Dictionary of the History of Ideas    DEISMDeism is the belief that by rational methods alone mencan know all the true propositions of theology whichit is possible, necessary, or desirable for men to know.Deists have generally subscribed to most of the follow-ing propositions, and have ranged widely from Chris-tian rationalists or fideists to atheists:1. One and only one God exists.2. God has moral and intellectual virtues in perfec-tion.3. God's active powers are displayed in the world,created, sustained, and ordered by means of di-vinely sanctioned natural laws, both moral andphysical.4. The ordering of events constitutes a general provi-dence.5. There is no special providence; no miracles orother divine interventions violate the lawful natu-ral order.6. Men have been endowed with a rational naturewhich alone allows them to know truth and theirduty when they think and choose in conformitywith this nature.7. The natural law requires the leading of a morallife, rendering to God, one's neighbor, and one'sself what is due to each.8. The purest form of worship and the chief religiousobligation is to lead a moral life.9. God had endowed men with immortal souls.10. After death retributive justice is meted out to eachman according to his acts. Those who fulfill themoral law and live according to nature are “saved”to enjoy rewards; others are punished.11. All other religious beliefs or practices conflictingwith these tenets are to be regarded critically, asat best indifferent political institutions and beliefs,or as errors to be condemned and eradicated ifit should be prudent to do so.Deism is thus the name given to a set of epistemologi-cal and metaphysical claims. It has sometimes beendiscussed in the light of what it positively affirms butmore often with respect to what it denies. To discrim-inate positive or constructive deism as a view different Page 647, Volume 1from negative or critical deism, while it may be usefulin emphasizing the characteristics of particular deistsor their works, obscures the fact that deism is criticalin its affirmations and constructive in its denials. Pyr-rhic or academic skepticism, fideism, any view whichrelies upon nonrational intuitions or feelings to estab-lish religious truth, or any claims to a nonrationalrevelation are implicitly rejected by deists. Also re-jected is any philosophy which affirms the nonexistenceof God or which claims that nothing can be knownabout any relations asserted to exist between God andmen.Deists have varied considerably in their views ofwhat constitutes a rational methodology. Some haveheld their religious beliefs to be warranted by a prioriarguments, while others claimed that their conclusionswere based on wholly empirical evidence. A deisticview of the world is a static one which exacts fromall men an identical religious response. Any thorough-going relativism is incompatible with deistic teleolo-gies. Equally clear is the deistic presupposition of auniform human nature. All reasoning men have andalways will have the same religious views in any timeor place. These views receive no support from tra-dition or authority, which, according to deists, aresources of pedantic error and corruption. History con-tains a history of religious error but not of religiousevolution.Deists claim that all or most of the true propositionsof theology are and have been known with certaintywhenever men have reasoned correctly about theology.Variations in religious belief, not the tenets of truebelief, have to be explained and accounted for. Reli-gious cults, the chief form taken by such variations,are the products of innocent or malicious human error.Among the innocent errors and mistakes giving riseto religious diversity are sickness, madness and delu-sion, fear, mistaken reasoning, and the transmission offalse information. Malicious errors are propagated bypriests, rulers, artists, and generally unscrupulous menwho, having no regard for truth, impose false reasoningupon men whom they wish to control or in somemanner use to their own advantage. Error once estab-lished is maintained by the force, authority, and cun-ning of men no different from the first deceivers.Truth may be discovered only when men are freeto reason. It can be maintained only where they haveliberty to criticize errors, even those dogmatic errorsmaintained by authority. No society which whollyprohibits criticism, in the form of argument or ridicule,can be good, happy, or enduring. Free discussion isa necessity; any political practices or institutions whichprevent this should be overthrown. Censorship andrepression, if legitimate and feasible at all, should be extended only to the propagators of known falsehoods.Abstractly considered, deism has an optimistic viewof the human condition: there can be no radical evilin the well-ordered world created by a good God.Moreover it assumes that the true religion, if known,will be followed by men