind. He failed to accomplish his project of producing a systematic treatise on the mind, but many of the fruits of his efforts found a prominent place in the doctrines and arguments of his other published works. In addition, these inquiries led Edwards to some of his boldest and most interesting, albeit less well-known, philosophical conclusions. Before taking up the substance of these matters, some attention should be given to the question how Edwards originally came to assert his leading metaphysical principle that nothing can be without being known. It could not have emerged as a logical consequence of his earlier views, for Edwards himself recognized it is incompatible with them. Neither does it seem that he adopted it from the work of any other philosopher or theologian. Various efforts in the past to demonstrate the source of Edwards' idealism in some published work have failed to make a convincing case;Georges Lyon, in chapter 10 of L'Idealisme en Angleterre au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, 1888), argued that Edwards must have received his idealism from Berkeley. This hypothesis was later disputed by, among others, Egbert Smyth in "Early Writings of JE," pp. 212–47 and H. N. Gardiner, "The Early Idealism of Jonathan Edwards," Philosophical Review, 9 (1900), pp. 573–96. Clarence Gohdes has argued that the Platonist Theophilus Gale might have been a source of JE's idealism; see "Aspects of Idealism in Early New England," Philosophical Review, 39 (1930), pp. 537–55. J. H. MacCracken, in Jonathan Edwards Idealismus (Halle, 1899), urges that the idealist Arthur Collier, through his Clavis Universalis (London, 1713), had a direct influence upon JE. in most instances, there is no firm evidence that Edwards had actually studied the works in question by the time he had formulated his idealist account of the world. In addition, the dissimilarities between Edwards' developed views and those of other early eighteenth-century idealists tell strongly against the hypothesis that he simply took over such a distinctive metaphysical doctrine from any of them.See further below, pp. 94–96, 102–03. In fact, Edwards' assertion of idealism, that is, the thesis that physical objects exist only in the mind or cannot exist unless they are perceived is not his primary claim, as an examination of Miscell. no. pp and the passage in "Of Being" clearly shows. In both places he introduces his idealism as a logical consequence of the much more general metaphysical principle that nothing whatever can be without being known. Edwards recognized, of course, that this consequence of the principle, more than any other, required some further and independent proof or vindication, and he undertook to provide such. But, as will be shown more fully below, the arguments he constructed for this purpose could hardly have been borrowed from the writings of another idealist, for they were shaped very specifically to deal with the peculiarities of his own earlier views concerning the existence of bodies. Above all, Edwards' arguments are not at all concerned with one question that was central to the other idealists of the time, namely, whether bodies are substances, capable of existing by themselves. He had already decided that question in the negative, and did not trouble to reconsider the matter. How then did Edwards first come to assert that nothing at all can be without being known? The writings of his early New York pastorate, that is, the "Diary" and "Resolutions," and especially the articles in "Miscellanies" preceding no. pp, offer valuable clues. These writings give no evidence that he continued to think systematically about the abstract questions of the nature of being and the ontological status of bodies after leaving college. But they show that he was deeply concerned about the distinctive character and the value of religious life and faith during this time, and his ideas concerning these matters took form in a manner that is very relevant to the claim that nothing can be without being known. Two points emerge from his discussions in "Miscellanies" that are especially important: first, he was convinced that the primary and essential element in religion consists in cognition—a unique consciousness and knowledge of God; second, he became convinced that religion, taken in this sense, is the very purpose of the entire creation. The view that religious faith consists essentially in the knowledge of God was certainly not peculiar to Edwards, but his understanding of that proposition must have arisen in part from the intense character of the spiritual exercises and experiences that he recorded in his "Diary." In Miscell. no. aa he characterizes faith as a unique awareness of a certain ineffable property, divinity, which might be recognized or discovered through contemplating the idea of God. When this property is disclosed in the idea, he says, it certifies to the beholding mind that the idea is indeed from God.See Townsend, pp. 244–45. Such an awareness of God requires that the mind be abstracted or turned away from the body and sensual pleasures, but it affords a spiritual happiness which is superior to any bodily good. In Miscell. no. f Edwards notes that, just as Hobbes had mistakenly supposed that matter and not spirit is the only substance, so it would be mistaken to assume that happiness consists only in sensuous pleasures and that there is no real spiritual happiness.See ibid., p. 193. The contemplation of God is indeed the highest good for man, and is the end for which he was created.Miscell. no. kk, in Townsend, p. 237; Miscell. no. tt, in ibid., pp. 126–28. In Miscell. no. gg Edwards carries these reflections an important step further: the knowledge of God and the spiritual happiness it affords is the purpose of the entire universe. It is certain that the world has a purpose, he argues; but it would be entirely lacking in purpose if there were no intelligent beings: For senseless matter, in whatever excellent order it is placed, would be useless if there were no intelligent beings at all, neither God nor others; for what would it be good for? So certainly, senseless matter would be altogether useless, if there was no intelligent being but God, for God could neither receive good himself nor communicate good. What would this vast universe of matter, placed in such excellent order and governed by such excellent rules, be good for, if there was no intelligence that could know anything of it? Wherefore it necessarily follows that intelligent beings are the end of the creation, that their end must be to behold and admire the doings of God, and to magnify him for them, and to contemplate his glories in them.Townsend, pp. 236–37. The universe could have no purpose unless it is known by intelligent beings. This claim may readily be associated with the proposition Edwards asserted quite soon afterward in Miscell. no. pp, that the universe could have no existence unless it is known by intelligent beings. The connection is even more apparent when we recall that Edwards had already denied the substantial and independent reality of the physical world, and maintained that it depends immediately and necessarily for its existence upon God's continual creative activity. These views provided a setting that was, at the least, very conducive to a new interpretation of existence. In fact, after he had formulated his new metaphysical principle Edwards occasionally expressed the connection between his metaphysical and his teleological views of the world. In Miscell. no. 87, for example, he writes, "Intelligent beings are created to be the consciousness of the universe, that they may perceive what God is and does. This can be nothing else but to perceive the excellency of what he is and does."Ibid., pp. 128–29. 1. And in Miscell. no. 247 he strikes the same note: "For God to glorify himself is to discover himself in his works, or to communicate himself in his works, which is all one. For we are to remember that the world exists only mentally, so that the very being of the world implies its being perceived or discovered."Ibid., pp. 129–30. However important these teleological considerations might have been in fostering Edwards' later metaphysical views, there is no sufficient reason for saying that he based his metaphysics upon teleology. On the contrary, his defense of the central principle that nothing can be without being known contains no direct or even covert references to the purposes of the world. In both Miscell. no. pp and "Of Being" he suggests that the principle is necessary and self-evident per se. That there should be being from eternity but nothing know it, he says, "is really a contradiction; we may see it to be so, though we know not how to express it."Above, p. 75. And again, it "grates upon the mind to think that something should be from all eternity, and nothing all the while be conscious of it"; it is not possible to "bring the mind to imagine" that anything should be and nothing know it.Below, p. 204. It is taken as a necessary consequence of this principle that the physical universe cannot exist without being perceived or known. But Edwards admits the need for an independent proof of the consequence, for our imagination leads us to think otherwise: "Our imagination makes us fancy we see shapes and colors and magnitudes though nobody is there to behold it."Ibid. In fact, his earlier conclusion that a body is an infinite resistance produced by God in some part of real space is entirely compatible with the assumption that bodies can exist without being perceived. But again, Edwards does not attempt to refute this assumption by appeal to the supposed purposes of bodies. He bases his argument entirely upon a new analysis of the necessary properties of bodies, especially of solidity or resistance. Edwards' first formulation of his argument, which is found in "Of Being," is clearly defective; it does not yield the intended conclusion, and it depends upon an account of solidity which he promises to give in another place. Nevertheless, the underlying strategy can be elicited from his reasoning. Various considerations had led Newton, Locke, and other philosophers and scientists to conclude that colors are not really in the objects where they appear, but only in the minds that perceive them. Edwards intended to show that similar considerations apply in the case of solidity, so that it will follow that this property also, the very essence of body, is only in the perceiving mind. Thus he argues that, as color can neither be nor be perceived without light, so solidity or resistance can neither be nor be perceived without motion.Below, pp. 204–06. From these points by themselves, however, it does not follow that either light or resistance exists only in perceiving minds. Edwards' second formulation of his argument, in "The Mind," No. 27, is a much more plausible and important version of it. Before taking up this argument in detail, however, it is necessary to examine yet another major development in Edwards' thought, one upon which that argument, and indeed the whole of his subsequent philosophical thought, depends. Shortly after writing the addition to "Of Being" that is discussed above, Edwards turned his attention to the examination of the concepts of excellency, harmony, and proportion which began to play a prominent role in his discussions of the relations of God to his creation and the ends for which he created it.
Miscell. no. 64 indicates the direction his thought was taking. The article begins: Thus the matter is as to the Holy Spirit's gracious operations on the mind. We have shewn in philosophy that all natural operations are done immediately by God only in harmony and proportion. But there is this difference: those, being the high[est] kind of operations of all, are done in the most general proportion, not tied to any particular proportion, to this or that created being, but the proportion is with the whole series of acts and designs from eternity to eternity.From a transcription of the original, provided by Thomas Schafer. This reflection, probably more than any other, led Edwards to see the need for a systematic treatment of the concepts of harmony and proportion as they apply to both physical and mental objects and events, and to the manner in which God acts in producing them. That perfection, goodness, and excellency consist in harmony or proportion, and that the greater excellency belongs to the higher or more general proportion, were for him unquestioned assumptions. Accordingly, when Edwards soon afterward addressed these questions, he did so in connection with an analysis and explanation of excellency. He began in Miscell. no. 78; but after writing a few lines he transferred the opening remarks to a separate paper and continued with the essay which was to become the first article in "The Mind." The task Edwards set for himself in "The Mind," No. 1 is the definition of excellency and beauty, evil and deformity. He supposes from the start that the same concept—excellency—will account for both moral and aesthetic value, and indeed all value in general. His starting point is with what he takes to be a received view, that "all excellency is harmony, symmetry or proportion." Edwards never seriously questions this view; his concern is with the analysis and explanation of it: "We would know why proportion is more excellent than disproportion, that is, why proportion is pleasant to the mind, and disproportion is unpleasant."Below, p. 332. It should be noted that although in this statement of objectives Edwards suggests that excellency is to be considered the same thing as pleasantness, it is by no means clear that he was committed to this assumption. That there is a real and even a necessary connection between goodness and our desire and pleasure, is affirmed by the whole Platonic and Augustinian tradition into which Edwards was born. The real good, it holds, is necessarily the proper object of will and desire wherefore the apparent good is the actual object of our wants and choices. And even though the possession of apparent goods can make us suffer the actual possession of the real good necessarily satisfies and pleases us—it could never make us miserable. In Edwards' case, the basis for proceeding is the assumption that real beauty and real good are some one thing, either proportion and harmony, or some more fundamental nature that is essential to them. He further supposes that the explanation why this one thing is beauty and goodness will also show why it pleases and satisfies us. He begins with the reflection that proportion is complex, and that it arises from and depends upon an equality of ratios. This provides the hypothesis that excellency consists in equality, that is, any equality that could enter into a ratio, such as equality of size, shape, or distance. He tests the hypothesis by various examples, and finds, in particular, that when an object is added to an existing composition, the beauty of the result depends upon the extent to which the new element conforms with and adds to the equalities already present. In general, he finds that the more complex the composition, and the more its parts and their arrangement exhibit equalities of relation, the greater is the complex beauty. He concludes, "This simple equality, without proportion, is the lowest kind of beauty, and may be called simple beauty. All other beauties and excellencies may be resolved into it."Below, p. 333. Further investigation also shows that complex beauty is not merely a combination of simple beauties; in complex objects it is often necessary to "omit" some simple beauties in some parts, "for the sake of the harmony of the whole."Below, p. 334. That equalities and proportions extending through the whole of a complex have a priority over those that are confined to limited parts, will become an important element in the general theory toward which Edwards is moving. Having established these general points concerning beauty, equality, and proportion, Edwards turns to the introduction of his explanatory theory. He begins with a new statement of the conclusion so far reached: "All beauty," he writes, "consists in similarness, or identity of relation." Then, to clarify this claim, he adds, "In identity of relation consists all likeness, and all identity between two consists in identity of relation" (italics added).Ibid.
It seems evident that the notions of likeness and "identity between two" can only pertain to universals. Accordingly, the most straightforward way of interpreting the sentence is as a statement about universals: all universals, Edwards is plainly asserting—whatever can be common to different things—are relations. All the properties that things may have in common, whether essential or accidental, are constituted by relations which are identical in each, either relations among the constituent parts of each thing, or relations of each to others. But relations alone are universal, and two things can exemplify or partake in the same universal only by virtue of themselves or their constituent parts standing in the same relations. Other statements in "The Mind," No. 1 make it clear that this is indeed what Edwards intends to affirm. Of bodies having the same shape, he writes, "The bodies are two, the relation between the parts of their extremities is the same, and this is their agreement with them." Even the similarity between two distinct sounds or other sensible qualities, in virtue of which they are pleasant, consists in the proportionate relations in the motions of our sense organs: "The organs are so contrived that upon the touch of such and such sensible particles there shall be a regular and harmonious motion of the animal spirits."Below, p. 336. See "Natural Philosophy," US No. 5 on JE's explanation of the pleasure and pain that come by the senses (below, p. 265). This entry was probably written hortly after "The Mind," No. 1. At a later time, in "The Mind," No. 42, he reconsiders is explanation of the agreement among simple sensible qualities, and proposes a very different one (see below, pp. 360–61).It seems evident that Edwards is prepared to account for all sameness of qualities and quantities by a sameness of relations; the Aristotelian distinctions between three different categories of accidents are collapsed into the single category of relations.John Locke had already gone far toward breaking down the distinction between » and relations by treating all so-called secondary qualities of objects as mere "powers to produce various sensations in us" (Essay, Bk. II, ch. 8, no. 14). But Edwards' view of the centrality of relations among objects extends even beyond this; he brings the Aristotelian category of substance itself under that of relations: "For being, if we examine narrowly, is nothing else but proportion. When one being is inconsistent with another being, then being is contradicted."Below, p. 336. And again, "Disagreement or contrariety to being is evidently an approach to nothing, which is nothing else but disagreement or contrariety of being, and the greatest and only evil; and entity is the greatest and only good."Below, p. 335. Roland Delattre, in Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, 1968), has called attention to the central place of beauty in JE's conception of being. The analysis of the statements in "The Mind," No. 1 that is proposed here will be found to support and confirm Delattre's general claim, although it differs in emphasis and in some details from his account.
Earlier, in "Of Atoms," Edwards had rejected the notion of substance as an underlying support of the properties of bodies, and maintained that their being consists in solidity alone. As we shall find later, his reformulated argument concerning the status of bodies turns upon the consideration that solidity or resistance itself is not an "absolute" property of bodies taken singly and individually, but is a relational property, to be explained by the order and regularity of relations between two bodies or their constituents.See below, pp. 95–96, for a discussion of "The Mind," No. 27. In the context of "The Mind," No. 1, Edwards draws another important consequence from his principle that being itself consists in relations: One alone, without reference to any more, cannot be excellent; for in such a case there can be no manner of relation no way, and therefore no such thing as consent. Indeed, what we call one may be excellent, because of a consent of parts, or some consent of those in that being that are distinguished into a plurality some way or other. But in a being that is absolutely without any plurality there cannot be excellency, for there can be no such thing as consent or agreement.Below, p. 337. In a brief addition to Miscell. no. 117, which Edwards must have added soon after writing the above, he gives what may be regarded as a corollary to it: "We have shewn that one alone cannot be excellent, inasmuch as, in such a case, there can be no consent. Therefore, if God is excellent, there must be plurality in God; otherwise there can be no consent in him."Townsend, p. 258. While this is not the place to discuss Edwards' account of the Trinity as such, it seems evident that his new concept of being, when applied to the divine perfections, stands in sharp contrast to the long tradition of philosophical theology into which he was born. God's goodness is not grounded in the absolute unity and simplicity of his being, but belongs to him only as he constitutes a plurality involving relations.See Delattre's discussion of beauty in relation to JE's conception of God, in Beauty and Sensibility, Pt. II, pp. 117–84.
