joined the mathematical genius of Descartes; and as a result became "as thoroughgoing an empiricist as he was a consummate mathematician," for whom there was "no a priori certainty."[i-4] At this time it is enough to note of Newtonianism, that for the incomparable physicist "science was composed of laws stating the mathematical behaviour of nature solely—laws clearly deducible from phenomena and exactly verifiable in phenomena—everything further is to be swept out of science, which thus becomes a body of absolutely certain truth about the doings of the physical world."[i-5] The pattern of ideas known as Newtonianism may be summarized as embracing a belief in (1) a universe governed by immutable natural laws, (2) which laws constitute a sublimely harmonious system, (3) reflecting a benevolent and all-wise Geometrician; (4) thus man desires to effect a correspondingly harmonious inner heaven; (5) and feels assured of the plausibility of an immortal life. Newton was a believer in scriptural revelation. It is ironical that through his cosmological system, mathematically demonstrable, he lent reinforcement to deism, the most destructive intellectual solvent of the authority of the altar.

Deists, as defined by their contemporary, Ephraim Chambers (in his Cyclopædia ..., London, 1728), are those "whose distinguishing character it is, not to profess any particular form, or system of religion; but only to acknowledge the existence of a God, without rendering him any external worship, or service. The Deists hold, that, considering the multiplicity of religions, the numerous pretences to revelation, and the precarious arguments generally advanced in proof thereof; the best and surest way is, to return to the simplicity of nature, and the belief of one God, which is the only truth agreed to by all nations." They "reject all revelations as an imposition, and believe no more than what natural light discovers to them...."[i-6] The "simplicity of nature" signifies "the established order, and course of natural things; the series of second causes; or the laws which God has imposed on the motions impressed by him."[i-7] And attraction, a kind of conatus accedendi, is the crown, according to the eighteenth century, of the series of secondary causes. Hence, Newtonian physics became the surest ally of the deist in his quest for a religion, immutable and universal. The Newtonian progeny were legion: among them were Boyle, Keill, Desaguliers, Shaftesbury, Locke, Samuel Clarke, 'sGravesande, Boerhaave, Diderot, Trenchard and Gordon, Voltaire, Gregory, Maclaurin, Pemberton, and others. The eighteenth century echoed Fontenelle's eulogy that Newtonianism was "sublime geometry." If, as Boyle wrote, mathematical and mechanical principles were "the alphabet, in which God wrote the world," Newtonian science and empiricism were the lexicons which the deists used to read the cosmic volume in which the universal laws were inscribed. And the deists and the liberal political theorists "found the fulcrum for subverting existing institutions and standards only in the laws of nature, discovered, as they supposed, by mathematicians and astronomers."[i-8]

Complementary to Newtonian science was the sensationalism of John Locke. Conceiving the mind as tabula rasa, discrediting innate ideas, Lockian psychology undermined such a theological dogma as total depravity—man's innate and inveterate malevolence—and hence was itself a kind of tabula rasa on which later were written the optimistic opinions of those who credited man's capacity for altruism. If it remained for the French philosophes to deify Reason, Locke honored it as the crowning experience of his sensational psychology.[i-9] Then, too, as Miss Lois Whitney has ably demonstrated, Lockian psychology "cleared the ground for either primitivism or a theory of progress."[i-10] In addition, his social compact theory, augmenting seventeenth-century liberalism, furnished the political theorists of the Enlightenment with "the principle of Consent"[i-11] in their antipathy for monarchial obscurantism. Locke has been described as the "originator of a psychology which provided democratic government with a scientific basis."[i-12] The full impact of Locke will be felt when philosophers deduce that if sensations and reflections are the product of outward stimuli—those of nature, society, and institutions—then to reform man one needs only to reform society and institutions, or remove to some tropical isle. We remember that the French Encyclopedists, for example, were motivated by their faith in the "indefinite malleability of human nature by education and institutions."[i-13]

"With the possible exception of John Locke," C. A. Moore observes, "Shaftesbury was more generally known in the mid-century than any other English philosopher."[i-14] Shaftesbury's a priori "virtuoso theory of benevolence" may be viewed as complementary to Locke's psychology to the extent that both have within them the implication that through education and reform man may become perfectible. Both tend to undermine social, political, and religious authoritarianism. Shaftesbury's insistence upon man's innate altruism and compassion, coupled with the deistic and rationalistic divorce between theology and morality, resulted in the dogma that the most acceptable service to God is expressed in kindness to God's other children and helped to motivate the rise of humanitarianism.

The idea of progress[i-15] was popularized (if not born) in the eighteenth century. It has been recently shown that not only the