Seven
States of Mind:
Enlightenment and Natural Philosophy

Simon Schaff er

The voice of the Devil:
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the cause of the following Errors:
1. That Man has two real existing principles: Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body; & that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
—WILLIAM BLAKE, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790-1793

If it were possible to find a method of becoming master of everything which might happen to a certain number of men, to dispose of everything around them so as to produce on them the desired impression, to make certain of their actions, of their connections, and of all the circumstances of their lives, so that nothing could escape, nor could oppose the desired effect, it cannot be doubted that a method of this kind would be a very powerful and a very useful instrument which governments might apply to various objects of the utmost importance.
—JEREMY BENTHAM, Panopticon; or, The Inspection-House, 1787-1791

THE PRISON OF THE BODY

The relationship between mind and body provides graphic political images of knowledge and power. The slogans composed by Blake and Bentham in the early 1790s are good examples of this imagery. Blake wrote against "the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul." He said that this false notion bred a self-imposed imprisonment of the mind: "man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." Political liberty went hand in hand with spiritual liberty. The destruction of the Bastille was figured as the action of

Abbreviations:

Bowring: John Bowring, ed., The Works of Jeremy Bentham , 11 vols. (Edinburgh, 1838-1848).

Rutt: John T. Rutt, ed., The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley , 25 vols. (London, 1817-1832).

liberating energies in the human mind. So, pastiching Emmanuel Swedenborg's visionary cosmology, Blake proposed a new Code, the "Bible of Hell" directed against old penology and old morality: "Prisons are built with Stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion." Bentham also proposed a new Code to replace old penology and morality, and he also represented this radical reform through an appeal to the relation of bodies and minds. He claimed that in his Panopticon a remakable architectural arrangement of bodies allow the possibility of the "power of mind over mind." In this visionary building, a concentric ring of cells was to be arranged around a central guard tower and a chapel. From the tower, the warden could survey every denizen of the "inspection house" but would always remain invisible to these inmates. The plan was to be fitted to prisons or factories, schools or workhouses—in short, any model polity that demanded the supervisory power of an "invisible eye." The members of such a polity were to be governed through the complete management of their atmosphere and their surroundings. The Panopticon relied on the link between the bodily situation of its inhabitants and their state of mind. The right distribution of light, air, and space prompted the right associations: every inmate would "conceive himself" to be under constant surveillance.^[1]

The Panopticon was an "enlightened" project, concerned with rational order and moral reform, deriving its authority from the natural philosophical understanding of the work of the mind. Spectacularly unsuccessful in reformed Britain, the scheme was initially drafted for the enlightened despotism of Russia and greeted with rapture in Revolutionary France. It has always invited allegorical interpretation. Its author helped himself to the language of a secularized theology: the Panopticon combined "the apparent omnipresence of the inspector (if divines will allow me the expression)" with "the extreme facility of his real presence." He told his Girondin admirer J. P. Brissot that it was "a mill for grinding rogues honest and idle men industrious," and yet confessed in private that it was "a haunted house." For William Hazlitt, the Panopticon was a "glass beehive," a scheme marked by luminous clarity, impractical idealism, and deadly obsession. Edmund Burke was even more scathing: "there's the keeper, the spider in the web." Recent com-

[1] William Blake, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 154, 151; Bowring, 4:66, 79, 40. For Blake and Swedenborg, see Mona Wilson, The Life of William Blake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 56-60; for Blake and the Revolution, see David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, 3d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 175-197.

mentators, no less critical, have found that Bentham's vision provides fruitful evidence of Enlightenment mentality. Bentham has been castigated for the pursuit of crass commercial gain under the mask of disinterested reform, thus damning the motives of future generations of his utilitarian disciples. He has been celebrated as the author of a "symbolic caricature of the characteristic features of disciplinary thinking in his age." Under the inquiring gaze of Michel Foucault, the Panopticon has been transformed into the ideal type of a "microphysics of power," "at once a programme and a utopia," whose disciplinary strategy of surveillance and individuation marked the birth pangs of the human sciences. Precisely because of this exemplary history, the Panopticon and its author's career provide important clues to the concerns of a reforming philosophy of mind and body in the age of reason.^[2]

The concerns of the reforming philosophers connected a model of the right role to be performed by expert intellectuals and a picture of mind and body. The Panopticon was a sign of a reconstructed discipline, both a new way of exercising power and a new form of knowledge. Foucault argued that this discipline was accompanied by the emergence of "the modern soul." Displaced from Christian theology, this soul was at once the site at which power was to be exercised and the object of which knowledge was to be produced. Hence Foucault's characteristically gnomic remark about the relationship between the subject of the enlightened philosophy of mind and the regimes of corporeal discipline these philosophers proposed: "the soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body."^[3] More prosaically, the account of the mind produced by Bentham and his colleagues directly confronted established religion and moral philosophy. Apparently

[2] Bowring, 4:45; Bentham to Brissot, [1791], in Bowring, 10:226; for the "haunted house" see Bowring, 10:250; for Hazlitt, see William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (1825; London: Henry Frowde, 1904), 12-13; for Burke, Bowring, 10:564. For commentary on the Panopticon, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, "The Haunted House of Jeremy Bentham," in Victorian Minds (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1968), 32-81; Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Para: The Pentitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (London: Macmillan, 1978), 113. For Michel Foucault on "panopticism,' see his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 200-209; "The Eye of Power," in Power-Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 146-165· For comments on Foucault's account, see Michelle Perrot, ed., L'impossible prison: Recherches sur le systèrae pénitentiaire au XIXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1980); Martin Jay, "In the Empire of the Gaze: Foucault and the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought," in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. D. Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 175-204.

[3] Foucauh, Discipline and Punish, 29-30.

Pl. 14. Jeremy Bentham, "A General Idea of a Penitentiary Panopticon" (1787).

Pl. 15. Jeremy Bentham, "A General Idea of a Penitentiary Panopticon" (1787).

abstruse exchanges on the immortality of the soul, the possibility of thinking matter, and the character of human motivation carried explicit political resonances. Traditional guardians of moral conduct were to be displaced by philosophers who knew the material sources of passions and interests. Materialist philosophy was allied with a natural philosophical inquiry into the activity of matter and life. It was also allied with reformist projects for the redistribution of authority in the social order.