If the above interpretation of Edwards' statements and their general import is correct, they present a very different view of the formal and intelligible structure of reality from any that had been developed by the major philosophers of the seventeenth century, and even by those of his own time. Edwards' account excludes, not only the concept of a material substance which he had already rejected, but the very notion of substance as it was entertained during this period. The claim that every real being must, as a condition of its reality, stand in some relation to other things, and even to all other things, implies that the universe is necessarily pluralistic. Nor does it admit that any one of this plurality of things is an ultimate substance, in the sense that it can exist by itself independently of all others, or that it can have any unity or self-identity apart from the relations in which it stands to others. Whatever logical or ontological difficulties such a view might prove to involve, it should be noted that from a schematic point of view it is very well suited to avoid some of the most severe and widely debated philosophical problems arising from the concept of distinct and independent substances. A thorough examination and analysis of these problems and the controversies surrounding them would be much too extravagant an undertaking here. But a major source of the difficulties found in the theory of metaphysical dualism concerned the intelligibility, or even the logical possibility, of any real causal or other relations existing between two independent things with such entirely different essences as minds and bodies were conceived to be.See above, pp. 59–61.Indeed, it seems to have been widely assumed that unless two things have a similar nature or common properties, each in itself, they cannot be said to stand in any relation to each other whatever. But on the other hand, it seems also to have been widely assumed that unless things have a different nature and distinct properties, each in itself, they cannot be really distinct individuals or things. In contrast to this, Edwards' view implies that two things cannot exist unless they stand in some relation to each other, and two things cannot have a similar nature or common properties unless each is a plurality of items that stand in the same relations as those of the other. The logical force this theory, as against the conception of independent substances With distinct essences, is reflected in a single cryptic comment in "The Mind," No. 1: "Two things can agree in nothing but relations, because otherwise the notion of their twoness (duality) is destroyed."Below, p. 335. But this remark, as it stands, is more than a little puzzling. It seems to assert that we cannot conceive there to be two numerically distinct individuals when they agree in all their nonrelational properties or have all such properties in common. But on the other hand, Edwards suggests, we can conceive two individuals to be numerically distinct when they agree in all their relations. At first sight it seems that if the former of these two claims is accepted, the latter should be denied. Certainly, it would appear, if numerical identity follows from the sameness of nonrelational properties, it follows from the sameness of relations as well. By extension of Leibniz' principle of the identity of indiscernibles, that "there cannot be two individual things in nature which differ only numerically,"G. W. Leibniz, "First Truths," in Leroy Loemker, ed., Leibniz Philosophical Papers and Letters (2nd ed., Dordrecht, 1969), p. 268. it could be argued against Edwards that we cannot conceive individuals to be numerically distinct unless we conceive some difference between them, either in their nonrelational properties or in their relations. A few sentences before this controversial claim, however, and in the same general context, Edwards briefly explains how two bodies at a distance from each other are beautiful. He might well have had this particular case in mind when he suggested that things can agree in their relations and still be conceived to be numerically different. "All identity between two consists in identity of relation. Thus, when the distance between two is exactly equal, their distance is their relation one to another; the distance is the same, the bodies are two, wherefore this is their correspondency and beauty."Below, pp. 334–35. Because beauty consists in the identity or sameness of relations, Edwards emphasizes that in this case the relation of either body to the other is the same as the relation of the other to it; if one is just six feet from the other, the other is just six feet from it. In the case of this and all other symmetrical relations, no individual can stand in it to another unless the other stands in the same relation to it. But "is distant from," "is just six feet from," "is next to," are also relations that nothing can have to itself. Whatever stands in such relations must, as such, be numerically distinct things. In this case, it would appear, numerical difference follows from the relation itself, or as Edwards might say, from the sameness or agreement of the relations; a difference of properties or relations is not logically required. Where no difference of property or relation is present, of course, the two bodies would be indiscernible, but they would still be numerically distinct. Edwards discussed the problem of the identity of individuals on at least two later occasions in his published works, in Freedom of the WillIn Pt. IV, §8; see Works (Yale ed.), 1, pp. 384–96. and in Original Sin.In Pt. IV, ch. 3; see ibid., 3, pp. 389–412. In both places his treatment of the problem may be seen to agree in essential respects with the early comment in "The Mind," No. 1. The discussion in Freedom of the Will is particularly significant, for in attacking Isaac Watts' conception of the arbitrariness of God's will Edwards seems to take up the very position that Leibniz had argued against Samuel Clarke, one of Newton's most devoted champions.See in H. G. Alexander, ed., The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (Manchester, 1956). In his third paper to Clarke, Leibniz attacks the Newtonian concept of absolute space by the following argument (p. 26): "I say then, that if space was an absolute being, there would something happen for which it would be impossible there should be a sufficient reason. Which is against my axiom. And I prove it thus. Space is something absolutely uniform; and without the things placed in it, one point of space does not absolutely differ in any respect whatsoever from another point of space. Now from hence it follows, (supposing space to be something in itself, besides the order of bodies among themselves,) that 'Tis impossible there should be a reason, why God, preserving the same situations of bodies among themselves, should have placed them in space after one certain particular manner, and not otherwise; why every thing was not placed the quite contrary way, for instance, by changing East into West." emphatically denied, that it is "possible for God to make two bodies perfectly alike, and put them in different places."Ibid., p. 388. Such bodies; he maintains, would be different only with respect to the "circumstance" of their place; but if each were in the place of the other there would be no numerical difference in the particular state of affairs. "If anyone should say … that there must be something determined without an end; viz., that of those two similar bodies, this in particular should be made in this place, and the other in the other, and should inquire why the Creator did not make them in transposition, when both are alike, and each would equally have suited either place? The inquiry supposes something that is not true; namely, that the two bodies differ and are distinct in other respects besides their place. So that with this distinction, inherent in them, they might in their first creation have been transposed, and each might have begun its existence in the place of the other."Ibid., p. 389. In Original Sin Edwards employs other arguments to show that the unity and identity of every created thing through time are founded upon an arbitrary establishment of the divine will by which things are immediately produced. This establishment in turn has its sufficient reason in God's wisdom, according to which there is analogy and harmony among all things, and a good consequence or end obtained by them.Works (Yale ed.), 3, pp. 402–06. Once again, he rejects the basic conception of the world as comprised in various distinct and independent individual things or substances, each with its own nature and inherent properties that belong to it independently of its relations to others. "There are various kinds of identity and oneness, found among created things, by which they become one in different manners, respects and degrees, and to various purposes; … and every kind is ordered, regulated, and limited in every respect, by divine constitution."Ibid., pp. 404–05. This general view of the logical structure of reality, as we have seen, first emerged in Edwards' thought from the analysis of excellency in "The Mind," No. 1. For purposes of further discussion, it will be helpful to sketch a rough and tentative picture of the formal structure of the world which seems to emerge from Edwards' view that universals, common properties, and the individual identities of things consist in or depend upon relations. We may consider, for a start, that there are various primitive and fully determinate relations that are logically independent of each other. No individual things will exist except as they are instances of these primitive relations, so that every existing individual will necessarily stand in such a relation to at least one other individual. We might then suppose that these primitive relations are ordered by various other relations which supervene upon them, in such a way that all the instances of any one of the primitive relations will themselves be connected in some determinate way with instances of others. Hence every existing individual will have various determinate relations with every other individual. The general and intelligible structure of the world, including the identities and differences among the objects in it, their natures and common properties, and their regular order in space and time, may be seen as determined according to and following from such ordering relations. A formal system of relations of this sort might be looked upon in several different ways, each of which can throw some light upon the structural concepts that Edwards brings into regular use in developing his theory of the creation. Such a system might be referred to in describing the order that is actually present in a complex set of objects, as Edwards often uses the terms "regular order," "harmony," and "proportion" in describing the natural world. Again, a system of relations might be expressed as a framework of general laws with reference to which certain particular objects and relations are explained, and others predicted. Furthermore, such a system might be taken as defining a plan or course of action that is adopted and implemented for some purpose, or as a set of fixed rules that are recognized and applied in acting. Taken in this way it might show the formal structure of what Edwards often refers to as the arbitrary constitution of God and his constant and regular manner of acting in the course of his creating. The notion of a system of relations as defining a rule of action that may be adopted or recognized and applied seems to afford a way of interpreting the explanation by which Edwards finally claims to answer the question with which he began "The Mind," No. 1: "Why is proportion pleasant to the mind, and disproportion unpleasant?" The claim that universals are relations was introduced as the first step in answering this question; and our lengthy elaboration of the implications of that claim may now throw some light upon what is otherwise an entirely obscure argument. Edwards presents it as follows: All beauty consists in similarness, or identity of relation. In identity of relation consists all likeness, and all identity between two consists in identity of relation.… So bodies of exactly the same figure: the bodies are two, the relation between the parts of the extremities is the same, and this is their agreement with them. But if there are two bodies of different shapes, having no similarness of relation between the parts of the extremities, this, considered by itself, is a deformity, because being disagrees with being; which must undoubtedly be disagreeable to perceiving being, because what disagrees with being must be disagreeable to being in general, to everything that partakes of entity, and of course to perceiving being. And what agrees with being must be agreeable to being in general and therefore to perceiving being. But agreeableness of perceiving being is pleasure, and disagreeableness is pain.Below, pp. 334–35. The notions of agreement and disagreement that Edwards introduces in this explanation probably take their rise from the formal disciplines, especially logic, to which he was devoted as a student. In the Ramist system of logic, in particular, these terms had an established use in the classification of "arguments" or reasons that should be searched out and applied to a subject matter in explaining or proving something about it. So-called "simple" arguments were thus divided into those that "agree with" the matter in question and those that "disagree with" it. The former included arguments involving the causes and effects of a thing, or its "subjects" and "adjuncts." The latter included the contraries, "relatives," and contradictories of it.Ramus' system of logic is discussed by Wilbur Howell, in Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (Princeton, 1956), pp. 146–172. There is no doubt that Edwards was familiar with this classification system from his undergraduate studies. In fact, in the Latin version of the Ramist system in Edwards' own textbook, the terms consentaneum and dissentaneum are used;Expositionis Georgii Dounami, in Petri Rami Dialecticam Catechismus. See further above, p. 14. and in "The Mind," No. 1 and elsewhere he regularly uses "consent" and "dissent" to express the relations of agreement and disagreement.In "The Mind," No. 45, JE comments, "When we spake of excellence in bodies we were obliged to borrow the word 'consent' from spiritual things. But excellence in and among spirits is, in its prime and proper sense, being's consent to being. There is no other proper consent but that of minds, even of their will; which, when it is of minds towards minds, it is love, and when of minds towards other things it is choice" (below, p. 362). For discussion, see below, pp. 131–32. John Locke's definitions of truth as "the joining or separating of signs, as the things signified by them do agree or disagree with one an-other, "Essay, Bk. IV, ch. 5, no. 2. and of knowledge as "the perception of the connection or agreemnt, or disagreement and repugnancy, of any of our ideas,"Ibid., Bk. IV, ch. 1, no. 2. seem to have an even more direct bearing upon Edwards' explanation of excellency. According to Locke, ideas might agree or disagree in any of four general respects: identity or diversity, relation, coexistence and necessary connection, or real existence.Ibid, nos. 2–7. Edwards holds that all these ultimately consist in the agreement or disagreement of things with respect to relations. But Locke also distinguishes among several sorts of relations according to their basis or foundation, and each sort involves the notions of agreement and disagreement in a somewhat different way. What Locke calls the proportional, the natural, the voluntary, and the moral relations all differ according as they depend upon the ideas or characters of the things themselves, the causes and circumstances of origin of the things, or on the other hand upon some voluntary act by which the relation is instituted, or some general standard or rule which is adopted, recognized, and applied in judging things.Ibid, Bk. II, ch. 28, nos. 2–4. In these latter cases, things agree or disagree according as the relation is instituted for them or not, and as they conform or disconform to the established rule. It is with reference to moral relations in particular that moral good and evil are defined: Good and evil, as hath been shown, are nothing but pleasure or pain, or that which occasions or procures pleasure or pain to us. Morally good and evil, then, is only the conformity or disagreement of our voluntary actions to some law, whereby good or evil is drawn on us from the will and power of the law-maker.Ibid, no. 5. It seems evident that Edwards understands the notions of agreement and disagreement as applying with respect to the relations among a complex order of objects. Their agreement or disagreement is not determined by the presence or absence of certain particular relations, but by the sameness or difference of the relations among them. An object agrees with others in a given complex order when it is proportioned to them, or when its various relations to them are the same as their relations to each other. We have already noted that, in Edwards' general conception of the logical structure of the world, every existing thing is related in some manner to all other existing things. It has also been suggested that he seems to consider any system of relations among things, not only as being present and observable in some set of objects but also as constituting a system of laws by which the parts of an order of objects can be explained, and again as defining a course of action by which such an order could be produced for some purpose, or a set of general rules for acting in the production of it. In the latter view, the system of relations may be seen to be analogous to what Locke calls voluntary and moral relations. If this analogy is admitted, then when Edwards speaks of an object agreeing with others, he should be taken to mean, not only that it is proportioned to others, but also that in being so proportioned it conforms to the general laws obtaining among those others, and even throughout the entire system of the world, and that it accordingly satisfies the rules by which this system is formed, and the purposes for which it is formed. It seems plausible to suppose that when Edwards says in explanation of excellency that an agreement of an object with others is necessarily agreeable to being in general and to everything that exists, this agreeableness involves or consists in the necessary conformity of such an agreement with the general laws of the universe, and consequently the satisfaction of the rules and purposes according to which it was created. It also seems plausible to interpret Edwards' explanation of excellency as maintaining that it is in this same way that excellency is understood to please us and deformity or disproportion to displease us. He points out how, when we accidentally notice a set of marks, we are very apt "to be ranging of them into regular parcels and figures, and if we see a mark out of its place, to be placing of it right by our imagination; and this even while we are meditating on something else. So we catch ourselves at observing the rules of harmony and regularity in the careless motions of our heads or feet, and when playing with our hands, or walking about the room."Below, p. 336. In these observations he calls attention to the manner in which even our casual perceptions, imaginings, and overt actions involve the application of rules. In a corresponding manner, Edwards implies that the pleasure we feel when we perceive any proportion or agreement essentially involves the satisfaction of rules of order and proportion that we ourselves apply to the objects of perception and thought. There is at least the suggestion in this that for Edwards the very nature of mental activity consists in the applying of rules to things. It is clear, in any case, that Edwards holds that the kinds of agreement or consent among the objects that please us are the same as that agreement or consent to being which is necessary for any object to exist. Indeed, he holds, it is just because such relations are necessary for the existence of a thing, that they are necessarily the ones that please us when we perceive them. "The reason why equality thus pleases the mind, and inequality is unpleasing, is because disproportion or inconsistency is contrary to being. For being, if we examine narrowly, is nothing else but proportion."Below, p. 336. Later, in "The Mind," No. 49, Edwards notes that not only the perception of being's consent to being, but the "mere perception of being" is pleasing to the perceiver, so that "there is in the mind an inclination to perceive the things that are, or the desire of truth."Below, p. 367. This supposed correspondence of the mind and its modes of operation about objects, to the manner in which those objects actually exist, is a basic point in Edwards' view that the physical world exists only as a representation or "shadow" of the spiritual. God creates and governs the world according to established rules of order and proportion; and it is in the very regularity and harmonious order of the world that God manifests his nature and so accomplishes his purposes in creating it. In a similar manner, Edwards argues, the spiritual character and attitude of a person are manifested and represented in his countenance,See "The Mind," No. 20, below, p. 346; ibid., No. 62, below, p. 380. and the mind of the artist is revealed in the harmonious relations among the parts of his work: "The notes of a tune or the strokes of an acute penman, for instance, are placed in such exact order, having such mutual respect one to another, that they carry with them into the mind of him that sees and hears the conception of an understanding and will exerting itself in these appearances. And were it not that we, by reflection and reasoning, are led to an extrinsic intelligence and will that was the cause, it would seem to be in the notes and strokes themselves."Ibid., No. 63, below, p. 382. Accordingly, Edwards argues that we perceive and enjoy regularity and proportion in the world because the regularity in its relations is the consequence of the manner in which it was actually created by God's mind; and because the very existence and nature of its objects consist in such regularity in its relations.