because they find it true andin their interest to follow it. Regarding the actualsituation of men, deists could only be pessimistic, criti-cal, and even politically subversive in their demandsfor reform.Deism has flourished only among rationalists posses-sing, in relatively closed societies, the freedom andleisure to criticize popular and authorized religiousbeliefs. Its concern with reason, its reliance on classicalsources, and its dislike of popular superstition contrib-uted to make it rather aristocratic in outlook. Whereit has not been so, notably in the United States, it hasbeen a form of protest allied to republicanism. Lackingexponents of the first intellectual rank and exercisinglittle hold on the emotions, it has never been a popularcreed, not even in the Englightenment. As is appropriateto a view with a negative philosophy of history, it hasscarcely varied since its first appearance.Elements of the deistic position are as ancient ascritical religious thought itself. False gods and impos-tors appear in the Old Testament, as does a providentialGod who is both creator and preserver of the world.Saint Paul's statements concerning the law of theGentiles (Romans 2:13-15) yield the base for a naturalreligion. Among the pre-Socratics there are sixth- andfifth-century B.C. fragments dealing with being, theOne, and the logos which suggest attempts at the con-struction of a rational theology. The imposture theoryof the origin of the gods and of popular, politicallyuseful religious cults can be found in the fragment fromthe Sisyphus of Critias of Athens. Plato and Aristotle,in their differing ways, contributed both to rationaltheology and to the critical literature on the originof the gods. Epicureans, Stoics, and Academics furtherelaborated and criticized rational theologies resemblingdeism, discussing the existence, attributes, and relationof gods to men. Cicero, who transmitted these specula-tions both to the Romans and to later thinkers, deservesthe title, and perhaps was, the father of deism, the firstdeist, even though he never gives wholehearted assentto the deistic position.All of the defining principles of deism appear inCicero's works, notably in De natura deorum (BookIII). Cicero, like later deists, distinguished betweenphilosophical and popular religions, defending the lat-ter by appeals to authority, reason, and utility. Writingin an age of political chaos and religious credulity inwhich cults were seen as political contrivances, Cicerooutlined views appealing to later thinkers who found Page 648, Volume 1themselves in similar circumstances. Such views sur-vived in the ancient schools, in the philosophicalpaganism of men such as Plutarch, Celsus, and theemperor Julian, even in works Christian apologistsdevoted to their refutation.The Christianization of Europe put an end to deismuntil the Renaissance. Yet even in this long period ideasessential to a deistic outlook were kept alive in avariety of ways. Controversy over the limits of faithand reason usually ended with the assignment to reasonof proofs for the existence of God and often allowedfor the discussion of some of His attributes. Naturallaw remained an expression of divine general provi-dence and specified moral obligations which, if fulfilled,entailed some merit if not saving grace. Christian andMuslim scholars speculated about the eternity of theworld and the immortality of souls. In doing so theyput their arguments more rigorously than the Stoicsor Cicero had done. Schism, heresy, and anticlericalismwere common to all of the western countries producingor keeping alive theories of imposture as well as givingconvincing examples. The Middle Ages thus preservedideas which, taken from their Christian contexts, mightbe reformulated in more rigorously monotheistic syn-theses than they had received in classical or Christianworks.Deism revived with the new philosophy, science, andculture of the Renaissance but also owed somethingto the concomitant religious upheaval which offeredfreedom, opportunity, and incentive to the criticalproclivities of religious thinkers. Moreover, concernrationally to ground revealed religion in natural reli-gion, to find an irenic and fundamental basis for Chris-tian unity, and to end sectarian controversies furtheredthe development of deism in the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries. Socinians and Baptists as well asRenaissance philosophers and scientists played a rolein the reemergence of deistic views in Europe.Perhaps the first reference to deists which employsthat term is found in Pierre Viret's Instruction Chres-tienne (1564), reliably reprinted in Bayle's Dictionnaireentry, Viret. To the Calvinist Viret, deism was a newspecies of heresy brought forth by Italian Renaissancenaturalism in the turmoil of reform. Allowing the dé-istes a belief in God like the Turks and Jews (commeles Turcs & les Juifs), he went on to say that theythought