To provide an example of this network of alliances, a case is taken from the work of some English clerics and lawyers in the 1770s. As Foucault suggested, "these tactics were invented and organised from the starting points of local conditions and particular needs." In this paper, the locale is provided by the work of Joseph Priestley, a dissenting minister at Leeds until 1773 and subsequently the Earl of Shelburne's librarian at Bowood House in Wiltshire until 1780, and of Bentham himself, working in London as a legal writer until he became Shelburne's client in 1781. The connections between these men play an important part in my argument. The "Bowood group," of whom Bentham and Priestley were members, with others such as Richard Price and Samuel Romilly, was later to be identified as a key source of subversive ideas by anti-Jacobins in the 1790s. The enterprise connected with Shelburne, organized under the banner of economic and philosophical reform, provides a convenient site from which to investigate the links between natural philosophy, epistemology, and reforming civil philosophy at this period. While at Bowood, Priestley composed a lengthy series of texts that criticized contemporary philosophies of mind, notably those developed in Scotland by Hume and the Common Sense school, and offered a challenging materialist account of moral philosophy and of mind and body, based on the theories of David Hartley and Priestley's views of proper religion. At the same time, Priestley was actively engaged in political and religious campaigning for civil reform and the emancipation of dissent. Shelburne also provided Priestley with support for his research in pneumatic chemistry, which was inaugurated just before the move to Bowood. Similarly, it was during this period that Bentham began his composition of an ambitious series of texts on political and legal reform and his search for influential backing for these schemes, of which the Panopticon was the most celebrated. The admiration of Benthamite disciples and the hostility of conservative critics have often obscured the process through which these visionary proposals were formed. It will be emphasized that the utopian character of the work mounted by Priestley and Bentham at this period is a significant aspect of their campaigns. Priestley's strong commitment to a millenarian vision of humanity's fu-

ture, and Bentham's extraordinary dreams for that future—and his part in it—are among the more striking aspects of their knowledge of civil society and of natural order. The reformers were visionaries because to change the state they had to change minds.^[4]

This paper is divided into five sections. The first explores an ambiguity in the sense of "enlightenment" as it was used in late-eighteenth-century Britain. During the 1790s, in particular, conservative critics of radicals and reformers argued that the "light" of these philosophers was indistinguishable from the "illumination" of occult mystics and enthusiasts. They pointed out a peculiar feature of the social organization of the reformers, the Masonic club or secretive association of like-minded members of the intelligentsia. The anti-Jacobins then argued that this social form promoted a subversive form of knowledge: the dangerously ambitious account of mind which materialist philosophes used to explain and defend the deeds of the Revolution. The ambiguity of "enlightenment" depended on the ambiguity of reformist philosophy, a knowledge that promised both freedom and discipline. Conservatives interpreted this freedom as anarchy and this discipline as tyranny. Radicals promised a world of free individuals who would pursue the dictates of reasoned self-interest. In contemplating Foucauh's analysis of the Panopticon, Jacques Léonard has pointed out that "utilitarian rationalization and political rationalism go together; one must pause here over masonic philosophy: the mason builds and frees."^[5] The conservative attack on the visions of the reformers suggests a promising line of inquiry into the interests of their philosophy. In particular, it suggests a link between the social forms of patronage and association and the philosophy which the reformers espoused. The second section of the paper documents the local setting of the work of Priestley and Bentham in the 1770s and 1780s, when they were working closely with Shelburne on schemes

[4] For Foucault on the local context, see "The Eye of Power," 159. For Bentham and the Bowood group, see Charles W. Everett, The Education of Jeremy Bentham (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 122-122, Mary P. Mack, Jeremy Bentharn: An Odyssey of Ideas, 1748-1792 (London: Heinemann, 1962), 370-404. For politics and the Bowood group, see Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (1928; London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 145-150; John Norris, Shelhurne and Reform (London: Macmillan, 1963), 83-85, 250-253; Derek Jarrett, The Begetters of Revolution: England's Relationship with France, 1759-1789 (London: Longmans, 1973), 130-135; D. O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 142-148; Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 101-l06.

[5] Jacques Léonard, "L'historien et le philosophe," in Perrot, L'impossible prison, 9-28 at 19. Compare Reinhart Koselleck, Krise und Kritik (Munich: Karl Albert, 1959), chap. 2.

for reform in philosophy, religion, and politics. It is suggested that there were important connections between the immediate concerns of this period and the apparently utopian schemes which the reformers proposed. In particular, work on the natural philosophy of the powers of matter, pursued both by Priestley and Bentham in the 1770s, is shown to be an important source for ideas about the progress of society. The link between natural philosophical and social reform lay in a new doctrine of pneumatics, of the behavior of matter and spirit.

In the third section of the paper, this connection is explored in some detail, and it is argued that work in pneumatic chemistry provided powerful resources for an understanding of the way the mind worked and the true doctrine of the soul. Priestley's experimental philosophy and the way he suggested experimenters should work generated a materialist philosophy of mind and a reconstruction of the orthodox model of the soul. The two final sections of this paper examine the consequences of this materialism. Such a philosophy of mind and of soul involved the development of what can be called a "counter-theology," a vision of the future of humanity which relied on a reform of the understanding of human nature. This understanding argued against dualism, removed the division between body and soul, and made mind an object of philosophical inquiry and reform. Mind could become such an object because it was supposed to be material. Philosophical materialism suggested an appropriate role which these intellectuals should follow, that of the medical manager, the expert equipped with an understanding of what Bentham named "mental pathology." So reforming philosophy posed as a therapy. Alongside their account of current social ills, both Priestley and Bentham wrote histories that explained how society and philosophy had developed. These histories simultaneously explained the source of error and suggested ways of correcting it. Social and philosophical error were due to "fictions," corrupt illusions generated by the interests of those in power. The right philosophy of mind and body would discriminate between the real and the fictional by distinguishing between the material and immaterial. Because both writers saw a link between the current social order and the current crisis of philosophy, they supposed that a future of improvement would be marked by a future of rational triumph. The last section of the paper connects this reformed philosophy of mind and this counter-theology with the visionary character of the reformers' project. While philosophical materialism deprived subjects of the illusory hopes of a spiritual world to come, it affirmed a certain future of advance in the social order. The exemplary deaths of Priestley and Bentham dramatized their attitude to this prospect. Reform would

continue under the guidance of expert managers armed with the right account of mind and body and thus the ability to cure the diseases of the body politic. In the nineteenth century, followers of this reforming philosophy developed new disciplines that sought to survey the mental and bodily habits of the subjects of the state. It is concluded that these new disciplines shared much of the utopianism and ambition of the "enlightened" philosophers of the 1770s.^[6]