THE WORLD IN SPACE AND TIME
After completing his long essay upon excellency, and making several additions to it, Edwards apparently found he had exhausted the topic and established a sufficiently firm conception of it, at least for the time.Of the remaining articles in "The Mind" that are concerned with excellency, only No. 14 followed No. 1 by less than some three years.He went on in "The Mind" to treat a variety of other matters pertaining to the relations between minds and bodies, the nature of cognition the nature and status of space, and the existence of bodies. It is apparent that he had taken up a serious study of Locke's Essay during this time, and in doing so he seems to have concentrated upon certain parts of the book rather than worked systematically through it.For further on Edwards' reading of Locke, see above, pp. 16–18, 24–26. Most of the following articles were probably written during his Yale tutorship. Several of them suggest that the lessons in logic that he was preparing for his undergraduates gave him occasion for reflecting upon the relations between logic and our performances of reasoning and judgment. He probably used Brattle's "New Logic" and Arnauld's Art of Thinking in his teaching, and perhaps also some version of Ramus.See above, p. 33. The course of his philosophical inquiries, as they are recorded in "The Mind" and other private writings, suggests that Edwards was working toward the formulation of a coherent system of ideas, which would largely be founded upon the principle that nothing can be unless it is perceived or known. He seems to have had little moral doubt that such a system could ultimately be established and defended. At the same time, he seems to have had no definite plan for proceeding. Instead of setting about it in a systematic manner, he occupied himself with private study and reflection upon what he took to be the central points and problems to be handled. One of these, inevitably, was the construction of a solid proof that bodies cannot exist unless they are perceived or known. In Locke he found just the right language for stating this claim, either expressions he had not before confronted, or whose suitable use for this purpose he had hitherto entirely overlooked and disregarded: bodies are "ideas that exist only in the mind." With this language in hand, and probably with Locke's chapter on ideas and qualities at his elbow, Essay, Bk. II, ch. 8. Edwards finally turned to work out the required proof in "The Mind," No. 27. The argument of this article makes an appropriate starting point for examining how Edwards undertook to develop a new theory of the physical world and its relation to the minds that perceive and know it. In "The Mind," No. 27 Edwards adopts a strategy similar to the one he used in his earlier argument in "Of Being."See above, p. 80. He asserts, on the authority of "every knowing philosopher," that colors are "strictly nowhere else but in the mind"; and then adds, "Color may have an existence out of the mind with equal reason as anything in body has any existence out of the mind beside the very substance of the body itself, which is nothing but the divine power, or rather the constant exertion of it." Besides color, he argues, our idea of body includes only solidity or resistance, and this in turn depends immediately upon the exercise of God's power: actual resistance is the actual exertion of that power, whereas the power of resisting is only "the constant law or method of that actual exertion." The question therefore is whether resistance, as so understood, can be conceived to exist unperceived and out of the mind. So far forth, Edwards is concerned just with his own earlier conception of resistance as comprising the very being of body; and that conception seems to imply that bodies can exist unperceived. It asserts that actual resistance exists in certain parts of real space, and that its existence in any one part of space depends immediately and solely upon God's exerting his power there. Now, however, Edwards offers an account of resistance that is incompatible with the idea that it could be produced by itself in any given part of space. Resistance cannot exist, he argues, unless something is resisted, for there can be no actual resistance unless one thing resists another. Hence we cannot conceive it to exist unless we conceive something that resists and is resisted; and if we conceive resistance existing out of the mind, we must conceive that which resists and is resisted as existing out of the mind as well. But it is obvious that neither actual resistance itself nor the mere power or law of resisting can be what resists and is resisted. Because our concept of body includes nothing else that we can conceive existing out of the mind that could be what resists and is resisted, it follows that resistance itself cannot be conceived as existing out of the mind. Edwards does not even consider whether our concept of body might include the notion of an underlying substratum in which the resistance inheres; his earlier rejection of this thesis is taken for granted here. The above treatment of resistance not only furnished Edwards with a vindication of his thesis that bodies cannot exist out of the mind; it also set the stage for a brief explanation of how bodies can exist in the mind. At the end of "The Mind," No. 27 he writes, "But now it is easy to conceive of resistance as a mode of an idea. It is easy to conceive of such a power or constant manner of stopping or resisting a color. The idea may be resisted—it may move, and stop, and rebound; but how a mere power which is nothing real can move and stop is inconceivable."Below, p. 351. When read in the light of comments and discussions elsewhere in his manuscript notes, this statement can best be interpreted as setting forth a form of idealistic phenomenalism. The things that resist and are resisted are colors (or colored shapes), as they are phenomena presented in visual experience. Because they are colors, he supposes, they are ideas that exist only in the minds that perceive them. These ideas are perceived to move, touch each other, and rebound in a fixed and regular manner, and so are understood to resist and be resisted. Actual resistance is not a property of each idea by itself; it is just that actual succession of observed motions of the ideas in the circumstances described. And the power of resistance is not an inherent cause of those changes of motion, it is only the constant manner in which they occur, or the general law to which they conform. Hence an idea is a solid body when its successive motions follow from its circumstances and relations to other bodies in accordance with that general law. Edwards closes "The Mind," No. 27 with a very general conclusion: "The world is therefore an ideal one; and the law of creating, and the succession of these ideas, is constant and regular."Ibid. Evidently he considered this phenomenalistic treatment of resistance to be basic to a larger program of explanations which would show how the whole system of the physical world exists in the mind. All bodies, their properties and relations, their mutual interactions and successive changes are to be accounted for by series of ideas in perceiving minds, and by the laws that govern order and succession among the ideas. In "The Mind," No. 10 he writes, "Truth as to external things is the consistency of our ideas with those ideas, or that train and series of ideas, that are raised in our minds according to God's stated order and law."Below, p. 342.As this passage indicates, Edwards does not suppose that physical obiects are merely nominal entities, at least with respect to the knowledge of perceiving minds. Like Locke, whose theory of truth he is evidently considering,Essay, Bk. IV, ch. 5. Edwards holds that bodies have real natures independent of the ideas and beliefs we form concerning them. But he rejects Locke's view that these real natures are unperceived and unknowable properties of substances; instead he holds that they consist in the general laws that govern the order and regularity of the series of ideas that are "raised in our minds" in the course of sense experience. These general laws, Edwards asserts, are established by God. In "The Mind," No. 15 he reforms his conception of truth with respect to external things in the light of this assumption. Truth, he now holds, is the agreement of our ideas with existence; and the existence of external things consists in "the determination, and fixed mode, of God's exciting ideas in us. So that truth in these things is an agreement of our ideas with that series in God. 'Tis existence, and that is all we can say."Below, pp. 344–45. In spite of the major differences between this and Edwards' earliest views concerning the nature of physical objects, it is apparent that he continued to hold some of his earliest metaphysical conclusions, and that these conclusions were fundamental to the formulation of his idealistic phenomenalism. It has been sufficiently noted that he continued to reject the notion that bodies are substances in which properties inhere. He did not neglect to emphasize this point on later occasions, for example, in Miscell. no. 267Townsend, p. 78. and "The Mind," No. 61.Below, p. 380. Beyond this, as he had argued in "Of Atoms" that solidity is the immediate effect of the exercise of divine power, now he maintains that God is the immediate cause of the ideas that are presented to us in sense experience, and that the order of succession of these ideas depends entirely upon God's will. Finally, Edwards continues to maintain that bodies, and indeed all created things, exist in God who is the being of all things. So Edwards concludes "The Mind," No. 15: " 'Tis impossible that we should explain and resolve a perfectly abstract and mere idea of existence: only we always find this, by running of it up, that God and real existence are the same."Below, p. 345. But it was a corollary of Edwards' earlier view that all things exist in God by way of being in space. Now however, he maintains that bodies are in God by way of his knowledge or consciousness of them; and this knowledge essentially involves general laws, or determinations of his will with respect to regularities in the order of ideas he causes in created minds. This difference seems to be fundamental in Edwards' understanding of his principle that nothing whatever can be without being known. He urged this principle, not merely as a theory about the nature of physical objects, but as a wholly new account of being in general. In the opening portion of "Of Being" he had followed Henry More in arguing the necessary omnipresence of being, and had concluded that space is God. His first declaration that nothing can be without knowledge or consciousness, however, marks the point of his general rejection of More's metaphysical system. Bodies are in God as determinations of his will with respect to order and succession, not as resistance in parts of real space. In "The Mind," No. 2 Edwards attacks More on another fundamental point: spirits are not in place in the sense that they are extended through parts of real space, as More had argued, but only in the sense that their perceptions and actions are regularly connected with the perceived positions and motions of phenomenal bodies. These regular connections are governed by certain general rules that are established by God.Below, p. 339. Again, in "The Mind," No. 9 Edwards strikes at the heart of More's system and his own earlier conception of reality: space, he contends, is only an external object, and like all other external things it has only an ideal existence. It is a necessary being in the sense that it is "a simple idea that is necessarily connected with other simple exterior ideas, and is, as it were, their common substance or subject."Below, p. 341. And in "The Mind," No. 13 he concludes that the necessity and infinitude of space depends upon "the law of nature, or the constitution of God."Below, p. 343. A closer examination of these articles, and other passages related to them, will show more fully how Edwards conceives this "constitution of God." Having rejected the notion that spirits are extended, in "The Mind", No. 2 Edwards goes on to propose a phenomenalistic account of the concept of the place of a mind. In this account he assumes that the concept is basically one which perceivers apply to themselves. That is, the place of a perceiving mind is just the place the perceiver sees or judges himself to be with respect to the phenomenal bodies he perceives at a given time. A given perceiver's concept of his own place is to be explained by those regular features of his own experience that lead him to recognize or judge where he is. These features, Edwards holds, concern the differences in the degree of clarity or "strength" among the ideas perceived at a given time, and the connection between the mind's operations and the perceived ideas or phenomenal body that is immediately affected. Some minds, he notes, are united with particular bodies, that is, each finds that it always perceives the same phenomenal body most clearly and strongly and that its operations regularly affect that body immediately. These conditions, in general, constitute the law of the union of mind and body. This is not a law to which every mind conforms, however, but only a law to which all the perceptions and operations of certain minds conform. A mind could have a place with respect to bodies it perceives and affects without being united with one particular body. Hence Edwards concludes that disembodied or separate minds are also in places: "At least a finite spirit cannot thus be in all places at a time equally."Below, p. 339. In "The Mind," No. 3, Edwards considers the difference between embodied and disembodied minds more fully. As opposed to Locke's assumption that the ideas we receive in sense perception are caused by events in our bodies, Edwards asserts those ideas are "communicated to us immediately by God while our minds are united with our bodies; but only we in some measure know the rule." There is therefore no difficulty in supposing that separate or disembodied minds also perceive things: "They will be communicated then also, and according to some rule, no doubt, only we know not what."Ibid. Again, in Miscell. no. 176 he argues in like manner for the possibility that separate spirits can act upon bodies: "We find that from such motions of mind there follows such alterations in such and such matter according to established rules, and these rules are entirely at the pleasure of him that establishes them. And why should we not think that God establishes other rules for other spirits, I cannot imagine."From a transcription supplied by Thomas Schafer. It was apparently from reflection upon this possibility that other minds might receive ideas or perceive things according to very different laws from the ones we know to obtain in our own case, that Edwards came to reopen the question of the necessity and infinitude of space itself. In "The Mind," No. 13 he suggests that this question, and likewise the question of the reality and duration of time, is to be resolved by arguments similar to those that apply to the "extension" or place of minds. With regard to space, his intention is to evaluate Locke's use of an ancient argument to prove that space is independent of the bodies in it, and extends to infinity beyond the universe of bodies: "If body be not supposed infinite (which I think no one will affirm), I would ask whether, if God placed a man at the extremity of corporeal beings, he could not stretch his hand beyond his body? If he could, then he would put his arm where there was before space without body."Essay, Bk. II, ch. 13, no. 21. Edwards accordingly asks whether an intelligent being could be removed beyond the limits of the corporeal world, and whether a spirit so removed would be "at a distance" from the limit as we are in places and at distances from bodies within the limits of the world. Such questions, he suggests, are actually questions about the rules according to which different minds might perceive things. He accordingly answers, "I cannot tell what the law of nature, or the constitution of God, would be in this case."Below, p. 343. He seems to infer from this that the necessity and infinitude of space as we conceive them are entirely relative to the special laws by which God communicates ideas to our minds. In a later addendum to "The Mind," No. 13 he argues that the concept of space itself is relative to the kinds of ideas a mind receives; specifically, that the common idea of space is dependent upon the perception of color, and that the ideas of space and motion formed by a person who was born blind must be entirely unlike the common notions, agreeing with them only with respect to proportions and number.Below, pp. 343–44. JE might have been led to this point by reading Berkeley's An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (Dublin, 1709). For discussion of his reading of this work, see above, p. 36. These discussions of place and space reveal certain basic points in Edwards' conception of God's constitution or determination with respect to the order of the ideas he causes. First, he holds that God's determination consists in his acting according to fixed rules in his communication of ideas to each perceiving mind. Hence the course of experience for each mind is constant and regular. But second, God may, and indeed does, communicate ideas to certain different minds according to very different rules. The rules by which he acts are entirely contingent, subject to "the pleasure of him who establishes them." Hence the order of experience for disembodied minds, or minds placed "outside" the limits of the physical world, will be quite different from that for embodied minds or minds placed "within" the system of physical objects. Third, each perceiver can know, or can come to know "in some measure," what rules govern the series of ideas presented to his own mind; but he cannot know what rules might govern the order of ideas in other minds, or at least in minds that are unlike his own in some specified manner. It follows that each perceiving mind is able to form concepts of external objects and their relations that have legitimate and universal application to its own experience, but none of these concepts is thereby logically guaranteed to have a universal application to all the experiences of every perceiving mind. In these several points it is quite evident that Edwards was influenced both directly and deeply by John Locke's "way of ideas" and his analysis of experience. Despite his rejection of Locke's specific assumptions with respect to the external existence of bodies and their role in causing ideas, he wholeheartedly accepted Locke's view that it is a wholly contingent matter that each mind receives the sensory information it does, and that the content and order of its experience is as it is. Thus Locke argues that we cannot know what ideas might be received by perceivers with more or different sensory capacities than ours,Essay, Bk. II, ch. 2, no. 3. or by angels and other spirits who are not united to bodies as our minds are.Ibid., 23, no. 13. Edwards follows Locke in holding that a perceiver knows from his own experience whether his mind is united with some particular body and how that union determines the place and motions of his mind.Ibid., nos. 18–21.In these particular points Locke's discussions were most likely a positive influence in Edwards' development of an account of the constitution of God as his established rules for communicating ideas. Nevertheless, it is clear that Edwards' fundamental commitments throughout these discussions are entirely different from Locke's. He has no interest in the problems of substance and essence as Locke understood them. Instead, his attention is given almost exclusively to the connections between our concepts of physical or "exterior" things, the order of the ideas presented in experience, and the laws or established rules that govern that order. In these points, his treatment accords with the principle stated in "The Mind," No. 1, that all universal are relations; and his general account of the nature and status of the physical world seems to have been in part guided by it. Locke is concerned about the question which of the kinds of simple ideas of sensation, if any, are epistemically important as representing real qualities of bodies.This is one of the problems involved in Locke's attempt to distinguish between the secondary and the primary qualities. See Essay, Bk. II, ch. 8, nos. 15 ff. Edwards, on the other hand, identifies real qualities with the fixed order and relations among ideas as they are presented in experience, and accordingly finds less explicit use for the notion of a simple idea. The very notion of an idea, as applied to the immediate objects of sensation, is in Locke's account primarily an epistemological one; simple ideas are, for him, the fundamental building blocks of knowledge. But in Edwards' discussions, the term "idea" as applied to given experience has primarily an ontological import; it serves to establish that the objects we perceive cannot exist except in minds. And while Locke supposes that a mind's "union" with a body is an unperceivable antecedent condition for its receiving any ideas of sensation, Edwards undertakes to explain mind-body union in terms of the order and relations of ideas perceived within the course of experience. What of the correspondence between Edwards' general theory and that of George Berkeley? In view of several of Edwards' statements that we have examined, it seems that it would not be surprising to discover the following passage in "The Mind": The ideas of sense are more strong, lively, and distinct than those of the imagination; they have likewise a steadiness, order, and coherence, and are not excited at random, as those which are the effects of human wills often are, but in a regular train or series, the admirable connection whereof sufficiently testifies the wisdom and benevolence of its Author. Now the set rules or established methods, wherein the mind we depend on excites in us the ideas of sense, are called the Laws of Nature: and these we learn by experience, which teaches us that such and such ideas are attended with such and such other ideas, in the ordinary course of things.Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge (Dublin, 1710), Pt. I, no. 30. It seems evident that Edwards would agree with the main points of this section from Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge. Their main differences, it would appear, are concerned with their theories of mind, rather than their general theories of bodies. Apart from this, there are considerable differences in their perspectives and philosophical objectives Berkeley was primarily concerned to defeat the scepticism and atheism he believed must follow from the assumption of material substance, and accordingly his presentation of idealism is primarily centered upon the overthrow of this assumption. But Edwards, as we have seen dismissed the assumption long before he developed his idealism. Thereafter, he was very little concerned about philosophical scepticism. His idealism was apparently not developed to answer it. Moreover, in only one of Edwards' many arguments for the existence of God, in "The Mind," No. 28, which is a brief corollary to No. 27, does he explicitly use his idealism as a premise. This is not to say that Edwards ignored the challenges of reason and common sense to his view, or that he was not concerned to demonstrate that it preserves and even guarantees our convictions with regard to the objective reality of the physical world. On the contrary, he worked hard to develop the theory in a manner that would accord with and confirm our ordinary beliefs about the places of objects and the assumptions of physical science with regard to the causes of physical change. He believed that the main source of objections, difficulties, and confusions, from the point of view of common sense, is the statement that the material world exists nowhere but "in the mind." In "The Mind," No. 51 he comments, "It is from hence I expect the greatest opposition. It will appear a ridiculous thing, I suppose, that the material world exists nowhere but in the soul of man, confined within his skull."Below, p. 368. But this problem arises only from the improper and metaphorical use of spatial terminology to express the relation between mind and body. The mind is not the same as the brain, nor is it somehow contained in the brain. The connection between the two is entirely operational: "The seat of the soul is not in the brain any otherwise than as to its immediate operations and the immediate operations of things on it."Below, p. 352. The connection neither is nor is dependent upon a spatial relation between the two, as the expressions "in the mind" and "in the brain" seem to suggest. It is therefore improper, Edwards admits, to say that the soul is in the brain. "To speak yet more strictly and abstractly, 'tis nothing but the connection of the operations of the soul with these and those modes of its own ideas, or those mental acts of the Deity, seeing the brain exists only in idea."Below, p. 355. And by the same reasoning, it is improper to say that bodies do not exist without the mind: "For place itself is mental, and 'within' and 'without' are mere mental conceptions.… But when I say 'the material universe exists only in the mind,' I mean that it is absolutely dependent on the conception of the mind for its existence, and does not exist as spirits do, whose existence does not consist in, nor in dependence upon, the conceptions of other minds."Below, p. 368. Once the metaphors are expunged from the theory, it is clear that it does not deny, but rather explains, our ordinary beliefs about the places of things. "Things are truly in those places, for what we mean when we say so is only that this mode of our idea of place appertains to such an idea."Below, p. 353. Furthermore, "The soul, in a sense, has its seat in the brain; and so, in a sense, the visible world is existent out of the mind, for it certainly, in the most proper sense, exists out of the brain."Below, p. 369. These clarifications do not resolve another and more serious objection to idealism, however, which is based upon acknowledged scientific claims about the causal relations between mind and body. Edwards stated the problem most cogently at a later time, in Miscell. no. 1340: If it be said that the sensible world has no existence but only in the mind, then the sensations themselves, or the organs of sense by which sensible ideas are let into the mind, have no existence but only in the mind. And those organs of sense have no existence but what is conveyed into the mind by themselves, for they are a part of the world. And then it would follow that the organs of sense owe their existence to the organs of sense, and so are prior to them, being the causes or occasions of their own existence—which is a seeming inconsistence with reason, which, I imagine, the reason of all men cannot explain and remove.Townsend, p. 223. The paradox seems to be as follows. The true scientific explanation of perception asserts that all our ideas of sensation causally depend upon our organs of sense. But idealism asserts that these organs, since they are bodies, exist only as ideas of sensation. From the two assertions he concludes that the organs of sense are the causes of themselves, that they "owe their existence" to themselves, and so are prior to themselves. However insoluble Edwards might have thought this problem to be at the time he wrote Miscell. no. 1340, certain passages in "The Mind" Show that he had considered it before and had developed resources for avoiding it, at least in the form stated above. The paradox as given involves two distinct assumptions, neither of which is admitted in those earlier passages. First, it assumes that ideas of sensation causally depend upon the organs of sense in such a way that the former "owe their existence" to the latter. Second, it assumes that the organs which cause ideas in a particular mind must actually exist as ideas of sensation in that same mind. The first of these assumptions pertains to the concept of cause that is employed in scientific explanations, and the second to the concept of existence as it is used by the idealist in interpreting causal inferences made in the context of scientific explanation. Edwards' treatment of the idea of cause, taken as a relation between objects or events in nature, does not admit that the effect "owes its existence" to the cause. In "The Mind," No. 26 he defines "cause" as "that, after or upon the existence of which, or the existence of it after such a manner, the existence of another thing follows."Below, p. 350. An effect is thus consequent upon a cause, but need not have a necessary dependence upon its cause or receive its existence from it. Indeed, Edwards holds that all the objects and events in nature receive their existence from God: ideas of sensation are immediately communicated by God,"The Mind," No. 3, below, p. 339. the order of phenomena by which bodies are solid objects is wholly determined by God,Ibid., Nos. 27, 61, below pp. 351, 379–80. and even every new thought in a mind depends for its occurrence upon God.Miscell. no. 267, in Townsend, p. 78. Causation in the context of physical or scientific explanation pertains only to the regular order in which God creates: "To find out the reasons of things in natural philosophy is only to find out the proportions of God's acting.""The Mind," No. 34, below, p. 353. Accordingly, our bodily organs are causes of our ideas of sensation only in the sense that it is "God's constitution that some of our ideas shall be connected with others, according to such a settled law and order, so that some ideas shall follow from others as their cause."Ibid., No. 40, Corol., below, pp. 358–59. This interpretation of the causal relation does not eliminate the paradox of perception that has been raised for idealism, however. The theory still asserts that the organs of sense are on the one hand ideas of sensation, and on the other are the regular antecedents of all our ideas of sensation. Does it not follow that the organs of sense are regular antecedents of themselves, and so must precede their own existence? This conclusion depends on a further assumption, however, that the bodily organs which cause ideas in a particular mind must actually exist as ideas of sensation in that mind. This assumption is contrary to fact; as Edwards notes in "The Mind," No. 40, we do not actually perceive the states of our sense organs from which our ideas of sensation follow. But in making the point he raises an even more serious difficulty for the idealist's effort to explain the connection between mind and body in sense perception: "How can this be, seeing that ideas most commonly arise from organs, when we have no idea of the mode of our organs, or the manner of external objects being applied to them?"Below, p. 359. The issue is evident. Our ideas of sensation are explained in science by antecedent modes of our sense organs. The explanation assumes that these bodily states exist; but since they are not actually perceived, the idealist must conclude that they do not exist. Edwards takes this problem to be only one instance of a more general one. In both our common understanding of the physical world and our scientific explantions of it we refer to objects and events even when they are not considered to be perceived by anyone. We believe the furniture of a room exists when no one is present, that there may be as yet undiscovered systems of remote stars, that ideas of sensation arise from unperceived events in our bodily organs, and that observable phenomena in the physical world depend on the properties of and interactions among singly imperceptible elementary particles. Edwards' metaphysical view, so far as it has been treated above, implies that no physical object can actually exist without being perceived. The claim that his view is compatible with common sense and science thus seems to be vitiated. Edwards devoted several important discussions to this problem, undertaking to show that his idealism can account for the truth of assertions about unperceived objects and events just as well as a realist metaphysics. Idealism even admits that conception of the world as a system of atoms having a fully determined and continuous history of successive changes which he had set forth earlier in his scientific writings: "Though we suppose that the existence of the whole material universe is absolutely dependent on idea, yet we may speak in the old way, and as properly and truly as ever.""The Mind," No. 34, below, p. 353. It does not follow that the system of atoms, its original creation, and all its subsequent history are actually perceived by any mind. It might exist nowhere "perfectly" except in God's mind, and there it exists as "his determination, his care, and his design that ideas shall be united forever, just so and in such a manner as is agreeable to such a series."Below, p. 354. God does not perceive these objects; rather, "God supposes its existence; that is, he causes all changes to arise as if all these things had actually existed in such a series in some created mind, and as if created minds had comprehended all things perfectly" (italics added).Ibid. Edwards' concept of "supposed" existence involves several closely related points. First, he does not consider that the things whose existence is supposed are entities of a different ontological kind from those that are actually perceived—they are not, for example, "the real things" in contradistinction to mere ideas of things. On the contrary, he considers that all material objects and events are comprised by ideas and sequences of ideas. The only objects that actually exist, however, are those that are actually perceived, or that exist in actual ideas in finite and created minds. It is indeed possible, he suggests, that all the objects and events in the material universe are actually perceived, so that even the individual atoms actually exist in some created mind; they are not unperceivable in principle, but only unperceived by us in fact. But even if no one perceives them, and they do not actually exist, Edwards holds that God supposes their existence in some mind, and causes all other ideas in us as if they actually existed in that way. "The supposition of God which we speak of is nothing else but God's acting in the course and series of his exciting ideas as if they, the things supposed, were in actual idea.""The Mind," No. 40, below, p. 357. Second, Edwards considers that all the ideas that are actually perceived by any finite mind, together with those that God only supposes, constitute a single order and succession of ideas. This single order of ideas comprises one unique system of material objects with a single continuous history, what he calls "the system of the ideal world."Ibid. This system is common to all perceivers in the sense that the series of ideas excited in any created mind, however it differs from those in other minds, nevertheless constitutes some of the objects and events in that system. Each perceiver is thereby afforded some partial and limited view of the same material world. Edwards assumes that no created mind perceives all the objects and events in the material world; but different minds might perceive the same objects and events in the sense that objects and events in the ideal system might be comprised of ideas that are excited in several different minds. In addition, this system might include some objects and events that are not perceived by any mind for example, the individual atoms and their original arrangement and motions in the first creation. These are the things that do not actually exist, but are only supposed. Third, Edwards holds that this system of the ideal world is a complete and fully determined whole, in which every object and event is related to all others in accordance with God's constitution. Hence, given the determinations of God's will, all actually existing things may be conceived to follow from some particular thing whose existence is only supposed, for example, a particular atom and its determinate state at the beginning of the creation: "All ideal changes of creatures are just so, as if just such a particular atom had actually all along existed even in some finite mind, and had never been out of that mind, and had in that mind caused these effects which are exactly according to nature, that is, according to the nature of other matter that is actually perceived by the mind."Below, p. 354. Again, given the objects that are actually perceived and so actually exist, those whose existence is supposed are necessary: "These things must necessarily be put in to make complete the system of the ideal world. That is, they must be supposed if the train of ideas be in the order and course settled by the supreme mind."Below, p. 357. One of the most important consequences of this view, and one that Edwards particularly emphasizes, is that every supposed object or event implies some actually existing and actually perceived objects or events in the established order of nature; and again, any difference in supposed objects or events implies some difference in the states of affairs that actually are or eventually will be perceived by some mind. "For upon supposition of these things are infinite number of things otherwise than they would be, if these were not by God thus supposed."Ibid. Conversely, Edwards holds that any actually perceived state of affairs implies, and in a sense even contains, all the unperceived objects and events that are supposed as antecedents for it: "And these hidden things do not only exist in the divine idea, but in a sense in created idea, for that exists in created idea which necessarily supposes it. … So, were our thoughts comprehensive and perfect enough, our view of the present state of the world would excite in us a perfect idea of all past changes."Below, p. 354. Applying this view to the particular matter of accounting for the causal role of our sense organs and brains in sense perception, Edwards writes, "It is hardly proper to say that the dependence of ideas of sensation upon the organs of the body is only the dependence of some of our ideas upon others. For the organs of our bodies are not our ideas, in a proper sense. Though their existence be only mental, yet there is no necessity of their existing actually in our minds, but they exist in the same manner as has been explained [i.e., as supposed]." At a minimum, he argues, this account has the same empirical consequences and serves "exactly the same purpose as can be supposed if our organs were actually existing in the manner vulgarly conceived, as to any manner of benefit or end that can be mentioned.""The Mind," No. 51, below, p. 368. But there can be no doubt that he was genuinely perplexed by the theory. He remarks of it, "But we have got so far beyond those things for which language was chiefly contrived, that unless we use extreme caution we cannot speak, except we speak exceeding unintelligibly, without literally contradicting ourselves."Ibid., No. 35, below, p. 355. Here, as elsewhere and on many other occasions, the logical framework of his conception was so different from the traditional categories and terms of philosophical discourse, that he could hardly find language with which to express it.He was particularly distressed by the difficulties of expressing spiritual matters as he understood them in the available language. For example, he searches for the right terms to capture his concept of faith; see "Observations concerning Faith," no. 37, in Worcester ed., 4, pp. 436–38. See also his comment upon words in "The Mind," No. 18, below, pp. 345–46. Nothing is more apparent in his theory of supposed existence than that Edwards conceives general laws of nature to be ontologically prior to the objects and events of the world. Although he granted, and even insisted, that no law of nature is ontologically or logically necessary, he also insisted that the laws of nature hold universally in the actual world. He entertained no Humean doubts whatever concerning the strict uniformity of nature. And although he did not address himself directly to the problem of how we know the laws, several comments concerning empirical knowledge, as we shall see, indicate that he had no interest in and little place for inductive reasoning in his epistemological theory. It was as a metaphysical assumption that he considered no particular object can exist except as it is in conformity with some general law determining its relation to others; nor need those others even actually exist, as the theory we have been examining tells us. At the same time, Edwards maintains that nature and the actual world contain nothing permanent but the laws of contingent regularity. In "The Mind," No. 61 he argues at length that the solidity of bodies is no less a matter of regularity of motion than is their gravity. It is therefore an error among philosophers and physicists alike to suppose that solidity resides in the unknown substance of bodies, while gravity must be due to some extraneous cause or to God. Both alike have their cause in the operations of an intelligent and voluntary being.Below, pp. 377–80. In a late passage in "Natural Philosophy," Edwards tries to explain why it is generally thought that there must be some cause of gravity but not of solidity.US No. 31, below, p. 290. He likewise finds no basis for the widespread controversy over whether bodies can act upon each other at a distance and without physical contact, as they apparently do by gravitational attraction.Thus Newton warns Richard Bentley against the assumption that gravity is innate in matter: "That Gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to Matter, so that one Body may act upon another at a Distance thro' a Vacuum, without the Mediation of anything else, by and through which their Action and Force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an Absurdity, that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an Agent acting constantly according to certain Laws; but whether this Agent be material or immaterial, I have left to the Consideration of my Readers." Letters to Bentley, no. 4, in Isaac Newton's Papers and Letters on Natural Philosophy, ed. I. B. Cohen, (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 302–03. In another brief comment he writes, " 'Tis the same thing that distant existence as to place should have influence on bodies, as in gravity, as that existence distant as to time, being past, should have influence on its present existence, as in the successions of motion.""Natural Philosophy," LS No. 61, below, p. 257. Because the past moment of time and everything it contains have ceased to exist for any present moment, it can have no real causal relation to what exists in the present moment.See Miscell. no. 267, in Townsend, p. 78; Original Sin, in Works (Yale ed.), 3, p. 400. Occurrences in space and time, therefore, whether they are near or remote, are connected only by fixed laws of order. In a much quoted passage in a late addendum to "The Mind," No. 13 Edwards sums up his view of the whole system of physical objects: That which truly is the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable idea in God's mind, together with his stable will that the same shall gradually be communicated to us, and to other minds, according to certain fixed and exact established methods and laws.Below, p. 344.