the doctrine of the evangelists and apostlesonly “myths and dreams” (la doctrine des Évangélistes& des Apostres only fables & resveries). Deists tendedto treat the creator in an Epicurean fashion. “Thereare some among them who have a belief in the immor-tality of the soul: others agree with the Epicureans,and likewise about the providence of God with respectto men: as He did not concern Himself with the con-duct of human affairs, so these would be governed by chance, prudence, or the folly of men accordingly asthings happen” (trans. R. Emerson).Viret thought these “atheists” greatly abused theliberty which the Reformation had given them to criti-cize idolatry and superstition. With horror he berateddeists, much as Roger Ascham, writing the Schole-master at the same time, did “Italianate Englishmen.”Like Roger Ascham, he gave no names. As a represen-tative thinker exemplifying these views we might pickJean Bodin, the author of Colloquium Heptaplomeres(1588), a dialogue on religion which includes a diestamong the discussants. One might also choose from thelist of deists given by Robert Burton in the Anatomyof Melancholy ([1621], Part 3, Sec. 4, Member 2, Sub-sec. 1). Or, one could examine the natural religion inthe Utopia (1516) of Sir Thomas More as a model ofwhat sixteenth-century thinkers, inspired by discoveriesin the New World, thought a religion of reason couldbe—a religion whose saving efficacy they denied.Europe in the first half of the seventeenth centuryproduced few deists. Numerous controversies over thenature and source of religious truth produced a bodyof literature used in the formation of deism in thesecond half of the century. Skepticism deriving fromclassical sources, the works of Michel de Montaigneand Protestant and Catholic fideists, was developedphilosophically and applied to historical and religiousworks by libertins such as Cyrano de Bergerac andérudits, including Gabriel Naudé, La Mothe le Vayer,and Giovanni Diodati—respectively two nominalCatholic fideists and a somewhat indifferent Protestant.In the skeptical and fideistic literature can be foundmost of the arguments of critical deism. Other studiesplaced a premium upon reason and natural law whichwas to nourish the positive claims of deism. Jurists likeHugo Grotius appealed to reason and natural law asthe bases of morality and law; religious thinkers suchas the great Anglican apologist Richard Hooker soughtin reason an irenic principle and recognized that reasonconstituted the common meeting ground of all religiouspolemicists. Christian humanists trained in Scholasticphilosophy who sought to be reasonable men believedin a rational religion prior to, but compatible with,Christianity. Philosophers who refuted skepticism,René Descartes or Lord Herbert of Cherbury (oftencalled the first English deist), to name but two, usuallyattempted to prove the existence of God and to workout a rational religion as part of their philosophicsystem. Thomas Hobbes did this in such a fashion thatreligion was reduced to a wholly natural phenomenonand one not very reasonable at that. As yet scienceplayed little role in the growth of deism which insofaras it emerged at all, did so in the context of debatesin theology, philosophy, and history.The deists of the early seventeenth century asked Page 649, Volume 1only to be allowed to believe, in peace, the religionof wise men; like most wise men they did not impru-dently preach it. We glimpse it as the rebellious pro-tests of wits in the circle of Théophile de Viau, longthought to be the author of Les Quatrains du Déiste(ca. 1626), and we occasionally find it as an easy surro-gate for conviction among wits and gentlemen whoregarded it as quite compatible with the establishedreligion. Among the scholars Thomas Campanella in-troduced it in his utopia, The City of the Sun (ca. 1602,published 1627), where it is joined to radical social andpolitical views and to a philosophic outlook commonin the Italian Renaissance. In France its most distin-guished exponent was probably Isaac de la Peyrère,the author of Du Rappel des Juifs (1643) and Praeada-mitae (1655). In England Lord Herbert of Cherbury'slater works De religione laici and Dialogue betweena Tutor and His Pupil (ca. 1641-45, published 1768),exemplify its critical side as his De veritate (1621) hadstressed its constructive arguments.The middle and late seventeenth century saw achange in the character of European deism. Conti-nental deists continued to maintain their beliefs largelyas they had in the past but modified them by supplyingnew scientific evidence of design in nature while sup-plementing the argument from universal consent bycitations from travel literature. The skeptical traditionwas nourished by Cartesianism. Libertine érudits foundtheir natural successors in men like Simon Tyssot dePatot, Charles de Saint-Évremond, and Pierre Bayle,the first two of whom were deists while the lattershared