ENLIGHTENMENT AND ILLUMINATION

Enlightened philosophers grew up in a world of spirits. Priestley recalled that when he was a child in Yorkshire in the 1730s, "it was my misfortune to have the idea of darkness, and the ideas of malignant spirits and apparitions, very closely connected." He also described the "feelings . . . too full of terror" prompted by his strict Calvinist education: "in that state of mind I remember reading the account of the 'man in an iron cage' in the Pilgrim's Progress with the greatest perturbation." Bentham had very similar memories about his upbringing in Essex twenty years later: "this subject of ghosts has been among the torments of my life," he wrote, while Bunyan was again a source of fear: "the devil was everywhere in it and in me too." No doubt this captures a conventional view of "enlightenment": reason destroyed the world of spirits and liberated humanity from superstition. Priestley's "remembrance . . . of what I sometimes felt in that state of ignorance and darkness," he revealed, "gives me a peculiar sense of the value of rational principles of religion." His fears were well known to Bentham, who reminisced about the "sensation more than mental" produced in Priestley by the name of a spirit "too awful to be mentioned." Commenting on his own reading of Pilgrim's Progress, Bentham exclaimed "how much less unhappy I should have been, could I have acknowledged my superstitious fears . . . now that I know the distinction between the imagination and

[6] For materialism and eighteenth-century natural philosophy, see Aram Vartanian, Diderot and Descartes: A Study of Scientific Naturalism in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953); Robert E. Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); John Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth Century Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). For Bentham on "mental pathology," see Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1876), vii; Bowring, 1:304-305. For Bentham on "fictions," see Bowring, 1:235; C. K. Ogden, Bentham's Theory of Fictions (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1932); Ross Harrison, Bentham (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 24-46.

the judgement!"^[7] This image of enlightenment has proved remarkably robust. Historians of natural philosophy have documented the processes whereby spiritual powers hitherto attributed to divine will or immaterial substances were made immanent in matter and subjected to reasoned experimentation. Enthusiasm was tamed: the mad were confined and their claims to inspiration referred either to somatic causes susceptible to medical treatment or to mental disturbance that needed moral therapy. Spirits no longer walked: astrologers were made the butt of the wits and ghost stories a matter of titillation rather than juridical process. It is suggested that these processes touched both the godly and the dissolute. Philip Doddridge, founder of the dissenting academy where Priestley studied, lectured his pupils on the astrologers, who "may as justly be punished as those who keep gaming houses brothels, &c." Yet he warned that some spirits were real: "Seeing there is something in the thought of such agents as these which tends to impress the imagination in a very powerful manner, great care ought to be taken, that children, from the first notice they have of the existence of such beings, be taught to conceive of them as entirely under the control of God." Priestley and many of his allies were taught such views, and carefully revised them to fit the canons of reason.^[8]

Eighteenth-century observers recognized a spreading materialism as a fact of social life. In his study of the Enlightenment's relation with death, John McManners cites an orthodox apologist's rueful lament of 1761: "it seems that it is no longer permissible to speak of the soul except to attack it and to confound it with the instinct of the animals." The long eighteenth-century debates on the powers that could be attributed to mere bodies implied that materialism was only too fashionable: "the very Beaux... Argue themselves into mere Machines," commented a worried enemy of "deism" in 1707. The experimental philosophy that sustained this materialism could be a political weapon: electricity and

[7] For Priestley on ghosts, see Rutt, 1:1-8; 3:50; for Bentham on ghosts, see Bowring, 10:11-21.

[8] For enlightenment, medicine, and enthusiasm, see Roy Porter, "Medicine and the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England," Bulletin of the Society for the Social History of Medicine 25 (1979): 27-40; G. S. Rousseau, "Psychology," in The Ferment of Knowledge, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 143-210; Michael MacDonald, "Religion, Social Change and Psychological Healing in England," Studies in Church History 19 (1982): 101-126; Martin Fitzpatrick, "Science and Society in the Enlightenment," Enlightenment and Dissent 4 (1985): 83-106. For Doddridge, see Philip Doddridge, Course of Lectures on the Principal Subjects in Pneumatology, Ethics and Divinity (London, 1763), 552, 541. For the academies, see Nicholas Hans, New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), 54-62.

pneumatic chemistry demonstrated the range of powers that matter could display. Hence Priestley's notorious remark that "the English hierarchy (if there is anything unsound in its constitution) has equal reason to tremble even at an air pump, or an electrical machine."^[9] Nor was this merely a matter of fashionable libertinism or pious philosophizing. Priestley, Bentham, and their allies saw immediate material necessity in the propaganda for rational knowledge. In 1772 the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid wrote to Priestley's colleague, Richard Price, praising him for quelling "the present Epidemical Disease of trusting to visionary projects" with the tools of political arithmetic. Reasonable knowledge and the maturity of men of the "middling sort" could reform manners and order even as corrupt a society as the present. What Peter Burke has called "the reformation with the Reformation" mobilized considerable support among the laity. Burke points out the change in the sense of the term "superstition" during this period. A label for powerful and dangerous heresies was transferred to the impotent vagaries of the credulous vulgar. This gave polemical point to the comradely sentiments of the letter from the Derby Philosophical Society which Priestley received soon after the Birmingham mob had destroyed his house and laboratory in 1791: "the sacrilegious hands of the savages at Birmingham" were best combatted with "that philosophy, of which you may be called the father." Erasmus Darwin and his Derby colleagues counseled that "by inducing the world to think and reason," this philosophy "will silently marshall mankind against delusion, and with greater certainty overturn the empire of superstition."^[10]

[9] Louis-Antoine de Caraccioli, La grandeur de l'âme (Paris, 1761), xii, cited in John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 159; John Witty, The First Principles of Modern Deism Confuted (London, 1707), v, cited in Yolton, Thinking Matter, 42; Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (London, 1774), xiv.