THE MIND
From his earliest writings onward Edwards emphasized that minds or spirits have a distinct nature from bodies, and an ontological status superior to them. In an early note in "Natural Philosophy" he comments, "The nearer in nature beings are to God, so much the more properly are they beings, and more substantial; and that spirits are much more properly beings, and more substantial, than bodies."LS No. 44, corol. 3; see below, p. 238.Later, from the impossibility that anything should be without being known, he concludes that "those beings which have knowledge and consciousness are the only proper and real and substantial beings, inasmuch as the being of all other things is only by these.""Of Being," corol; see below, p. 206. In many other places he asserts that spirits are the end for which God created the world; that "senseless" bodies are only images or shadows of spiritual beings, and are created only for the sake of them. Despite such repeated claims, however, Edwards rarely addressed himself directly to the most fundamental questions about mind or spirit. Even in the manuscript he entitled "The Mind" he concerned himself more fully with problems about the existence of bodies and the manner of their dependence upon the mind, than with the existence and nature of minds themselves. In planning his treatise on the mind he promised more. There he proposed to discuss human nature in a detailed and systematic way, starting with the most basic metaphysical principles: "Treat first of being in general, and shew what is in human nature necessarily existing from the nature of entity; and then concerning perceiving or intelligent beings in particular, and shew what arises from the nature of such; and then animal nature, and what from that.""Subjects," No. 8; below, p. 388.Most of what can be determined of the account thus outlined must be pieced together and worked out by interpretation and inference from widely scattered passages. As we have noted, Edwards' earliest writings were deeply influenced by the metaphysical views of Henry More. He accepted More's claim that space is a necessary spiritual being, and probably supposed that all spirits are extended and occupy space. But the doctrine that nothing can be without being known led to his making substantial revisions in this account. Early in "The Mind" he finds that the supposition that spirits are extended treats them as "very gross and shadowy and corporeal," and he urges instead that the spiritual be identified by such notions as thought, love, hate, inclination, and desire."The Mind," No. 2, below, p. 388. From this point Edwards' discussions of the mental are particularly marked by the influence of John Locke. Many articles in "The Mind" were evidently written in response to specific statements in Locke's Essay. Throughout these passages it appears that Edwards agrees with Locke in assuming that consciousness and immediate self-consciousness are the characteristic marks of the mental. Yet his discussions show that Edwards was very far from accepting Locke's general theory of mind and that he almost never adopted Locke's claims without significant revision. In many points he openly rejected Locke's views. In the last analysis, it will appear that their concepts of mind are as sharply distinct as their concepts of bodies. Edwards' phenomenalistic idealism, like that of Berkeley, assumes that there are many different created minds, each one conscious, capable of perception, knowledge, and volition, and in each of which God excites an orderly train of ideas of sensation that comprise the bodies it perceives and affects. It is tempting to suppose that Edwards, like Berkeley, considered each mind to be an individual substance in which these various modes of consciousness inhere and by which they are supported.See Principles of Human Knowledge, §§89, 91; Luce, Works of Berkeley, 2, pp. 79–81. The passage previously quoted from "The Mind," No. 51, in which Edwards contrasts the status of the material world with that of the mind, especially lends itself to the view that minds are substances. The material world, he writes, "is absolutely dependent on the conception of the mind for its existence, and does not exist as spirits do, whose existence does not consist in, nor in dependence on, the conception of other minds."Below, p. 368. This interpretation, however, conflicts with Edwards' express doctrine that God alone is substance, and that all created things exist in immediate dependence upon him. In "Of Atoms" he rejects the notion that the substance of a body is a distinct but unknown underlying support of its properties, and thence argues that the substance of bodies is the divine power exerted in a particular manner. Much later, in Miscell. no. 267, Edwards argues in an exactly similar way with respect to minds. The "mere exertion of a new thought," he holds, requires some cause that immediately produces and upholds it. This cause cannot be antecedent thoughts, for "they are past, and what is past is not." The cause is therefore a substance, where "substance" means God: "But if it be meant something else that has no properties, it seems to me absurd. If the removal of all properties, such as extension, solidity, thought, etc. leaves nothing, it seems to me that no substance is anything besides them."Townsend, p. 78. The most obvious target of this critical remark is Locke, who gives similar accounts of spirit or immaterial substance and body or material substance: "By supposing a substance wherein thinking, knowing, doubting, and a power of moving, etc. do subsist, we have as clear a notion of the substance of spirit as we have of body: the one being supposed to be (without knowing what it is) the substratum of those simple ideas we have from without; and the other supposed (with like ignorance what it is) to be the substratum to those operations which we experiment in ourselves within."Essay, Bk. U, ch. 23, no. 5 For Edwards, on the contrary, a body consists in nothing but the ideas of sensation "from without" that are immediately communicated to the mind by God. And from the argument in Miscell. no. 267, it appears that a mind itself is nothing but various thoughts, perceptions, etc. which are likewise immediately produced and sustained by God. Edwards' rejection of the Lockean account of spirit is indicated as early as "The Mind," No. 11, where he comments upon Locke's theory of persons and the identity of persons. According to Locke, as one cannot know what the substance or spirit is that thinks in him, so he cannot know whether the same or a different spiritual substance might be thinking in him at different times, or whether the same or different spirits might belong to different persons. Nevertheless, he points out, each person is "a thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and considers itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking and, as it seems to me, essential to it."Ibid, ch. 27, no. 9. Each individual self or person, Locke holds, identifies itself and distinguishes itself from all other persons by its own unique consciousness. "As far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action thought, so far reaches the identity of that person."Ibid. In "The Mind," No. 11, Edwards seems to approve this account of the identity of persons; but as for Locke's distinction between persons and spiritual substances, he adds, "He might have said that identity of spirits, too consisted in the same consciousness. For a mind or spirit is nothing but consciousness and what is included in it. The same consciousness is, to all intents and purposes, individually the very same spirit or substance, as much as the same particle of matter can be the same with itself at different times."Below, pp. 242–43. Edwards' difference from Locke on this fundamental point seems central to his interpretation and modification of Locke's claims about minds, their nature and their acts and operations. Edwards denies that the conscious thoughts and actions of a mind subsist in an unknown substance, and that they arise from or depend upon the real essence of such a substance. On the contrary, he holds that every state of consciousness is immediately produced by God, and that the existence of individual minds, their natures, properties, and relations to other minds and to bodies, are founded upon the constant method or established rules by which God acts in producing them. In his "Diary" for His rejection of Locke's conception of the thinking substance may be associated with several other points in which Edwards takes explicit exception to Locke's claims. One instance concerns the question whether matter could think. Followers of Descartes maintained that the essence of matter excludes thinking, so that thought must be the essence of another distinct substance. Locke, on the other hand, held that thinking is not continuous in the mind, but consists in episodes of conscious mental action and operation; hence it cannot be the essence of the thinking substance, but only one of its operations, as motion is of the body that moves.Essay, Bk. II, ch. 1, no. 10. Indeed, he argues, in view of our ignorance as to what substance it is in us that thinks, we cannot prove it impossible that matter should think: "It is not much more remote from our comprehension to conceive that God can, if he pleases, superadd to matter the faculty of thinking, than that he should superadd to it another substance with the faculty of thinking."Ibid., Bk. IV. ch. 3, no. 6. But Edwards supposes no such ignorance of the substance that thinks. Accordingly, in "The Mind," No. 21a, he argues in support of the Cartesian position that the nature of matter excludes the possibility of matter itself thinking. All the properties in matter, he holds, have a necessary dependence upon solidity and extension; but thought has no such connection with these or the other properties in matter, and is even "alien" to them. God may, and does, add thought (though not a thinking substance) to a body according to certain laws, so that thought is "in the same place" as the body, but he cannot include it in the properties of matter in such a way that it would depend upon those properties and so as to make matter itself think.Below, pp, 346–48. It should be noted in connection with this argument that Edwards did not work out his phenomenalistic account of solidity, reducing the property to a law governing the order and succession of perceived ideas, until afterward in "The Mind," No. 27. There is no indication that he attempted at any later time to reformulate his argument in terms of relations among the laws governing ideas instead of relations among properties in matter. Miscell. no. 1263, in which he discusses God's immediate and arbitrary operations, contains a suggestion as to how such a reformulation might be given: God's creation of bodies involves a primary and absolutely arbitrary operation by which the laws of resistance, attraction, and inertia were established, and then a secondary operation establishing the dispositions and motions of particular bodies. The secondary operation is also arbitrary, but not absolutely so, since it follows upon and presupposes or "makes use of" the primary But the creation of the soul, he holds, is not by any secondary or consequent operation of God: "Most things in the visible world were brought into their present state so as to [be] of such a particular kind, or to complete their species of creatures, by a secondary creation, which is a mixed operation; excepting the creation of the highest order of creatures, viz., intelligent minds, which were wholly created complete in their kind, by an absolutely arbitrary operation."Miscell. no. 1263 in Townsend, pp. 184–93. The passage does not attempt to demonstrate that God's creation of intelligent thought must be by a primary operation, however, and it may well be questioned whether such a demonstration would be possible. However that may be, Edwards continued to accept the proof as originally presented in "The Mind," No. 21a, and in Miscell. no. 361 he jotted down a reminder of the place where he had written it.Miscell. no. 361: "Soul of man. Matter. Thought. Vid. Mind, p. 8." Another matter in which Edwards came to differ from Locke pertains to the question of the identity of the self, or, as Edwards would have it, the identity of a spirit. Despite his seeming approval of Locke's account of personal identity in "The Mind," No. 11, Edwards later offers explicit objections to it in "The Mind," No. 72, and implies other criticisms in his extended treatment of the subject in Original Sin. In both places Edwards follows Locke in attending to the practical bearings of personal identity, as the self may be concerned in its own future happiness or misery but indifferent to the future condition of others, and as it is subject to reward or punishment for its own past actions but not those of others. And in both places Edwards suggests that Locke is mistaken in proposing that the identity of one's self depends necessarily and entirely upon one's conscious memories of particular past thoughts and actions. In Edwards' own view, the identity of a self or spirit, and indeed of any other created thing, depends entirely upon the arbitrary constitution of God by which he determines the order and course of successive ideas and states of consciousness. It seems evident that Locke's account of personal identity is developed on the assumption that a self, in any of its present states, knows with certainty which present self it is, and is capable of knowing which past self it was, and of conceiving which future self it will be. Consequently, it can be certain about which past actions it is responsible for and which future state of happiness or misery it is uniquely interested in, namely, the actions and states of its past and future selves. Locke thus argues that, because our beliefs about our past selves involve memories of past states of consciousness, and our conception of our future self involves the idea of memories of our present states of consciousness, it is memory alone that makes us certain of our unique and continuing personal identity. Moreover, he seems to hold that the very fact of personal identity is founded on memory alone, and consequently determines which past actions and future states we are now responsible for. "For as far as any intelligent being can repeat the idea of any past action with the same consciousness it had of it at first, and with the same consciousness it has of any present action, so far it is the same personal self."Essay, Bk. II, ch. 27, no. 10. In "The Mind," No. 72 Edwards questions whether memory is sufficient for personal identity, or even sufficient for one's beliefs concerning his identity, especially with regard to his future existence. God might annihilate me and create another self that has my present ideas as its memories, although I should have no reason to concern myself about its welfare. We could reply on behalf of Locke that whatever future self has my present ideas as memories is necessarily identical with me, and is certainly the self whose welfare I am now considering. But, Edwards goes on, that future self is not necessarily unique. God might create two persons with exactly the same memories of past actions and experiences, but differing with respect to their present actions and experiences; one might be happy and the other miserable. Assuming Locke's view, both these persons would be identical with the same past self, and each would be responsible for that self's actions. But neither would be identical with the other, nor even need be conscious of the existence or condition of the other.Below, pp. 385–86. The above objections tend to argue that, as opposed to Locke's theory, the sameness of consciousness and memory is not sufficient for self-identity. In Original Sin. Edwards allows it is necessary, or "one thing essential to it," but adds, " 'Tis evident, that the communication continuance of the same consciousness and memory to any subject, through successive parts of duration, depends wholly on a divine establishment."Works (Yale ed.), 3, p. 398. His subsequent account of identity is intended to show that it would not be unjust or unreasonable for God to impute Adam's sin to all subsequent human beings as their own sin, for it is not impossible that God's establishment for all subsequent persons is such as to make each of them truly and in fact identical with him, so that his sin is in fact theirs. The points of this argument concerning Edwards' concept of mind or spirit may be drawn into focus without tracing the whole exposition of it in detail. His argument depends essentially upon the assumption that every created thing, in any moment when it exists, is immediately and entirely the effect of God's acting in that moment. It follows that every created thing is an effect, and that things existing at different moments in time are numerically distinct effects. "There is no identity or oneness in the case, but what depends on the arbitrary constitution of the Creator; who by his wise sovereign establishment so unites these successive new effects, that he treats them as one, by communicating to them like properties, relations, and circumstances; and so leads us to regard and treat them as one."Ibid., p. 403. It is thus entirely due to an arbitrary constitution that satisfies the divine wisdom, that successive states of consciousness are united in such a way as to be the same, and involve the same memories of one continued self. It is likewise by an arbitrary constitution that each person subsequent to Adam is united to him, or is the same person as he. We may conceive such a constitution applying throughout nature, Edwards holds, so that every individual member of any natural kind is, by divine establishment, one with the first and original parent of that kind, and so that all subsequent members are given properties in accordance with those of the first parent.Ibid., p. 406. In the case of persons, Edwards certainly did not suppose that God unites us with Adam by giving each of us the same conscious memory of Adam's sinful action as being our own, in the manner that Locke's explanation of personal guilt would require.Locke writes, "For supposing a man punished now for what he had done in another life, whereof he could be made to have no consciousness at all, what difference is there between that punishment and being created miserable? And therefore conformable to this, the Apostle tells us, that at the Great Day, when everyone shall receive according to his doings, the secrets of all hearts shall be laid open. The sentence shall be justified by the consciousness all persons shall have that they themselves, in what bodies soever they appear, or what substances soever that consciousness adheres to, are the same that committed those actions and deserve that punishment for them" (Essay, Bk. II, ch. 27, no. 26). Adam's act of disobedience is ours by virtue of our "innate sinful depravity of heart,"Original Sin, Pt. I, ch. 1, §1, in Works (Yale ed.), 3, p. 107. or a "natural tendency or propensity" to sin.Ibid., p. 120. More precisely, it is by virtue of the first existence of a corrupt disposition in any of Adam's posterity, "whereby he is disposed to approve of the sin of his first father, as fully as he himself approved of it when he committed it, or so far as to imply a full and perfect consent of heart to it."Ibid., p. 391. Edwards' claim that each person possesses a definite innate moral disposition, which is prior to his first conscious experiences and actions and his particular memories of these, indicates an important departure from Locke's conception of the mind as being, in its first existence, a mere "white paper."Essay, Bk. II, ch. 1, no. 2. Nor is Edwards' departure in this matter confined to his admission of innate moral tendencies in accounting for original sin. In "The Mind," No. 54 he asserts that causal reasoning depends upon "an innate principle, in that sense that the soul is born with it; a necessary fatal propensity so to conclude on every occasion."Below, p. 370.Other passages indicate that Edwards considers much, if not all, of our conscious mental processes in perceiving, reasoning, and judging arise from and are determined by fixed dispositions of the mind, and that he regards at least some of these dispositions to be innate, in some sense of that term. The nature of the difference between Edwards and Locke with respect to innateness in the mind is not immediately apparent, however. Locke had argued at length that the mind has no innate ideas, that all its ideas arise from and are supplied by its conscious experience, at first by sensation and then by reflection.Essay, Bk. II, ch. 1, nos. 3–4. Edwards seems to agree fully with this doctrine, especially in his "Subjects to be Handled in the Treatise on the Mind," where in No. 29 he sets the topic, "Sensation:. How far all acts of the mind are from sensation, all ideas begin from thence, and there never can be any idea, thought or act of