and diffused their critical arguments. Europeandeism continued to be both scholarly and aristocratic,apolitical even while condemning the vulgar religion.It existed in the protected homes of the wealthy, inthe Bohemian world of journalism, among a fewscholars, and in the places of exile and refuge suchas Holland. In Rotterdam Peyrère's deism suppliedBenedict Spinoza with a few critical analyses of theOld Testament; elsewhere Giovanni Marana's L'Espiondu Grand Seigneur (The Turkish Spy, 1684) coulddefend a natural religion that was not Islam, and theBaron Lahontan's imaginary member of the Hurontribe, whom he named Adario, would show that evensavages could reason better than Jesuits. The epistemicclaims, the uniformities which deism asserted, and itsrationalism, appealed to those who thought vulgarreligion an imposture, sects equally wrong, and mira-cles unlikely to happen in a world composed of sub-stances and modes behaving according to rules knownwith near mathematical exactitude.In England a political and religious upheavalaffected the course of development in several ways.The spectacle of sectarian strife, prophets in the coun-tryside, and saints at Westminster deepened or produced a distrust of enthusiasm and religious emotionnot to be overcome until the end of the eighteenthcentury. “Priestcraft,” which until the 1640's had beenprimarily a sin of Catholics, now appeared as a univer-sal clerical trait. Irenicism, based on appeals to naturaltheology and reason as essentials in religious debate,had marked Anglican apologetics since ArchbishopJewel's (1522-71) time. Richard Hooker was succeededby men like William Chillingworth, John Hales ofEton, the Cambridge Platonists, and latitudinarians,who throughout the century in the interests of Chris-tian unity appealed to reason and formulated a justifi-cation of Anglican practices which made Christianityitself supportable only as a reasonable revelation,moralistic rather than sacramental in character. Natu-ral theology became, as it was not among Calvinistsor Catholics, the apologetic mainstay. English rationaltheology, which became increasingly liberal as thecentury progressed, was the product of religious con-troversy, not a philosophic inquiry into epistemology.So much was this the case during the 1620's, '30's, and'40's that Lord Herbert's deistic works were not refuteduntil after the Restoration. Religion became an openlypolitical issue in England and those who found repub-licanism congenial often tended to maintain religiousviews equally rationalistic. Levellers and near deistssuch as Henry Marten, William Walwyn, Major JohnWildman, reputed deists like the first Lord Shaftesbury,James Harrington, and Henry Neville were republicansin political theory as English deists tended to be inthe 1690's and throughout the eighteenth century.Political and religious protest joined not only in thesemen but in Puritans like Milton who moved progres-sively in the direction of a rational religion. EvenPuritan mystics, Quakers or pantheistic Ranters, andthose disturbed by the inner light often spoke in ra-tionalistic terms, thus introducing into popular par-lance a rational religion of sorts. “The light of reason,”“the spirit of reason” were for the Digger, GerrardWinstanly, synonyms for the divine in human con-sciousness: “When Mankind lives in the unity of the oneSpirit of Righteousness, he lives in the light and thelight lives in him, which is Christ in him, the lightof the Father, or the restoring power.” Such talk madea less heated rationalism in religion acceptable to manywho on the Continent would have had no exposure toit. London judges worried over Peyrère's work on thepre-Adamites published in translation in 1655. Bul-strode Whitelock related in his Memoirs (March 22,1651) “That one Boston... was cashiered for holdingsome dangerous opinions, as that god was reason, etc.”Heresy was for a longer time more freely expressedthan it had been hitherto in any Christian country saveperhaps in Luther's Germany. From this confusiondeism grew either as a rejection of sectarian extrava- Page 650, Volume 1gance or from revulsion against enthusiasm or in somecases as an outgrowth of the ideas held by Puritansand Anglicans themselves.The Restoration of Charles II brought a reaction toPuritanism which made fashionable among rakes likeCharles Sedley, George Etherege, the Duke of Buck-ingham “a general creed and no very long one” suchas the Marquis of Halifax ascribed to Charles II. Hali-fax, “the Trimmer” in politics, was himself a Trimmerin religion. Thomas Shadwell and the young JohnDryden shared the literary interests of the courtierswhose “atheism” they occasionally displayed on stage.Seldom really godless, it was much more a religion ofreason and nature quite compatible with neo-classictastes. Generally critical, as in Shadwell's The Lanca-shire Witches (1685), it could be more explicitly con-structive. Dryden's