[10] For political arithmetic, see Thomas Reid to Richard Price, [?] 1773, Correspondence of Richard Price, ed. W. Bernard Peach and D. O. Thomas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1983), 1:154; Peter Buck, "People Who Counted: Political Arithmetic in the Eighteenth Century," Isis 73 (1982): 28-45. For moral reformation, see R. W. Malcomson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), chap. 7; Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1978), 239-242. For Priestley and the Derby Philosophical Society, see Derby Philosophical Society to Priestley, 3 September 1791, in Rutt, 2:152; compare E. Robinson, "New Light on the Priestley Riots," Historical Journal 3 (1960): 73-75; French chemists to Priestley, July 1791, in R. E. Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Joseph Priestley (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966), 257-258: "we have therefore resolved to re-establish your Cabinet, to raise again the Temple which ignorance, barbarity and superstition have dared profane."

The opponents of men such as Priestley and Darwin were swift to see through these assaults on "delusion" and "superstition." In his remarkable survey of the sinister conspiracies of the philosophes and their "illuminated" allies, the Edinburgh natural-philosophy professor John Robison argued in 1796 that a real danger lurked behind this "silent" campaign. In his Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, Robison compared the virtuous religion of Newton's celebrated General Scholium with Laplace's Système du monde. He cited Laplace's attack on "the dangerous maxim that it is sometimes useful to deceive men in order to insure their happiness." What were these "deceits"? "They cannot relate to astrology," Robison suggested, "this was entirely out of date." So Laplace was assaulting the doctrine of the nobility of man and his difference from beasts: materialism bred arrogance among the intellectuals and abasement among their followers.^[11] Robison was one of many anti-Jacobin writers of the 1790s who made these points. "Is superstition the greatest of all possible vices?" Burke asked in 1791. No, for it was "the religion of feeble minds, and they must be tolerated in an intermixture of it, in some trifling or some enthusiastic shape or other." Burke and his admirers held that the disasters of the Revolution demonstrated three key principles of contemporary intellectual life. First, there were identifiable bands of self-styled enlightened philosophers whose sinister associations masked silent plots to subvert established order. Second, these associations promoted a materialist doctrine of mind, bolstered with a false natural philosophy, in which the status of the intellectual reformer was exaggerated and the aspirations of men reduced to the level of beasts. Last, the exaggeration of the powers of reason was no better than a revamped enthusiasm. There was nothing to choose between the radical savants and the enthusiast mob. Nor was there much difference between the wilder shores of philosophical materialism and the old doctrines of spirits, witches, and ghosts. New enlightenment was but old illumination. The enthusiastic visions of the philosophers helped this set of claims: it was not always easy to distinguish the language of the rational dissenters from that of their Methodist enemies. Priestley's Yorkshire bred both. His work on "the scriptures, Ecclesiastical History and the Theory of the Human Mind" was often couched in the metaphor of light and applied directly to

[11] John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, 3d ed. (London, 1798), 229-233. For Robison and the Laplacians, see J. B. Morrell, "Professors Robison and Playfair and the Theophobia Gallica: Natural Philosophy, Religion and Politics in Edinburgh, 1789-1815," Notes and Records of the Royal Society 26 (1971): 43-64.

radical secular change. Thus in his learned dissertation of 1782 on the scriptural foundations of unitarianism, Priestley made use of an obviously visionary language: "happy are those who contribute to diffuse the pure light of this everlasting gospel."^[12]

In his own Everlasting Gospel of 1818 Blake drew a sharp distinction between his vision of spirituality and that of the rational unitarians: "Like dr. Priestly [sic] & Bacon & Newton—Poor Spiritual Knowledge is not worth a button!" But in the 1790s it was easy to see the connections between the proclamations of the empire of reason and the older forms of spiritual knowledge. In France and Britain astrology, mesmerism, alchemy, the Eleusinian mysteries, electrotherapy, and prophecy all became linked to the radical cause. If, as Robert Darnton has suggested, mesmerism marked the end of the Enlightenment in France, mesmerists found it possible to trace respectable natural-philosophical ancestry for their doctrines among the views on active matter developed by eighteenth-century electrical and pneumatic experimenters. But Paris physicians found it more plausible to compare Mesmer with occultists such as Paracelsus, Fludd, Greatrakes, and Bruno. Roy Porter is right to point out that the disciples of animal magnetism proffered materialist stories to explain their successes while the established academicians referred Mesmer's cures to psychosomatic possessions in order to explain them away.^[13] In the 1790s, Britain witnessed a wide range of such radical

[12] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791; London: Dent, 1910), 155; Joseph Priestley, Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated (London, 1777), xvi; Rutt, 5:4. For the anti-Jacobin reaction, see M. D. George, "Political Propaganda, 1793-1815: Gillray and Canning," History, n.s., 31 (1946): 66-68 (on the Anti-Jacobin ); Norton Gar-tinkle, "Science and Religion in England, 1790-1800: The Critical Response to the Work of Erasmus Darwin," Journal of the History of Ideas 16 (1955): 276-288; Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, chaps. 4, 6, 10.

[13] Blake, Complete Writings, 752; for mystical sciences and radical politics in Britain, see Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780-1850 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). For mesmerism, see Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); Roy Porter, "Under the Influence: Mesmerism in England," History Today 35 (September 1985): 22-29. Mesmer connects his views with natural philosophy in "Mémoire sur ses découvertes" (1799), in Mesmerism, ed. George J. Bloch (Los Altos, Calif.: Kauffmann, 1980), 118-121. For English mesmerism, see Roger Cooter, "The History of Mesmerism in England," in Mesmer und die Geschichte des Mesmerismus, ed. Heinz Schott (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1985), 152-162. For the psychosomatic explanation of mesmeric cures, see F. Azouvi, "Sens et fonction épistémologique de la critique du magnétisme animal par les Académies," Revue de l'histoire des sciences 29 (1976): 123-142. For Mesmer and Paracelsians, see J. J. Paulet, L'antimagnétisme (Paris, 1784). For the "Eleusinian mysteries," see Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature (London, 1803), 13n. Compare Herbert Loventhal, In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism. and Renaissance Science in 18th Century America (New York: New York University Press, 1976).