the mind unless the mind first received some ideas from sensation, or some other way equivalent, wherein the mind is wholly passive in receiving them."Below, p. 390.Nos. 30, 31, and 32 of the series continue this theme, with suggestions that even angels and other separate spirits must receive ideas of sensation, and so are "united to some kind of matter."Below, pp. 390–91. Yet in No. 52 he promises to discuss "in what respects ideas or thoughts and judgments may be said to be innate and in what respects not."Below, p. 392. His explanations of original sin and of causal reasoning, as mentioned above, indicate that he does not suppose our consciously perceived ideas or conscious acts of thought and judgment are innate in us, but only that certain dispositions, tendencies, or propensities for such conscious states are innate. And Locke's attack upon innate ideas does not seem to rule out the possibility that dispositions are innate. Nevertheless, Locke's tabula rasa theory of mind does preclude the possibility of our having innate dispositions of the sort that Edwards admits; and as a result, Edwards' discussions of the operations of consciousness in cognition and volition are in disagreement with Locke's in some fundamental respects. A comparison of the two ways of treating these operations will help to clarify Edwards' conception of the nature of the mind. It will also tend to show that, in his lifelong study of the Essay, Edwards used Locke's views more as a foil for developing his own conception of the spiritual world than as a source or authority for it. The tabula rasa theory of mind, as asserted by Locke, forms the basis for an extended account of how thinking goes on in us, and how knowledge, belief, and volition come about. According to this account, the mind, before it actually receives ideas and consciously perceives them, possesses nothing but capacities, faculties, or powers for receiving and retaining ideas, and for performing various other acts and operations with and about them. Locke's empiricism consists in the claims that no act or operation of the mind can be performed before it has actually received and passively perceived simple ideas, first by sensation and then by reflection, and that no operation can produce a simple idea that has not already been perceived in this manner.Essay, Bk. II, ch. 2, no. 2. At the same time, he holds that all reflective thinking, cognition, and voluntary action either consist in or depend upon the mind's actually exercising its active powers in performing the various acts and operations of which it is capable about the ideas it perceives. That is, our concepts of objects, our knowledge and beliefs concerning them, and our voluntary actions as well, result from the mind's performing those acts and operations of which it is capable. Thus such knowledge as we have and are able to have results from operations of the understanding, by which we distinguish or compare, combine and separate, abstract from, and connect together ideas.Locke lists the operations of mind in ibid., ch. 1, no. 4, and discusses them at length in ibid., chs. 9–11. In ch. 11, no. 14, he writes, "Observing the faculities of the mind, how they operate about ideas, … we may the better examine and learn how the mind abstracts, denominates, compares, and exercises its other operations about those which are complex, wherein we are much more liable to mistake." Accordingly, he remarks of the discerning faculty, "so far as this faculty is in itself dull or not rightly made use of, for the distinguishing one thing from another, so far our notions are confused, and our reason and judgment disturbed or misled" (ch. 11, no. 2). Similar observations are made concerning the proper use of each faculty. All our concepts of individual things and their properties and powers, their kinds, relations, and modes, are formed by performing these operations about the simple primitive ideas originally received by sensation and reflection.Ibid., ch. 12, nos. 1–2. Voluntary action depends upon the mind's consciously preferring and choosing or commanding the performance or forbearance of an action, either one of the operations of the understanding itself or some motion in the body.Ibid., ch. 21, no. 5. This account of thinking involves the basic assumption that all states of knowledge, belief, and volition involve the conscious activity of an agent, not of the understanding and will, but of the mind which has the powers of understanding and willing.Ibid., no. 6. 'We cannot know what the mind is, but through introspection and our ideas of reflection we can discover what it does and what it therefore is capable of doing. Although the mind cannot exercise its faculties or capacities without having perceived ideas to exercise them about, the capacities themselves neither consist in nor depend upon ideas. They may thus be said to belong to the mind by nature, and to be innate in it, even though the mind has no innate ideas. In addition, Locke seems to assume that the mind has natural dispositions or propensities to exercise its abilities, to set itself upon the appropriate intellectual tasks, and to perform the due acts and operations of which it is capable on the occasions when it actually perceives ideas. To this extent, Locke's view seems to admit of the mind's having innate dispositions. But these are quite different from dispositions or propensities to choose sin or to infer the existence of a cause, such as Edwards holds to be innate. The former would be manifested in the mind's regularly exercising its powers, while the latter would be manifested in the mind's regularly arriving at or realizing some definite contingent result. In Locke's view, all such dispositions as these must be acquired from the accidental connections of ideas in experience, and they are manifested in the mind's associating or connecting ideas by habit or custom, without reflection or antecedent operations of reason.Ibid., ch. 33, especially nos. 5–7. This chapter first appeared in the second edition of 1694. It is doubtful how far Edwards supposed that conscious thinking involves our consciousness of our performing such a variety of mental acts and operations as Locke describes. As we have noted, his later comments show that he agreed with Locke that all thinking begins with our passively receiving ideas of sensation, and he supposed that from these ideas and the order in which they are presented we form ideas of external things and come to know the laws of nature that govern them. But Edwards gives no clear account of how such ideas are formed and such knowledge is achieved. The main trends of his epistemological discussions, however, suggest that, instead of the step-by-step operations required in Locke's empiricist account of our acquisition of concepts and knowledge, Edwards consistently assumes that our apprehension, even of complex objects, is direct and immediate, and does not depend upon prior reflection and conscious methodical procedure. In earlier passages he seems to hold that all knowledge is either immediate and intuitive, or arises by necessary inference from what is intuitively known. In later discussions he argues that certain acts of cognition which are neither intuitive nor demonstrative occur immediately and without reflection as they are determined by fixed dispositions, propensities, and habits of the mind. Edwards' earlier emphasis upon intuition and demonstration shows the important influence of seventeenth-century rationalism upon his thought. The essay "Of the Prejudices of Imagination" is an unmistakable reflection of the Cartesian logics of William Brattle and Antoine Arnauld that he studied in college. He apparently used these logic books again while teaching the subject at Yale, and several articles in "The Mind" show their continuing influence upon his thought.Leon Howard, in "The Mind" of Jonathan Edwards: A Reconstructed Text (Berkeley, 1963), comments at length upon the apparent influence of Arnauld's Art of Thinking upon various of JE's discussions in "The Mind." His primary concern in these passages is with the impediments that stand in the way of intuitive and demonstrative knowledge. We are prevented from the certain and rational apprehension of objects, he maintains, by prejudices of the imagination formed from our earliest conscious experiences,"Of the Prejudices of Imagination," below, p. 196. by the ideas of sensation themselves which "clog the mind,""The Mind," No. 22, below, pp. 348–49.and by the weakness of our minds and the imperfections of our ideas of things. Demonstration itself, he holds, gives only relative assurance, for it depends upon our severely limited ability to keep ideas attentively in order before the mind so as to discern their connections.Ibid., No. 5, below, pp. 339–40. In one place he asserts that if we were to have perfect ideas of all things at once we would have no need for reasoning, because things would be immediately known and self-evident.Ibid., No. 10, corol. 3, below, p. 342. And in another he claims that if it were not for the "imperfection and slowness of our minds," the accurate observation of a falling body in one part of its motion would "immediately and of itself" give rise to the idea of the whole of its motion.Ibid., No. 34, below, p. 354. Consonant with this view of knowledge as the immediate apprehension of self-evident truths, Edwards maintains at first, in "The Mind," No. 19, that we have immediate and intuitive knowledge of such general facts as that grass is green and honey is sweet, even though the facts themselves consist in regularities among ideas in the constant course of experience.Below, p. 346. Later, however, in "The Mind," No. 53 he acknowledges that the certainty or fallibility of perceptual judgments depends upon the constancy of our experience and our opportunities for trial and experiment in cases similar to the one being judged.Below, pp. 369–70. This change of view with regard to perceptual judgment might have been stimulated by his reading of Berkeley's An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision. The influence of that work seems evident in several later articles in which Edwards discusses the role of judgment in cognition, and the manner in which judgment is formed. In "The Mind," No. 57 he follows Berkeley in holding that judgments of spatial distance are not based upon a natural trigonometry of the eyes or on our observation of the angles at which light rays converge to them, "for the mind judges by nothing but the difference it observes in the idea itself, which alone the mind has any notice of."Below, p. 372. See Berkeley, New Theory of Vision, §§4–13, 19–20; in Luce, Works of Berkeley, 1, pp. 171–73, 175. Like Berkeley, he explains these judgments by our recognizing a "particular mode of indistinctness" in the ideas;New Theory of Vision, §3, ibid., p. 171. and he explains judgments of temporal distance, or "pastness" in a similar manner by "a certain peculiar inexpressible mode of fading and indistinctness which I call veterascence."Below, pp. 372–73. In "The Mind," No. 59 he agrees with Berkeley again in distinguishing between these judgments and intuitive or demonstrative knowledge: "Though the thing is not properly self-evident, yet [the mind] judges without any ratiocination merely by the force of habit."Below, p. 373. See New Theory of Vision, §45, in Luce, Works of Berkeley, 1, pp. 187–88. Our regular experience, he goes on, gives rise to an habitual association of ideas which determines our judgment without antecedent reflection. Similarly, in "The Mind," No. 69, he declares that memory involves the repetition of an idea together with an act of judgment that it was perceived before; "and that judgment not properly from proof, but from natural necessity arising from a law of nature which God hath fixed."Below, p. 384. All this suggests a general progression in Edwards' conception of how the mind knows, from an early emphasis upon intuition and demonstration which may be associated with Cartesian and generally rationalist theories of mind, to a later emphasis upon mental habits of associating ideas and propensities for certain acts of judgment, such as may be associated with the post-Lockean empiricism of Berkeley and Hume.Sang Hyun Lee discusses the importance of habit and disposition in JE's theory of mind in "Jonathan Edwards' Theory of the Imagination," Michigan Academician: Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, 5 (Fall, 1972), pp. 233–41, and in "Mental Activity and the Perception of Beauty in Jonathan Edwards," Harvard Theological Review, 69 (1976), pp. 369–96. Throughout this progression Edwards either disregards or rejects Locke's own analysis of the faculties of mind and the operations by which they are exercised. His treatment of Locke in this matter is nowhere more evident than in the series of articles in "The Mind" concerned with abstract ideas and genus and species. In "The Mind," No. 7 Edwards assumes with Locke that our abstract ideas are "creatures of the mind," formed by us to expedite reflection and discourse.Essay, Bk. III, ch. 3, no. 11. But in this article Edwards holds these ideas are formed arbitrarily, while Locke holds that our abstract ideas of natural kinds are made by us in conformity with the observed regular features and common properties of the objects themselves. In Locke's view, only our ideas of modes are formed in a wholly arbitrary manner.Ibid., ch. 5, no. 3. The adequacy and truth of these ideas are guaranteed, he holds, for it does not depend upon their correspondence with anything else, but only upon their being formed.Ibid., Bk. II, ch. 32, no. 13: "As to the truth and falsehood of our ideas in reference to the real existence of things: when that is made the standard of their truth, none of them can be termed false, but only our complex ideas of substances." But Locke earlier (ch. 32, no. 9) notes that when the truth of ideas is judged by "the conformity they have to the ideas which other men have and commonly signify by the same name," then all ideas might be false; and indeed, our complex ideas of mixed modes are the most likely to be false in this sense (no. 10). Edwards proposes a comparable standard of truth, internal consistency, for all abstract ideas."The Mind," No. 10, below, p. 342. Yet in "The Mind," No. 17 he recalls the pleasure he had earlier received from studying the abstract system of definitions and distributions of the "old logic," for it taught him to place his ideas in order, and revealed "new and strange dependencies of ideas, and a seeming agreement of multitudes of them in the same thing that I never observed before."Below, p. 345. It remains moot whether the "old logic" to which JE refers in this try was that of Ramus or that of the Aristotelians (e.g., Burgersdijck or Morton); and whether by the "other logic" he means that of Arnauld (and Brattle) or that of Locke. Clearly, each of these left a characteristic mark upon some important part or aspect of his thought. Later he maintains that some abstract ideas have a real foundation in nature, not by virtue of the manner in which we form them, but because "God evidently designed such particulars to be together in the mind and in other things.""The Mind," No. 37, below, p. 355. In "The Mind," No. 42 Edwards directly attacks Locke's account of the operation by which abstract ideas are formed: the abstract ideas of color and sound cannot be formed by mentally sifting out the common features of all particular colors and all particular sounds, for these are simple ideas and have no common features.Below, pp. 360–61. See Locke's account of abstraction, Essay, Bk. III, ch. 3. In these cases, he argues, the mind perceives a unique and unanalyzable agreement among some of its simple ideas, from which it is "determined to rank those ideas together in its thoughts; … and by the nature, determination and habit of the mind, the idea of one excites the idea of others."Below, p. 361. Compare JE's earlier discussion of the agreement of sense qualities in "The Mind," No. 1, below, pp. 335–36. In the next article Edwards declares that "the union of ideas is not always arbitrary, but unavoidably arising from the nature of the soul, which is such that the thinking of one thing, of itself, yea, against our wills, excites the thought of other things that are like it." God himself thus distributes things into kinds, not only by manifesting agreements among them, but by "making the soul of such a nature that those particulars which he thus made to agree are unavoidably together in the mind, one naturally exciting and including the others.""The Mind," No. 43, below, p. 362. The above examination indicates that in his later discussions of the manner in which we make causal inferences and perceptual judgments and form memories and abstract ideas, Edwards finds that our performances are not reflective and procedural, and they do not depend upon our recognizing intrinsically necessary connections among the ideas concerned. Instead, although the mind acts in a constant and regular manner in these cases, it typically acts without antecedent conscious reflection. And it connects or unites ideas, and forms judgments concerning them, even in the absence of perceived evidence or demonstrated proof of their actual connection. The mind's operations in these cases, Edwards holds, are nevertheless not at random, but are determined according to its fixed habits and dispositions, either innate or natural, or developed from earlier experiences. It is important to note that, although these habits and dispositions are manifested in certain states and acts of the mind, they do not themselves consist in mental states or acts; they are not treated simply as felt constraints upon or inclinations of our mental endeavor. Instead, Edwards uses the terms "habit," "disposition," "tendency," "propensity" to mean any general law governing the regular order of antecedent and consequent occurrences. Thus in Miscell. no. 241, in the context of a discussion of the habit of grace, he writes: All habits being only a law that God has fixed that such actions, upon such occasions, should be exerted, the first new thing that there can be in the creature must be some actual alteration. So, in the first birth, it seems to me probable that the beginning of the existence of the soul, whose essence consists in powers and habits, is with some kind of new alteration there, either in motion or sensation.Transcription of the original supplied by Thomas Schafer. In "The Mind," No. 69 he notes the difficulty of discovering the laws of nature which govern our mental acts;Below, p. 385. in his "Subjects to be Handled in the Treatise on the Mind" he proposes that they might be reduced to three principles, namely, "association of ideas, resemblance of some kind, and that natural disposition in us, when we see anything begin to be to suppose it owing to a cause." These laws, he says, are "a kind of mutual attraction of ideas," by which "one idea suggests and brings in another.""Subjects," No. 43, below, pp. 391–92. These references to laws governing the order and sequence of thoughts, and Edwards' statement that "laws of nature take place alike" in the mind and in other things,Ibid., No. 36, below, p. 391. can give rise to a misleading interpretation of his theory of mind. He does not suppose that our mental lives consist solely in successive episodes of conscious perception, following each other according to fixed rules. In his treatise on the mind he intended to discuss "wherein there is an agreement between men and beasts; how many things in men are like instincts in brutes."Ibid., No. 49, below, p. 392.According to "The Mind," No. 59, the habitual association of ideas is one respect in which human and animal intelligence are alike. But in his addendum to that article Edwards points out that animals are capable of no more than perception, memory, and habitual association, whereas the human mind can consciously reflect upon its acts and voluntarily and actively arrange and dispose its ideas. It is thereby capable of rational will, while animals have only instinct and sensual appetite; and the human mind is capable of knowing spiritual things and hence capable of religion.Below, p. 374. All this notwithstanding, self-conscious reflection and volition do not give the mind an absolute governance over its thoughts and judgments. We find, in some cases, that "the thinking of one thing, of itself, yea, against our wills, excites the thought of other things that are like it,""The Mind," No. 43, below, p. 361. and that the supposition "that anything should start up into being without any cause, itself or anything else, is what the mind, do what we will, will forever refuse to receive, but will perpetually reject."Ibid., No. 54, below, p. 393. The discovery in ourselves of the unavoidability of these associations and the inability of the mind to think otherwise, through trial and failure, gives us knowledge of the laws or the constant manner in which God acts with respect to our minds. Moreover, Edwards