The Indian Emperour (1665) hasa Montezuma capable of the following statement ofnatural religion:That which we worship, and which you believe,From Nature's common hand we both receive:All under various names, Adore and LoveOne power Immense, which ever rules above.Vice to abhor, and Virtue to pursue,Is both believed and taught by us and you.... this must be enough, or to MankindOne equal way to Bliss is not design'd.For though some more may know, and some know less,Yet all must know enough for happiness(Act 5, Scene 2).Dryden was later to attack such views in Religio laici(1682). In a more popular genre Richard Head's picar-esque novel The English Rogue (1665) contains a por-trait of an “atheist” whose deism is plainly apparent.The publication of Dryden's Religio laici and theanswer to it by Charles Blount in a pamphlet of thesame name began in England a controversy over deismwhich was to last until after 1750. The initial yearsof this controversy, to which Blount was a major con-tributor, show that English deists had begun to appealto the new science as well as to the classics and thephilosophers. Science was widely held to reveal thewill of God in a natural and rational way and it bol-stered arguments from design with new evidence. Thephilosophy of Herbert, Hobbes, and Spinoza wassearched for biblical criticism and their psychologiesapplied to the analysis of religion. The latter wereplagiarized by the anonymous pamphleteers like theauthor of Miracles No Violation of the Law of Nature(1683) to show “that the power of God and the powerof Nature are one and the same, and that all her lawsare his eternal decrees” (p. 3). Due to the relativefreedom of the press, deism could be openly advocatedand was in a pamphlet by Charles Gildon entitled ASummary Account of the Deist's Religion (1686). These developments in philosophy, science, and re-ligion were given renewed impetus by the work of JohnLocke whose empirical methodology, reasonablenessin religion, and conviction that the new physics re-vealed God's design in nature were widely shared. JohnToland and Anthony Collins, whose writings appearedafter Locke's great works of the 1690's and also afterthe lapsing of censorship laws in 1694, elaborated theimplications of the new science and philosophicalempiricism. For them clear and distinct ideas con-forming to “their Objects, or the Things we thinkupon” are the “ground of all right Persuasion” (Toland,Christianity Not Mysterious [1696], p. 16). Reason,“That faculty of the Soul which discovers the Certaintyof God's own Existence, so we cannot otherwise discernhis Revelations but by their Conformity with our natu-ral Notices of him, which in so many words, do agreewith our common Notions,” reason was to be the solebase of religion (ibid., p. 13). With ideas limited byexperience and the mind's ability to reflect and com-pare ideas there could be no mysteries in religion.Toland wrote biblical criticism designed to rationalizethe apparent mysteries found there. In Nazarenus(1718) and Tetradymus (1720) he used apocryphal andpseudo-epigraphic literature as well as Muslim sourcesto catalogue the errors and deviations from the truereligion taught by Christ and reason. His biblical criti-cism went beyond that of Benedict Spinoza and JeanLe Clerc and fell short of Richard Simon's not in designbut in erudition. Toland's history of religious errorplaced Christianity firmly in a secular context whilehis comparison of it with Celtic and Muslim sourcesstripped it of uniqueness. Without radically breakingwith the Christian conceptions of history he introducedtechniques which would make it imperative to do so.Collins and Toland both, like most English deists, weremore interested in philosophical and critical problemsthan in the application of the discoveries of the newscience to religion. Both argued forcefully against cen-sorship but did not go as far in their demands for freeexpression as did Trenchard and Gordon.Other English deists of this generation, e.g., LordShaftesbury, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Woolston,Thomas Chubb, John Trenchard, Conyers Middleton,Lord Bolingbroke, are of interest in several respects.They kept alive a controversy in religion, which,merging into polemics about the trinity and the natureof the church, kept England in heated debate for thebetter part of fifty years and provided open discussionsof what had to be clandestine elsewhere in Europe.It was a discussion known on the Continent throughtranslation, refutation, and even bibliographies such asthose of Trinius, Alberti, and Thorschmid. Second,these writers show that empirical philosophy was not Page 651, Volume 1the only source of eighteenth-century deism, nor reli-gion its only concern. Tindal and Chubb relied upona priori reason to perceive the natural law and theeternal and immutable relations of things and less onthe argument from design bolstered by