and mystical activity. Conservatives documented groups such as the "ancient deists" at Hoxton, a center of London dissent, who combined the views of "infidel mystics" with French politics and occult sciences. The activities of the popular prophets such as Joanna Southcott and Richard Brothers were also greeted with a mixture of amusement and alarm. The work of the inspired attracted considerable support in regions such as those where dissent was strong. The events of the 1790s suggested at least three targets for conservative comment: millenarians and prophets who foresaw an imminent change in the civil and moral order; radical physicians who appealed to a materialist knowledge of the mind and the soul in order to change humanity; and rationalist metaphysicians who applied the principles of their philosophy to the reconstruction of the state. Priestley and his allies, such as Theophilus Lindsey and Richard Price, talked in explicitly millenarian terms: "I have little doubt," Priestley announced in 1798, "but that the great prophecies relating to the permanent and happy state of the world, are in the way of fulfilment." These hopes were backed by a specifically materialist account of the capacities of the human mind. As fashionable physicians and radical natural philosophers, both Thomas Beddoes and Erasmus Darwin attracted particular hostility from the conservatives. As Maureen McNeil has shown, Darwin was attacked in the same way as his ally Joseph Priestley for "constantly blending and confounding together the two distinct sciences of matter and mind." Writers in the Anti-Jacobin made fun of these visions. In their satire of 1798 on Darwin's Loves of the Plants, Canning and Frere paraphrased the radicals' view of the progress of humanity. "We have risen from a level with the cabbages of the field to our present comparatively intelligent and dignified state of existence, by the mere exertion of our own energies." The future prospects were ludicrously glorious and based on a risible natural philosophy: the wits claimed that the radicals hoped to raise man "to a rank in which he would be, as it were, all MIND; would enjoy unclouded perspicacity and perpetual vitality; feed on oxygene, and never die, but by his own consent. "^[14]

[14] For the "ancient deists," see William Hamilton Reid, The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in This Metropolis (London, 1800), 91; for prophecy, see Harrison, The Second Coming, 57-134; D. M. Valenze, "Prophecy and Popular Literature in Eighteenth-Century England," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 29 (1978): 75-92; Clarke Garrett, "Swedenborg and the Mystical Enlightenment in Late Eighteenth-Century England," Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984): 67-81. For popular dissent, see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), chap. 2. For Priestley and prophecy, see Priestley to Lindsey, 1 November 1798, in Rutt, 2:410; Jack Fruchtman, Jr., The Apocalyptic Polities of Richard Price and Joseph Priestley (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983), 8-45, 81-93. For attacks on Darwin, see Edinburgh Review 2 (1803):449, cited in Maureen McNeil, "The Scientific Muse: The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin," in Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature, ed. Ludmilla Jordanova (London: Free Association Books, 1986), 159-203 at 172; Charles Edmonds, ed., Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1890), 147 (April 1798).

The apostles of reason often seemed to be tools of unreason. Bentham recognized this: in the 1770s he already accepted that "the world is persuaded, not without some colour of reason, that all reformers and system-mongers are mad.... I dreamt t'other night that I was a founder of a sect; of course, a personage of great sanctity and importance: it was called the sect of the Utilitarians." The language of the sects was a powerful tool for the reformers. It became a devastating weakness when attacked in the 1790s. Burke's immediate target, Richard Price, preached that "every degree of illumination which we can communicate must do the greatest good. It helps prepare the minds of men for the recovery of their rights and hasten the overthrow of priestcraft and tyranny." Their opponents identified the social habits of the reformers with their mental constitution. Their covert associations of like-minded intellectuals allegedly fostered the strategy of an insinuation of the false and dangerous beliefs of materialist metaphysics and silly natural philosophy. Thus derangement became dangerous when it seized power. In 1796 Burke picked on the geometricians and chemists whose "dispositions" made them "worse than indifferent about those feelings and habitudes which are the support of the moral world. Ambition is come upon them suddenly; they are intoxicated with it." Sometimes, as in the satires directed against Beddoes's use of gaseous medicines in Bristol in the 1790s and the "pneumatic revelries" of his friends, the "intoxication" became literal. The mental habits of these men were viewed as the cause of their threatening policy. Approaching dangerously, if characteristically, the excessive fury which he condemned, Burke said that "the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than the frailty and passion of man. It is like that of the Principle of Evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil." Accusations of insanity provided much of the language of the polemic on the Reflections on the Revolution in France. Both Burke and Robison, who was well known for his opium habit, might also be shown to be mentally disturbed. Bentham was irate that "the National Assembly of France has been charged with madness for pulling down

establishment," and he condemned Burke's book as the "frantic exclamation" of a "mad man, than whom none perhaps was ever more mischievous."^[15]

Burke was only the most effective of those who argued for the devastating effects of the connection between the associations formed by the reforming philosophers and the political havoc they had wrought. The natural philosophy of the reformers provided fruitful targets for wit: in a famous figure, Burke compared "the spirit of liberty in action" to "the wild gas , the fixed air": "but we ought to suspend our judgement until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface." The most obvious—and most humorous—connection which the anti-Jacobins spotted between this natural philosophy and the politics of the Terror was the endorsement of materialism. Robison commented at some length on Priestley's use of David Hartley's theory of association and aethereal vibrations in the mind. "Dr. Priestley again deduces all intelligence from elastic undulations, and will probably think, that his own great discoveries have been the quiverings of some fiery marsh miasma. " From here it was but a short step to the dangerous lunacies of the intellectuals. Their overestimate of their own mental capacity was accompanied by the bestialization of humanity. "They find themselves possessed of faculties which enable them to speculate and to discover; and they find that the operation of those faculties is quite unlike the things which they contemplate by their means." The consequence was reformist arrogance and corrupted politics: "they feel a satisfaction in this distinction."^[16] An insistence on the material basis of mind seemed to be leading to the creation of a new elite of intellectuals, a new breed of "saints." The resonance with the "Good Old Cause" was deliberate. The admirers of reforms also helped themselves to this hagiographic language. The connections between the English philosophers, such as the Bowood group, and their French colleagues were

[15] For Bentham on the sect of utilitarians, see David Baumgardt, Bentham and the Ethics of Today (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), appendix 1, printing Bentham MSS, University College London, 169.79. For Price, Richard Price, Discourse on the Love of Our Country (London, 1789), 15. For Burke's attack, Edmund Burke, Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), in Burke's Politics, ed. R. Hoffman and P. Levack (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 532-534. For attacks on Beddoes, see Dorothy Stansfield, Thomas Beddoes (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984), chap. 7; T. H. Levere, "Dr. Thomas Beddoes: Science and Medicine in Politics and Society," British Journal for the History of Science 17 (1984): 187-204. For Bentham on Burke and the Revolution, see Bowring, 2:404-405; 4:338·

[16] Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, 6; Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, 429-430.