holds that our recognized inabilities to think or believe otherwise are, by themselves, grounds for the assurance of what is thought or believed. In his treatise on the mind he intended to discuss a two-fold ground of the assurance of judgment:"a reducing things to an identity or contradiction, as in mathematical demonstrations, and by a natural, invincible inclination to a connection, as when we see any effect, to conclude a cause; an opposition to believe a thing can begin to be without a cause. This is not the same with the other and cannot be reduced to a contradiction.""Subjects," No. 10, below, p. 388. Edwards recognizes that in admitting our self-conscious intellectual inabilities and our "invincible inclination to a connection" of ideas as evidence sufficient to justify belief, he is making a profound and fundamental departure from Locke's theory of knowledge, and indeed from the whole rationalist tradition. In "The Mind," No. 71 he specifically lays aside Locke's definition of knowledge: "Knowledge is not the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas, but rather the perception of the union or disunion of ideas, or the perceiving whether two or more ideas belong to one another."Below, p. 385. The perception of union or disunion, as Edwards speaks of it, is not the recognition of a relation among the ideas themselves, but a recognition of the mind's own inability to act otherwise with regard to them. Hence he adds, "Perhaps it cannot properly be said that we see the agreement of the ideas unless we see how they agree, but we may perceive that they are united and know that they belong to one another, though we do not know the manner how they are tied together."Ibid. Accordingly, we may know the truth even of propositions that we cannot understand, on the basis of our fixed inclination to believe them and our inability to believe the contrary. Thus the mysteries of faith become evident to the saint through a divine influence which alters the disposition of his mind and affords him a view of divine things that convinces him of their truth. In his attacks upon the deists Edwards repeatedly argues that our ordinary and scientific convictions about the natural world are no more founded upon absolutely indisputable argument than the doctrines of religion; but on the other hand, he maintains, the saint's convictions about God rest upon evidence as compelling for him as the evidence of scientific or philosophical truths is for one whose beliefs are governed by natural dispositions of the mind.This is the substance of JE's argument in Miscell. no. 1340; see Townsend, pp. 219–33. In Miscell. no. 1297 he takes note of Hume's treatment of the causal argument for God's existence, an argument to which Edwards himself was committed. Hume undertakes, he writes, "to shew that there is no real connection between cause and effect, and that there can be no certain or even probable reasoning from one to the ther. He endeavors to subvert all proofs of a particular providence, of a future state, and of an intelligent cause of the universe."Townsend, p. 216. Edwards himself supposes that our belief in the causal relation and the necessity of a cause does not rest upon intuition or proof of that connection, but only upon a fixed propensity of the mind. But in "The Mind," No. 54 he argues that this propensity underlies a rational belief about God's existence and nature. This discussion of Edwards' theory of mind should end with some remarks about his views concerning the will. His most detailed and important discussions of volition are found in his Freedom of the Will and in the manuscript writings, letters, etc. that are associated with the work.See in Works (Yale ed.), 1. "The Mind," Nos. 21b, 60, 67, and 70, and several comments in his "Subjects to Be Handled in the Treatise on the Mind," virtually exhaust the passages in this volume that are specifically concerned with the topic. But these few discussions and remarks are of particular interest for what they suggest concerning Edwards' concept of the will as part of his general theory of the mind. One of the most important points that these passages make clear is that Edwards wholly rejected the traditional distinction between the will and the affections. Among the "Subjects" for his treatise he included, "Of the nature of the affections or passions: how only strong and lively exercises of the will; together with the effect on the animal nature.""Subjects," No. 7, below, p. 388. In the same series he also proposes to discuss "how far the love of happiness is the same with the faculty of the will; it is not distinct from the mere capacity of enjoying and suffering, and the faculty of the will is no other."Ibid., No. 44, below, p. 392. And in "The Mind," No. 67 he asserts the direct opposite of Locke's account of pleasure and pain: Pleasure and pain are not properly ideas. Though pleasure and pain may imply perception in their nature, yet it does not follow that they are properly ideas. There is an act of the mind in it. … All acts of the mind about its ideas are not themselves mere ideas. Pleasure and pain have their seat in the will, and not in the understanding. The will, choice, etc. is nothing else but the mind's being pleased with an idea, or having a superior pleasedness in something thought of, … or a pleasedness in such a state of ourselves and a degree of pain when we are not in that state, or a disagreeable conception of the contrary state at that time when we desire it.Below, p. 384. In these passages it is clear that Edwards understands pleasure and pain in general, not as being perceived states or sensations in the mind, but as being intentional acts; pleasure and pain are the acts of being pleased or displeased with or in something that is perceived or contemplated. Moreover, he holds that whatever it is that the mind is inclined to or disposed to be pleased with is that mind's apprehension of good. In "The Mind," No. 60 he writes, "It is utterly impossible but that it should be so, that the inclination and choice of the mind should always be determined by good as mentally or ideally existing. It would be a contradiction to suppose otherwise. For we mean nothing else by 'good' but that which agrees with the inclination and disposition of the mind; and surely that which agrees with it must agree with it."Below, p. 376. To this extent, the much exercised question whether the will is determined by the apprehension of good is settled by definition. The problem Edwards deals with in this article is not primarily whether good determines the will, but which perceived good determines a particular act of will. The particular act of will as distinct from the faculty, general inclination or disposition of will, is "the mind's inclination with respect to its own immediate actions."Ibid. In No. 12 of his series of "Subjects" he asserts more plainly, "Imperate acts of the will nothing but the prevailing inclination, concerning what should be done that moment; so God hath ordained that the motions of the body should follow that."Below, pp. 388–89. It is not difficult, in the light of these passages, to understand the nature of Edwards' criticism of Locke in "The Mind," No. 70. Locke considered "uneasiness" to be a felt state or sensation of the mind, which is antecedent to the act of will and distinct from it. That this state, or the mind's perception of it, determines the will was, for Locke, an empirical fact which he took great pains to establish.Essay, Bk. II, ch. 21, nos. 33–40. Locke added these sections to his chapter on power in the second edition of the Essay. But for Edwards, on the contrary, uneasiness should be regarded as a disposition or act of the will itself, so that the question whether it determines the will when it occurs is settled by definition. Edwards' point in this passage is that uneasiness in our present state cannot determine, or constitute every particular act of will; our will and choice to remain in the same state can never be determined by, or consist in, our uneasiness in it.See below, p. 385. The will, then, is "nothing else but the mind's being pleased with" ideas or states of ourselves, or, on the other hand, its being displeased with them. The assertion of this point in "The Mind," No. 67 leads us directly to that feature of his theory of excellency according to which, as we found earlier, he claimed that it is necessary that the perception of agreement be pleasing to the mind, and the perception of disagreement be painful. Accordingly, we should expect that Edwards' account of the nature and dynamics of the will is largely founded upon his theory of excellency, that his very concept of will is inextricably tied to some account of how we perceive excellency and deformity, and that will is to be understood as the necessary agreeableness or disagreeableness of such perceptions. An examination of other passages in "The Mind" indicates that this is certainly the case. In "The Mind," No. 45, his second major treatment of excellency in the series, he begins, "When we spake of excellence in bodies we were obliged to borrow the word 'consent' from spiritual things. But excellence in and among spirits is, in its prime and proper sense, being's consent to being. There is no other proper consent but that of minds, even of their will; which, when it is of minds towards minds, it is love, and when of minds towards other things it is choice."Below, p. 362.What Edwards here speaks of as a matter of correct terminology actually involves a major development in his theory of excellency. When someone perceives excellency in an object or set of objects, we are told, he not only is pleased with or by that excellency, but his being so constitutes a consent with or to it. As the remaining discussion in "The Mind," No. 45 makes clear, this consent itself involves a relation between the consenting person and the object that pleases him and that he consents to; a relation that may be beheld by some other mind, and found to be agreeable and lovely, or deformed and odious. Edwards thus turns from an account of how the will works to an account of what makes its workings virtuous or vicious. It is the former account that we are presently concerned with; but we may note in passing that he here takes his general theory of excellency to be the basis for his moral theory. That is the moral theory is worked out by considering how one mind's love for or hate of another (or indifference to another), as it is related to that other mind, may be agreeable or disagreeable, lovely or odious, to one that beholds it.See below, pp. 362–66. Clyde Holbrook discusses this aspect of JE's moral theory in The Ethics of Jonathan Edwards (Ann Arbor, 1973), esp. pp. 97–112. But the entire exposition of "The Mind," No. 45 presupposes that will, whether as love or as choice, consists in a mind's being pleased with an excellency that is perceived. The consequence of such a view may be seen to give rise to a serious problem, and one which had long been considered central to the theory of the will. If good is the proper object of the will, what accounts for the clear and evident fact that we choose what is evil? The most straightforward explanation for the partisans of such a theory is that we choose what appears to the intellect at that time to be good; that it is in fact evil that we choose is fundamentally an error in the mind's factual judgment about the object. But this explanation is not easy to defend; in many cases, perhaps even most, we choose the evil or less good even though our factual judgments as to goodness are not mistaken, or at least are contrary to the choice. It was this, indeed, that led Locke to set aside the theory that the perception of goodness determines the will, and to propose that it is determined instead by our feeling of uneasiness in our present state.Essay, Bk. II, ch. 21, no. 37. But as we have noted, Edwards treats such feelings as easiness and uneasiness as being, not what determines the will, but what constitutes the will as it is determined by something else, that is, by what is perceived. According to what appears so far, Edwards thinks that our perception of excellency necessarily determines the will. In an earlier discussion, it was proposed that the necessity here is akin to that by which a rule, when it is applied, is necessarily satisfied or unsatisfied.See above, p. 92. Such a view immediately raises an ancient problem in moral psychology: Why do we sometimes, perhaps even usually, perceive excellency or good, but nevertheless fail to choose and act in accordance with it; and perceive deformity and evil, but nevertheless choose it? If our interpretation is so far correct, it would appear that Edwards' account of the will gives rise to it in its most extreme form, for it considers that it is by logical necessity that the will is determined by the perception of good. The remaining passages in "The Mind" that pertain to the will are directly concerned with the issue. In "The Mind," No. 39, Edwards brings up an important consideration which permits him to distinguish between will and conscience: Beside the two sorts of assent of the mind called will and judgment, there is a third, arising from a sense of the general beauty and harmony of things, which is conscience. There are some things which move a kind of horror in the mind which yet the mind wills and chooses; and some which are agreeable in this way to its make and constitution which yet it chooses not. These assents of will and conscience have indeed a common object, which is excellency. Still they differ: the one is always general excellency, that is, harmony taken in its relation to the whole system of beings; the other that excellency which most strongly affects, whether the excellency be more general or particular.Below, p. 356. Both will and conscience have excellency as the object; both consist in the being pleased by the perception of excellency. But the passage calls to mind Edwards' basic view that excellency and deformity are relational properties; they consist in relations of agreement and disagreement of a thing with others. Consequently, the same thing can be and be perceived to be excellent with respect to its relations to a limited number of things, and yet be and be perceived to be deformed with respect to its relations to the system of all things. In this case it has a false or limited beauty."The Mind," No. 14, below, p. 344. Our conscience, Edwards holds, is our "horror" in viewing the true deformity; but our will might be a choice of its limited and therefore false beauty. How could this be, when both the limited beauty and the extended deformity are perceived, and can be accurately judged? Edwards closes "The Mind," No. 39 with a suggestion: "The degree wherein we are affected by any excellency is in proportion compounded by the extensiveness and the intensiveness of our view of that excellency."Below, p. 356. Edwards had broached the idea of intensiveness of view in "The Mind," No. 21b, where he claims, "It is not merely by judging that anything is a great good that good is apprehended or appears; there are other ways of apprehending good. The having a clear and sensible idea ot any good is one way of good's appearing, as well as judging that there is good."Below, p. 348. Later, in "The Mind," No. 60, he gives more form to the distinction by representing motivation or the determination of will as a compound of three distinct "proportions." The degree of good apprehended or represented by an idea, he notes, "used to be reckoned by many the only thing that determined the will." But in addition to that, he argues, motivation involves some degree of apprehension of the good, which itself depends upon the degree of certainty or assurance of the judgment of the goodness, and upon "the deepness of the sense of the goodness, or the liveliness and sensibleness of the goodness or sweetness, or the strength of the impression on the mind." Finally, the will's determination is affected by "the proportion or degree of the mind's apprehension of the propriety of the good, or of its own concernment in it," as whether it is a near or a remote pleasure that is perceived.Below, pp. 375–76. We thus see Edwards moving away from the traditional concept of will and intellect as distinct powers or faculties of the mind, and toward the conception of distinct kinds or modes of apprehension or perception of objects; the one kind he sees as generally terminating in judgments of truth or falsity that have varying degrees of assurance, and the other as terminating in some degree of that agreeableness or disagreeableness that at first he had claimed was the necessary consequence of all perception of excellency. It may, in fact, be questioned how far Edwards kept these two modes of apprehension entirely distinct in his later writings. In his major essay on the "sense of the heart" in Miscell. no. 782, for example, he treats this sense of the heart as a sensible knowledge of an object which, when the object is spiritual, involves a conviction of its reality and truth, as well as a delight in and warm agreeableness toward its goodness.Townsend, pp. 113–26. JE's conception of the synthesis of intellect and will in his account of the affections and the sense of the heart has been carefully examined by John Smith in his introduction to A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, in Works (Yale ed.) 2, pp. 11–17. See also the discussion in Smith's recent paper, "Jonathan Edwards as Philosophical Theologian," Review of Metaphysics, 30 (1976), pp. 321–24. Norman Fiering's paper, "Intellect and Will in the New England Mind," William and Mary Quarterly, 29 (1972), pp. 515–58, gives an excellent account of the history of the intellectualist-voluntarist controversy in colonial thought, and of JE's place in relation to it. For our present purposes, it appears that there is at hand at least some evidence for proposing that Edwards' general conception of the will developed through his writings in "The Mind" in a manner similar to his conception of the intellect. From the very start, in "The Mind," No. 1, he saw will and intellect as necessarily conjoined in our perception of objects, and as being concerned about and directed to relations within and among the several individuals present rather than the properties of each individual taken separately. Both truth and goodness, he thought, are borne to the mind by such relations, and indeed the very existence and natures of the objects themselves are comprised in such relations and in laws governing them. But in the course of investigation Edwards found and became increasingly convinced that we humans, at least in our fallen state, do not and cannot actually apprehend those relations that bear truth and goodness; they are not disclosed either to intuition or by demonstration. At the same time, he found that we all generally do form concepts, judge objects, and reason about them in much the same ways. And again, though perhaps to a considerably lesser extent and degree, we share the same natural tendencies to approve benevolence and disapprove malice, to enjoy proportion and symmetry but feel uneasy about disproportion and irregularity, to admire a rose or tree but shrink from a snake or spider. In all these cases, he still supposes, our mental states and acts are about relations; but they do not occur in accordance with our actual and full recognition of the relations concerned, and so we cannot explain how and why they occur except by reference to dispositions, propensities, and habits of the mind itself. These dispositions and habits constitute the general and particular laws according to which our ideas are united and our judgments and affections about them occur. Such laws, it seems, might vary greatly from one to another mind, and might be altered in any one mind by circumstance, or especially by the regeneration extended from God, upon whose constant operation all our conscious thinking immediately depends in any case. How far this hypothesis is confirmed by Edwards' discussions of our cognitive and moral psychology in other places must at present be left an open question. But what he set down in the late fragment we have titled "Notes on Knowledge and Existence" seems to support the interpretation. In a list of topics to be discussed he includes: How real existence depends on knowledge or perception. From hence shew how all real union and all created identity is arbitrary. How God is as it were the only substance, or rather, the perfection and steadfastness of his knowledge, wisdom, power and will. And then, with regard to the mind, he writes:
Answer to that objection, that then we have no evidence of immaterial substance. Answer: True; for this is what is supposed, that all existence is perception. What we call body is nothing but a particular mode of perception; and what we call spirit is nothing but a composition and series of perceptions, or an universe of coexisting and successive perceptions connected by such wonderful methods and laws.See below, p. 398.