science. Tindal'sChristianity as Old as the Creation (1731) is probablythe best summary of deism in its a priori form. Theirwork and that of Shaftesbury helped to divorce ethicsfrom the religion of the churches. Third, ThomasWoolston and Conyers Middleton, the first a professedallegorist who scurrilously likened Christ to a gypsy,the second a clever historian and polemicist whoseworks on miracles cast doubt on the authenticity ofany, forged arms which Voltaire and Gibbon were toemploy against the “infamous” with greater effective-ness. Likewise John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (d.1750), editors of the London Journal, Cato's Letters,and The Independent Whig, extreme Whig opponentsof Walpole, joined religious and political radicalismin amusing essays almost unique in the history of deism.Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury,made deism not only a good-natured religion, the markof breeding, wit, good taste, and refinement but alsogave its most optimistic formulation. Buoyed byShaftesbury's moral-sense theory and aesthetics, tingedwith a self-conscious rhetorical enthusiasm, it made amark on the continent where Shaftesbury was trans-lated by Diderot, and eagerly read and used by Germanwriters, including Christlob Mylius, Johann Spalding,Gotthold Lessing, and Hermann Reimarus. In Francethere was less need of translation since many of theolder philosophes had become deists. Bernard de Fon-tenelle, the Abbé de St. Pierre, Voltaire, and Montes-quieu could be added to the list along with manyauthors of clandestinely circulated tracts.Deism penetrated and influenced many aspects oflife. Debated in the coffee houses and salons, it formedan essential ingredient of freemasonry and had theallegiance of philosophes, princes, soldiers, statesmen,abbés, and tradesmen. Its simple message of equality,optimism, and reason contributed to the ideas of pro-gress and the complacency of the enlightened. Ex-pressed in such works as Joseph Addison's renditionof Psalm 19, Alexander Pope's Universal Prayer (1738),James Thomson's Seasons, or the plays, essays, andstories of Voltaire, it became a cliché of poets and thereaders of periodicals like Le Journal Encyclopédique(1756-93). Given a measure of endorsement by worksas diverse as Samuel Clarke's Demonstration of theBeing and Attributes of God (1704) or Maupertuis'Essai de philosophie morale (1750), it helped to liberal-ize Christianity and to accommodate it to the age ofreason. It is central as a unifying conception in Les-sing's plays and in the moral philosophy of Adam Smith. Even the political opportunism of Bolingbrokeand Napoleon is partly explained by deistic views ofvulgar religion and the credulity of the people. Forrepublicans from Toland to Robespierre, Gordon toThomas Paine, it justified and sanctioned republicangovernment and served as a counterweight to theoriesof divine right. As a regulative principle its teleologystructured the works of Abbé Pluche and other physico-theologians in the eighteenth century as well as scien-tists in royal societies and academies throughoutEurope. In America Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine,and Thomas Jefferson among the great, and EthanAllen and Elihu Palmer among the lesser, testified tothe truth, political usefulness, and scientific accuracyof the deists' creed.The eighteenth century saw not only the heyday ofdeism but the beginning of its demise. David Humeexposed its shoddiness: its teleology was unproven; itseasy epistemology unsound; its rationalized universalhuman nature a myth exploded by the passions, diversehabits, and customs of essentially unreasonable crea-tures who never possessed a rational religion, just asthey never lived in a state of nature. Bishops GeorgeBerkeley and Joseph Butler showed the deistic argu-ments to be fallacious or inconclusive, while a host ofminor apologists in England attacked individuals, theirscholarship and claims, with arguments now as deadas the deists' own. In France materialists put togethernot only a competing radicalism but evolved a theoryof self-regulating nature which needed no creator andled to no divinely sanctioned moral duties. DenisDiderot's rationalism implied a vitalism which out-moded the stable mechanisms of the deistic cosmos.Rousseau's romantic appeal to conscience and theemotions as a source of religion and his concept ofa normative general will undermined the deists' super-ficial religion and political rationalism. GottholdEphraim Lessing's conception of a progressive educa-tion of mankind, indeed the idea of progress as theimmanent teleology of unfolding reason, was inimicalto the deists' assumption of the fixity of things. Thecultural pluralism of Edmund Burke and of J. G.Herder, insofar as it implied and prized uniqueness andvariation, had no room for the uniformities upon whoseexistence deism was predicated. Even notions of utilitycalled in question the