often figured in these terms. The Girondin leader J. P. Brissot, guillotined in 1793 and later satirized as a vindictive ghost in the Anti-Jacobin, saw Bentham as a modern saint, one of "those rare beings, whom Heaven sometimes sends down upon earth as a consolation for woes, who, in the form of imperfect man, possess a heavenly spirit."^[17]

The attack on the new "saints" was the basis of what amounted to a critique of the new social function of the intellectual. The reformers' associations were held to be the principal site of subversive philosophy and politics. Burke named these associations in the Reflections and then defended his decision to do so: "I intend no controversy with Dr. Price, or Lord Shelburne, or any other of their set," he claimed. But his purpose was to destroy their credentials as disinterested men of knowledge: "I mean to do my best to expose them to the hatred, ridicule and contempt of the whole world; as I always shall expose such calumniators, hypocrites, sowers of sedition and approvers of murder and all its triumphs." This was the sense given to the term "Illuminati." The Masonic conspiracies spread through Europe provided the appropriate model with which to analyze the behavior of the English reformers. "The detestable doctrines of Illuminatism have been preached among us," Robison claimed, and named both Priestley and Price as examples. Robison implied that there was a significant contrast with the proper form of natural philosophy developed in such organizations as the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of which he had been Secretary. It was argued that the materialist doctrines of the illuminated philosophers provided a model of the mind which only invited the habit of conspiracy. They had made morality a problem for subtle metaphysics, when it was really a question of public orthodoxy and private sentiment. So their revolution followed from a false natural philosophy. "They have much, but bad, metaphysics; much, but bad, geometry; much, but false, proportionate arithmetic," Burke wrote against the philosophes. Political subversion was the same as natural disorder. When Burke turned his gaze upon the French dissolution of the monasteries, he explicitly compared bad policy with bad cosmology: "to destroy any power growing wild from the rank productive force of the human mind, is tantamount, in the moral world, to the destruction of the apparently active properties of bodies in the material." When he explained his own horror at the deposition of the king, he pointed to the natural constitution of the mind: "we behold such disasters in the moral, as we should behold a miracle, in the physical, order of things." Any group of intellectuals which

[17] Bowling, 10:192; Edmonds, Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, 165-168 (April 1798).

claimed to be able to understand, reform, and manage these mental faculties was at best insanely optimistic about the capacity of metaphysics and, at worse, destructive of those natural sentiments which actually governed proper moral life.^[18]

The anti-Jacobin assault repeatedly contrasted the rational technology of mental management proposed by the radicals with a proper interpretation of the established powers of the mind. The radicals were compared with wily impresarios, or with cunning magicians, or with dissolute gamblers. Burke sought an aesthetics of the state: "to make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely." The machinations of the materialists would be incompetent because they could not hope to understand or to force these aesthetic judgments. The Jacobin theater of politics was a world of illusion and crude spectacle. Their philosophical supporters were no better than wizards, making use of "poisonous weeds and wild incantations." It was scarcely surprising that deluded chemists and natural philosophers found such allies congenial. In the 1770s, Burke had contacts with Priestley's natural philosophy, but by the 1790s he viewed this work as a dangerous error. John Robison was a leader of the British resistance to the new-fangled French chemistry, but Priestley was held to be guilty of overconfidence in his mere hypotheses. Newton's aether was wrongly treated by the materialists as having the certainty of Euclid. It was easy to connect materialist natural philosophy with conjuring. The Anti-Jacobin imagined a pneumatic chemist whose "skin, by magical means, has acquired an indefinite power of expansion, as well as that of assimilating to itself all the azote of the air . . . an immense quantity which, in our present unimproved and uneconomical mode of breathing, is quite thrown away."^[19] This was a well-aimed barb, for the

[18] Burke to Philip Francis, 20 February 1790, Letters of Edmund Burke, ed. Harold Laski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), 283-284; Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, 481; Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, 178, 154, 78.

[19] Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, 75, 93; Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, 484; Edmonds, Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, 160. For Burke's attack on Jacobin histrionics, see P. H. Melvin, "Burke on Theatricality and Revolution," Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975): 447-468 and the interesting comments in UEA English Studies Group, "Strategies for Representing Revolution," in 1789: Reading Writing Revolution, ed. Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: University of Essex, 1982), 81-109. For Burke and Priestley's pneumatics, see Priestley to Burke, 11 December 1782, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 216; for Robison and French chemistry, see J. R. R. Christie, "Joseph Black and John Robison," in Joseph Black 1728-1799, ed. A. D. C. Simpson (Edinburgh: Royal Scottish Museum, 1982), 47-52. For Jacobin and anti-Jacobin natural philosophy, see W. L. Scott, "Impact of the French Revolution on English Science," in Mélanges Alexandre Koyre, ed. R. Taton, 2 vols. (Paris: Hermann, 1964), 2:475-495.

reformers did base their authority on their understanding of the atmosphere and the economy of powers that circulated through it. The joke turned sour when these conjurers claimed to be able to reconstruct society. Their charms and spells deceived, and did not comprehend, the moral faculties. Burke argued that "on the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons; so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration or attachment." The materialists did not know these passions and so were foolish to rationalize about them: they knew of "nothing that relates to the concerns, the actions, the passions, the interests of men." This attack applied both to the general possibility of a rationalist metaphysics of the moral order and to the intimate details of political reform. Since the state was a "body politic," a failure to understand the "true genius and character" of any natural body would lead to a failure to understand proper politics. Hence the disasters of the new French financial regime: revenue was "the sphere of every active virtue" of "all great qualities of the mind which operate in public." Mechanistic policy made civil philosophy into a branch of gambling. A principal consequence of the Revolutionary settlement had been to hand over control to the few urban intellectuals who would "understand the game." "The many must be the dupes of the few who conduct the machine of these speculations."^[20]

The controversies of the 1790s used the civic humanist language of corruption and virtue and turned it back upon the radical reformers. Burke pointed out that the new intellectual regime privileged the politics of "combination and arrangement (the sole way of procuring and exerting influence)." He argued that "the deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men" would end in "an ignoble oligarchy" form of coteries of roofless men, recognizable only for their self-styled expertise in management and manipulation. The habit of association was a natural consequence of the reformers' intellectual position. Robison listed the "Corresponding - Affiliated - Provincial - Rescript - Convention - Reading Societies" as British manifestations of this habit. Those linked with politically interested patrons, such as Shelburne or the radical Whig lord and natural philosopher Charles Stanhope, and with groups and clubs of inquirers, such as the Bowood group or the

[20] Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, 75, 178, 223, 190. Compare R. W. Kilcup, "Reason and the Basis of Morality in Burke," Journal of the History of Philosophy 17 (1979): 271-284.