4. Preparation and Editing of the Texts.
The principal objective of the Yale edition is to present the authentic texts of Edwards' writings in a clear and readable form. In the case of works published during Edwards' own lifetime, this objective is satisfied by following the words of the first-edition texts which he himself saw into print. Eighteenth-century printing conventions with respect to spelling, capitalization, punctuation, use of italics, etc. are revised in specified ways so as to preserve the style and flavor of Edwards' writing, but at the same time render it in a printed form more acceptable to the modern reader.See Ramsey's account in Works (Yale ed.), 1, pp. 118 ff. The same objectives are sought in the publication of his manuscript writings; but the means of achieving them are necessarily very different. The various special problems confronted in preparing texts of the writings in this volume, and the ways they have been handled, call for some further explanation. From the point of view of the editor, each of the writings presented below is in many ways unique in the problems it presents. None of them was written to be published, and only one, the "Spider" letter, was intended for an eye other than the author's. Each was produced for its own particular purpose, and accordingly they vary greatly in form and content from extended essays to mere topical outlines and lists of memoranda. Some were written with careful attention to style and grammatical form, while others were composed in careless haste; some were written from corrected drafts, others are themselves mere drafts with various amounts and kinds of revision on the page. All texts except that of "The Mind" are based upon the original manuscripts, each of which presents special problems according to the manner in which it was formed and organized, the time at which it was written, and its present physical condition. And although "The Mind" is based upon Sereno Dwight's published version, this can hardly be treated as a first-edition text prepared by Edwards himself. Discussion of the special problems of editing that are peculiar to each of the writings will be reserved for the headnotes preceding each of the texts or set of related texts below. The present concern is with those problems that are common to many or all of the writings, and with the manner in which they have been resolved. The first major problem is that of establishing an authentic and verbally accurate text of the manuscript writings. Various difficulties in this matter are due to the present condition of the manuscripts, the nature of Edwards' chirography, the quality of his pen and ink, and the degree of caution with which he wrote and amount of revision he made either in the course of writing or afterward. Each of these calls for particular comment. Several of Edwards' manuscripts are now badly deteriorated through much handling (and mishandling), both by Edwards himself and by later readers. Some pages have become so badly rubbed, marked, torn, and frayed at the edges that portions of the original text have been destroyed altogether or made entirely illegible. Where there are copies or published versions made at earlier times when the manuscripts were in better condition, the missing and illegible words have been taken from these. In all such cases, the words in question are set in square brackets, and the source from which they were taken is explained in an editor's footnote. These earlier copies and published versions have also been used to assure the accuracy of the editor's transcriptions of the manuscripts. Edwards' handwriting is notoriously difficult to read, especially in many of the earlier papers where he wrote in a very small, hurried, half-printed script, crowded his lines on the page, and wrote to the extreme margins of the paper. In many places where his chirography was adapted to writing speed and the conservation of space rather than readability, it is difficult to tell by the eye where the words begin and end, not to speak of discerning what words they are. The same small loop, dot, or curved dash might represent any vowel or even diphthong, and the same curved vertical stroke could stand for quite different consonants. Many words can be read only by scrutinizing the marks under a microscope or by photo-enlargement, and the context is often as much a factor in finding the correct reading as Edwards' inscription of the word itself. These difficulties are exacerbated further in passages in which he wrote with a blunt quill, or used ink that faded so rapidly that he himself was occasionally forced to touch it up afterward. In preparing the texts presented below, the editor's transcriptions of the manuscripts have been systematically compared with the readings of others who have copied or published them, and often to good purpose Such comparisons have led to the correction of innumerable errors even obvious ones, both in the earlier published versions and in the editor's own initial transcriptions. While such comparison afforded the means for resolving many problematic readings, it also called attention to others and to plausible alternative readings that might deserve mention. Not every doubtful case is sufficiently uncertain or significant to demand editorial annotation, but where there is a substantial question of meaning or style the matter has been explained in a footnote to the text, and plausible alternative readings given in other published versions have been noted. In one or two cases where neither I nor any other reader has found an intelligible reading the wholly illegible part of the text is represented by an ellipsis and annotated. The problem of establishing an authentic text for publication goes beyond the question of making verbally accurate transcriptions of the manuscripts. Most of the writings included here were actually composed on the pages from which our text is derived, rather than copied from corrected drafts. Consequently, the most accurate transcriptions contain all the inadvertent verbal omissions, redundancies and repetitions, slips of the pen, and grammatical infelicities, both major and minor, that may be committed in the act of composition. Moreover, most pages show some number of Edwards' revisions of his writing, made either at the time of composition or afterwards. Apart from making the manuscripts more difficult to read, these revisions sometimes complicate and confuse the text. Many revisions are made by deleting words or phrases; occasionally Edwards struck through more or fewer words in deleting than the meaning or form of his sentence would permit. Other revisions consist in words or phrases written above the line; sometimes these do not conform to the grammatical structure of the sentence, and sometimes Edwards left it unclear at what point in the sentence they were intended to be inserted. He usually wrote longer additions to a discussion in available space elsewhere on the same page or on another page of the manuscript, with key marks or marginal and parenthetical notes to explain the place he intended them to be introduced. Some of these organizational instructions are ambiguous, and some lead to unnecessary awkwardness in the flow of a discussion. Most of the problems of wording, word order, and organization of the text that arise from these causes can be handled by silent editing.
The objective is to present the text that results from Edwards' composition and revision, so that his deletions are omitted and his additions are incorporated in course without comment. Moreover, wherever his meaning and intentions are perfectly clear the mistakes that result from his incomplete or grammatically faulty revisions have been silently corrected, as have similar trivial mistakes in unrevised text, for example in the tense or number of a verb, or the inadvertent repetition of a word. Words that are not actually present in the manuscript text but are required for the meaning of a sentence, are put in square brackets in the conventional manner. Annotation is provided only in cases where Edwards' meaning and intentions are ambiguous or obscure. In these cases, the actual wording of the manuscript and the nature of Edwards' revisions are presented in the editor's footnotes. The purpose of these notes is to explain the state of the manuscript as fully as possible at every point where Edwards' meaning or style is not entirely clear. In this way, it is hoped the reader will be adequately informed about relevant difficulties with the text, without being burdened with an excess of editorial annotation. Nevertheless, the footnotes to the texts as given below are almost entirely those of the editor. Many of Edwards' notes in his manuscripts consist in comments in the margins concerning the organization of the text, and these have been presented in editor's footnotes together with explanations of their purpose and location. Otherwise, Edwards' notes consist in parenthetical remarks, cross-references to other passages in his writings, and citations of published works and passages of Scripture. These are most appropriately printed within the text where they apply and at the places where Edwards wrote them, rather than as separate footnotes at the bottom of the page. Where further information is needed to complete or explain Edwards' notes, it is given in footnotes of the editor. Relevant information pertaining to the dates and chronological order of passages and the sources of particular ideas or statements of fact presented in them is also given in the editor's notes. Despite the numbers of silent and annotated decisions concerning the correct wording of these texts, they have not been "improved" in substance or style by the editor's emendation. Verbal inconsistencies, awkwardness of phrasing, redundancies of expression, and errant syntax all stand as Edwards wrote and left them, even though he him-self would not have approved their publication. All undeleted passages have been preserved in the text below, however obscure their meanings might be. And substantial passages that Edwards himself deleted are given in footnotes when they reveal significant points in the way his ideas developed and his expression of them was altered after critical reflection. In this way, it is hoped, the reader will not only be presented with an authentic final text, but will be informed about the most significant steps in Edwards' composition of it. The policies of the Yale edition call for silent editing with respect to the modernization of spelling and capitalization, the expansion of Edwards' abbreviations, and the regularizing of his various references to published works and passages of Scripture. Certain words and contractions familiar to Edwards but no longer current, for example, "spake," "lien" and "shewn"; "ben't," "han't," " 'tis," and " 'em," have been retained as authentic to his style, but the y-contractions that are frequent in his earlier writing are lengthened to their modern forms. Edwards' own abbreviations, for example "SS" for Scriptures, "G." for God, "X" for Christ and "Xtian" for Christian have been silently expanded. On the other hand, the abbreviations "Fig." for Figure, "Prop." for Proposition, "Corol." for Corollary, "Ax." for Axiom, "Obj." for Objection, and "N.B." for Nota Bene have been retained where these are used nongenerically. The text has been punctuated in conformity with the standards of this edition, in a generally eighteenth-century style but somewhat less densely than an eighteenth-century editor would have done. Almost all punctuation is that of the editor, because in his manuscript writings Edwards rarely pointed in the conventional manner, and his occasional dot might equally represent a comma, a colon or semicolon, or a period, or in some cases, as it appears, it might have been produced entirely by accident. In the flow of his composition Edwards often developed his thought through long sequences of independent and subordinate clauses, with little regard for the conventional form of the complete sentence. Where his compound structures have proved to be inordinately long, cumbersome, and confusing to the modern reader, they have been divided into sentences, although doing so has produced numerous sentences beginning with a conjunction. Often an appropriate punctuation could be supplied only by applying a range of marks, inserting them according to their degree of relative strength, the comma being used as the weakest and the semicolon, colon, and period as relatively stronger in an ascending order. Where clarity required, the dash and parentheses have been used as well. The many notes and memoranda that begin with such words as "how," "to shew that" and "relating to," have been treated as much as possible on an analogy with sentences. The organization of the text and sequence of passages is presented as it appears in the source, but with certain notable exceptions that should be explained here. Edwards' paragraphs have been retained, except that inordinately long paragraphs have been silently divided by the editor. His numbering of entries (and Dwight's, in the case of "The Mind") has also been retained. Where two items are found with the same number, they have been distinguished by the use of "a" and "b" Series of entries that Edwards himself did, not number have been given numbers by the editor for convenience of reference. These numbers, and Dwight's numbers in "The Mind," have been put in square brackets in the text itself, though the brackets are omitted in the editor's citations of them. In the last series of notes in "Natural Philosophy," the unnumbered series, numbering has proceeded according to the chronological order in which the articles were composed; in other cases, it is according to the sequence of items as they appear in the manuscript. Other special details of organization that require explanation are treated in the editor's head notes to the texts, and in footnotes at the appropriate points. In volumes of the Yale edition dedicated to Edwards' published works, most of the footnotes to the text are Edwards' own, and the relatively few editor's notes are distinguished from these by bein printed in brackets. In the case of his manuscript writings, however, almost all of Edwards' notes are contained within the text, while the need for annotation results in a relatively large number of editor's notes. In this volume, therefore, the editor's notes are printed without brackets; and where Edwards' statements, his marginalia, certain deleted passages, and the like form the content of a footnote, they are given in an editor's note together with appropriate annotation.
5. Acknowledgments
This volume could hardly have been completed without the generous assistance and support of many friends and colleagues. I am especially indebted to Thomas A. Schafer of McCormick Seminary for offering his time, skill, and knowledge in so many instances, and for sharing so much of the best fruit of his own study of Edwards' manuscripts. He contributed most of the information concerning the dating of the early writings that is presented here, and also prepared Edwards' many drawn illustrations for reproduction with the texts below. The contributions of my wife, Ruth Mastin Anderson, have been equally great. She gave invaluable help with aspects of the background research offered expert criticism of the writing and editing, and spent many unrewarded hours in the tedious work of typing and proofreading Above all, she lent her constant support to this project, shared the moments of excitement and satisfaction it has afforded, and patiently endured my seasons of anxiety and frustration as well. The advice and assistance of John E. Smith of Yale University has helped me to avoid many pitfalls as the work progressed, and I have benefitted greatly from our discussions of Edwards' thought. I am also indebted to Wilson Kimnach of the University of Bridgeport for many rewarding conversations, and for his timely help in expediting steps toward the completion of the project. Discussion with Sang Hyun Lee of Hope College, and with the Reverend Chalmers Coe of Columbus, has helped my understanding and appreciation of various aspects of Edwards' work. Edmund S. Morgan and Sidney E. Ahlstrom of Yale University, and Paul Ramsey of Princeton University, read and helpfully commented upon the Introduction. I received other help from the late Rev. John Mastin, Shirley Niebanck, Pamela Coe, and Helen Mastin. Throughout the preparation of this volume I enjoyed the help and cooperation of Marjorie Wynne, Suzanne Rutter, and the other members of the staff of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. My work has also been facilitated by the collections and facilities of the Sterling Library at Yale, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the libraries of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New York Historical Society, the Ohio State University, the University of Minnesota, and Macalester College, and in England by the libraries of Cambridge University, Sheffield University, and the British Museum. The New York Historical Society has given permission to publish Edwards' "Spider" letter here, and supplied the photograph of Edwards' illustration in that letter. I received special support from the Ohio State University in the form of a period of assigned research duty in 1967–68, and two grants-in-aid. Robert and Harriett Balay generously opened their home to me and my family during several brief and extended periods of work in New Haven. I have also enjoyed the hospitality of David and Beverley White, Gunter and Sarah Garbe, and Martin Einhorn at various times while working on this project. Wallace E. Anderson Columbus, Ohio
Jonathan Edwards [1714], Scientific and Philosophical Writings (WJE Online Vol. 6) , Ed. Wallace E. Anderson [word count] [jec-wjeo06]. |
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