deists' easy appeal to impostureand fraud.Attempts to understand the minds of primitives, orin the case of Jean Astruc, Robert Lowth, and Herder,the genesis and form of inspired poetry, forced mento make less simple analyses of the origins and functionof myth than deism had purveyed. Of equal importancewas the fact that most Christians were willing to acceptthe validity of a natural religion as the basis upon Page 652, Volume 1which a revealed religion might be asserted. Fideismwas dead. Imposters and fanatics no longer menacedstates where standing armies moving over good roadshad replaced the established religion as a means ofcontrol. Only in the United States, among republicanrevolutionaries and proletarians, was deism to have afurther career. Tom Paine's style, thought, and appealwere vulgar; so were the readers of his books and thosepublished by Elihu Palmer, Richard Carlisle, and thehalf-literate Chartists of the 1840's. As a secularizingforce making for order and placing a premium uponreasonableness in all areas of life, deism ceased to liveafter 1800. This judgment, however, has been ques-tioned by some scholars, notably E. C. Mossner, whopoint out that the heirs of deism are to be found amongthe liberal and freethinking religious critics of thenineteenth century and among those who defendedtoleration.BIBLIOGRAPHYBibliographical Works. J. A. Trinius, Freidenkers Lexicon(Leipzig and Bernburg, 1759); many attributions are wrongbut Trinius' work is useful as a guide not only to Europeandeists but to the freethinking background from which theystemmed. U. G. Thorschmidt, Versuch einer VollständigenEngelländischen Freydenker-Bibliothek, 3 vols. (Halle,1765-66). N. R. Burr, A Critical Bibliography of Religionin America (Princeton, 1961), Parts I and II, pp. 184-237.General Works Bearing on the History of Deism Con-taining Bibliographical Information. D. C. Allen, Doubt'sBoundless Sea (Baltimore, 1964). H. Busson, Les Sources etle développement du rationalisme dans la littératurefrançaise de la Renaissance, rev. ed. (Paris, 1957). E. Cas-sirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (Tübingen, 1932),trans. as The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton,1951). J.-R. Charbonnel, La Pensée italienne au XVIe siècleet le courant libertin (Paris, 1919). P. Gay, The Enlighten-ment: An Interpretation (New York, 1966); contains a usefulbibliographical essay. P. Hazard, La Crise de la conscienceeuropéenne (Paris, 1935), trans. as The European Mind1680-1715 (Cleveland, 1963); idem, La Pensée européenneau XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1946), European Thought in theEighteenth Century (New Haven, 1954). A. O. Lovejoy, “TheParallel of Deism and Classicism,” Modern Philology, 29(1932), 281-99, reprinted in idem, Essays in the History ofIdeas (Baltimore, 1948). R. Pintard, Le Libertinage éruditdans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1943). R.Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Des-cartes, Part I (Assen, 1960). T. S. Spink, French Free Thoughtfrom Gassendi to Voltaire (Bristol, 1960). L. Stephen, Historyof English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 3rd ed.(London, 1902). R. N. Stromberg, Religious Liberalism inEighteenth Century England (Oxford, 1954).Studies of Deism and Deists. R. F. Birn, “Pierre Rousseauand the philosophes of Bouillon,” Studies on Voltaire andthe Eighteenth Century, 29 (1964), 170-79; a summary of the views of a typical deist, 1756-93. F. Brie, “Deismusund Atheismus in der Englishen Renaissance,” Anglia Zei-tung, 48 (1924), 54-98, 105-68. R. L. Colie, “Spinoza andthe Early English Deists,” Journal of the History of Ideas,20 (1959), 23-46. G. Gawlick, “Cicero and the Enlighten-ment,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 25(1963), 657-79; idem, Moralität und Offenbarungsglaube:Studien zum englischen Deismus (Stuttgart, 1965). F. H.Heineman, “John Toland and the Age of Reason,” Archivfür Philosophie, 4 (1950), 33-66. G. V. Lechler, Geschichtedes Englischen Deismus (Tübingen, 1841). D. R. McKee,“Isaac de la Peyrère, A Precursor of Eighteenth CenturyCritical Deists,” PMLA, 59 (1944), 456-85. H. M. Morais,Deism in Eighteenth Century America (New York, 1934).G. L. Mosse, “Puritan Radicalism and the Enlightenment,”Church History, 29 (1960), 33-66. E. C. Mossner, “Deism,”Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 vols. (New York and London,1967), II, 326-36.ROGER L. EMERSON[See also Agnosticism v1-03 ; Enlightenment v2-10 ; God v2-39 v2-40 v2-41 ; Nature v3-44 ; Religion. v4-13 v4-14 v4-15 ]The Dictionary of the History of IdeasElectronic Text CenterPO Box 400148Charlottesville VA 22904-4148434.924.3230 | fax: 434.924.1431Maintained by: The Electronic Text Centerat the University of Virginia Library© 2003 the Gale GroupAll Rights ReservedLast Modified: Thursday, May 1, 2003 |
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