Lunar Society, were obvious targets for this critique. The anti-Jacobins found it fitting that the Lunar Society has been destroyed by the Birmingham mob for whom Priestley's friends claimed to act as spokesmen. "Peace to such Reasoners!... Priestley's a Saint," chortled the Anti-Jacobin. The attack upon intellectual associations extended to a critique of the "enlightenment" they sought. This light was derived from the wrong use of the inquiring mind. "We see that it is a natural source of disturbance and revolution," wrote Robison. The paradox that the philosophical societies of virtuous men bred nothing but corruption was matched by the paradox that enlightenment bred disorder. "Illumination turns out to be worse than darkness."^[21]

BOWOOD AND THE REFORMERS' DREAM

Conservatives tried to make enlightenment look like illumination. They saw the social groupings of the reforming intellectuals as the wrong kind of organization for men of knowledge. They also claimed that the true purposes of the reformers were now revealed. Controversies within the radical camp—as for example Priestley's violent attack on the infidelity of Volney's Ruines in 1797—were treated as signs of the incoherence of the Jacobin cause. But philosophers such as Bentham and Priestley had very specific proposals for reform. They presented the work performed since the 1770s as an ideal of the reformers' task. One such ideal was provided by the work in natural and moral philosophy which Priestley pursued with his colleagues at Bowood and elsewhere. The patronage provided by Shelburne for these philosophers was a key resource for their projects. The accounts of this relationship provided by Priestley and Bentham are extremely revealing, because in describing their relationship with their noble master they also described the function which they claimed to discharge. The idealization of this relationship is an important contrast with the harsh realities of late-eighteenth-century patronage and its vicissitudes. There is an interesting tension between the tortuous paths followed by Priestley and Bentham as they sought backing from their potential allies, and the utopian models which they presented of how this support might change society. Hence Bentham's extraordinary presentation of the contrast between himself, "an unseated, unofficed, unconnected, insulated individual," whose "blameless life" had been entirely devoted to the promotion of the Panopticon, and

[21] Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, 190-192; Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, 479, 431; Edmonds, Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, 278 (July 1798).

his enemies, such as George III: "Imagine how he hated me.... But for all the paupers in the country, as well as all the prisoners in the country, would have been in my hands." This tension demonstrates two important features of intellectual life at this period: First, the role of medical manager, equipped with the knowledge of pneumatic chemistry and the right principles of the philosophy of mind, provided the appropriate model for reform. Second, a complex network of political and theological aims was centered on this search for patronage and provided the reformers with their interests and goals.^[22]

Bentham presented his contact with Shelburne in extraordinarily messianic terms. By the end of the 1770s, Shelburne was one of the leaders of a discredited and divided opposition to the American war and to North's Tory administration. Bentham was an impoverished legal writer, author of the important Fragment on Government (1776), and at this stage by no means sympathetic to the rebels' cause. His text on the law was a radical critique of the great jurist William Blackstone, whom Bentham had heard lecture on the laws of England at Oxford. Bentham proceeded to the M.A. there in 1767 and spent the intervening years working on his commentaries on Blackstone and on other essays on legal reform, including texts on prison reform and criminal punishment. His friends at Slaughter's Club and the London coffeehouses included chemists and physicians, such as George Fordyce, Jan Ingenhousz, Felice Fontana, and the Austrian F. X. Schwediauer, who were also working closely with Priestley during this period. In spring 1780 Bentham collaborated with Schwediauer on a translation of the Usefulness of Chemistry by the great Swedish chemist Torbern Bergman. Yet his principal labors centered on what he baptized his "Code" and his "Punishments, " of which the Fragment was a highly condensed and preliminary extract. Bentham's remarkable memoir recalled that it was this book which prompted Shelburne to seek him out at Lincoln's Inn. "I felt as men used to feel when Angels used to visit them." In another

[22] For Priestley and Volney, see Joseph Priestley, Observations on the Increase of Infidelity (Philadelphia, 1797) and Brian Rigby, "Volney's Rationalist Apocalypse," in Barker, 1789, 22-37. For Bentham's presentation of himself, see Bowring, 5:160-161 and 10:212, discussed in Himmelfarb, "The Haunted House of Jeremy Bentham," 70-71. For problems of patronage, see Michael Foss, The Age of Patronage: The Arts in England, 1660-1750 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971), chap. 7; John Brewer, "Commercialization in Politics," in Neil McKendrick et al., The Birth of a Consumer Society (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 197-262; W. A. Speck, "Politicians, Peers and Publication by Subscription, 1700-1750," in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Isabel Rivers (New York: St. Martin's, 1982), 47-68; for an excellent example of Shelburne's patronage, see Dorothy Stroud, Capability Brown (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 90-92.

reverie, Bentham used explicitly apocalyptic imagery: "There came out to me a good man named Ld. S. and he said unto me, what shall I do to be saved? I yearn to save the nation. I said unto him—take up my book and follow me.... We had not travelled far before we saw a woman named Britannia lying by the waterside all in rags with a sleeping lion at her feet: she looked very pale, and upon inquiring we found she had an issue of blood upon her for many years. She started up fresher farther and more alive than ever; the lion wagged his tail and fawned upon us like a spaniel."^[23]

Bentham's dream about Shelburne, though recollected in tranquillity, transfigured the actual relations with patronage and the proposals for reform which he offered in his juridical work. Connection and influence dominated the political strategies of the 1770s. To understand the role which the reformers made for themselves in this jungle of deference and obligation, it is necessary to describe the political programs they espoused and the model they chose for their campaigns. In a public culture that spoke the language of "candour" and abhorred "interest," patronage was always a fraught relationship. Burke seized upon these resources in his anti-Jacobin polemic against the Bowood group in the 1790s, risking the charge of hypocrisy as he did so. In 1771, Priestley was apparently barred from serving with Cook and Banks on a voyage to the South Seas by "Dr. Blackstone and his friends in the Board of longitude," allegedly on the grounds of his heretical theology and animosity against the government lawyers. Priestley wrote sarcastically that the ministry would support "a high churchman or a known atheist, tho' his reputation for philosophy or virtue should stand very low." The sarcasm implied an accurate assessment of the standards of public patronage. For example: Shelburne was struck by Bentham's apparent disinterest when he approached him in 1780, though Bentham was more prosaic: "Ld. S. puts in members," he told his brother. Another possible supporter Bentham tried was the Empress Catherine of Rus-

[23] For Bentham's life in the 1770s, see Everett, Education of Bentham, 57-70; Mack, Bentham, 335-351. For Blackstone at Oxford, see Bowring, 10:45. For connections at Slaughter's, see Bowring, 10:133 and Bentham to John Lind, [?] 12 June 1776, The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, ed. T. L. S. Sprigge (London: Athlone Press, 1968), 1:328; Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 6 March 1779, ibid. 2:246-247; F. W. Gibbs, Joseph Priestley (London: Nelson, 1965), 94-98. For collaboration with Schwediauer, see Bertel Linder and W. A. Smeaton, "Schwediauer, Bentham and Beddoes: Translators of Bergman and Scheele," Annals of Science 24 (1968): 259-273. For Bentham's reveries about Shelburne, see Mack, Bentham, 370-372; J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart, eds., Comments on the Commentaries and the Fragment on Government (London: Athlone Press, 1977), 523-526; Norris, Shelburne and Reform, 141-143.

sia. Catherine had hired several British experts, including Robison, who worked at Kronstadt as mathematics professor between 1772 and 1774. One function that Bentham made his chemist friends serve was to get better contacts with Russia. He persuaded Schwediauer to translate the introduction to the Code, later to appear as An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. During early 1779, Schwediauer and Priestley helped Bentham contact Shelburne through a junior treasury lord, and keen mathematician, Francis Maseres. When Bentham's brother went to St. Petersburg in August, Bentham was to pose as an expert political and technical journalist, submitting information to Shelburne for his consideration. But the crucial meeting was necessarily delayed, because Bentham felt that Shelburne should see the Code before they met, and because "my letters I was afraid had gone rather too far on the side of humility." The role play was crucial: Bentham had to present himself as the right kind of expert in order to set up the appropriate relationship with his new master.^[24]

Priestley provided Bentham with an avenue—he also made his own vocation through his contacts with Bowood. The relation between Priestley's political strategy in the 1770s and his contacts with Shelburne was particularly important here. Priestley was a leader of the group of "rational dissenters" who sought the emancipation of dissent from legal disabilities. Allies included both Price and Theophilus Lindsey. Rational dissent connected the familiar civic humanist critique of the established institutions of civil and ecclesiastical corruption with a program based on the progressive unmasking of "prejudice" and the establishment of true philosophy through putative matters of fact about matter and spirit. Such matters of fact were best exemplified in the research on pneumatic chemistry which Priestley launched in Leeds just before his departure for Wiltshire. The label "rational dissent" was first coined by Priestley and his colleagues in texts such as their 1769 attack on Blackstone, an inspiration for Bentham's Commentaries. Bentham was impressed by the

[24] For Burke and patronage, see Albert Goodwin, "The Political Genesis of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, " Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 50 (1968): 336-364. For Priestley and the South Seas voyage, see Priestley to William Eden, 4 December and 10 December 1771, Priestley to Joseph Banks, 10 December 1771, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 95-98; David Mackay, In the Wake of Cook: Exploration, Science and Empire, 1780-1801 (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 3-27. For Shelburne and Bentham, see Bowring, 10:225; Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 25-26 September 1775, including Priestley to Bentham, 23 August 1775, in Correspondence of Bentham 1:265; Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 16 May 1779, ibid. 2:257-258; Shelburne to Bentham, 27 July 1780, ibid. 2:471; Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 6 August 1780, ibid. 2:480.

"well-applied correction" which the rational dissenters had given to Blackstone's "holy zeal" for the established religion. He also judged Blackstone's publications by the standards demanded from "demonstrators" in experimental natural philosophy. Most importantly, the rational dissenters' campaigns provided the immediate context both for Priestley's initial links with the Earl, and for his subsequent formulation of a combined program of philosophical materialism, pneumatic chemistry, and political reform.^[25]

Rational dissenters initially sought to speak the language of "candour" in their appeals to established power and their relationships with their patrons. Priestley told Price that "all that candour requires is that we never impute to our adversary a bad intention or a design to mislead, and also that we admit his general good understanding, though liable to be misled by unperceived biases and prejudices from the influence of which the wisest and best of men are not exempt." So this language allowed the rational dissenters to describe the way their political strategy should be structured and the way philosophical debate should be conducted. It provided a contrast with the views of the allies of the ministerial interest. An American Tory, writing in 1783 in the Gentleman's Magazine, helped himself to the talk of mind and body to analyze "Lord Shelburne's connection with the Dissenters." He suggested that the dissenters had been "carnalized" by Shelburne, rather than the "Peer spiritualized" by them. "Seeing more fire and spirit in Dr. Priestley's Disquisition on civil liberty," Shelburne had then offered a place at Bowood to the Doctor. In fact, it was to the "wisest and best of men," such as Shelburne, that Priestley and his allies began their appeal from 1769, following the return of John Wilkes at the Middlesex election. Shelburne's support was important in 1772, when the rational dissenters mounted an unsuccessful appeal for the extension of the Toleration Act. The defeat of this so-called Feathers Tavern Petition was immediately interpreted by Priestley and Lindsey in prophetic, if not millenarian, terms, and they used the more eschatological passages in David Hartley's Observations on Man to understand their own troubles: "to me everything looks like the approach of that dismal catastrophe described, I may say

[25] For rational dissent, see J. G. McEvoy and J. E. McGuire, "God and Nature: Priestley's Way of Rational Dissent," Historical Studies in Physical Science 6 (1975): 325-404; Priestley on "those of us who are called Rational Dissenters," in Rutt, 1:349-357; Michael Watts, The Dissenters from the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 464-478. For Bentham on Blackstone, see Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government (1776), ed. F. C. Montague (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931), 102-103n, 117n.

predicted, by Dr. Hartley in the conclusion of his essay and I shall be looking for the downfall of Church and state together." It was during this crisis that Priestley got his place at Shelburne's house and inaugurated his new set of philosophical and chemical researches.^[26]

Priestley's introduction to Shelburne in 1772-1773 won him a salary increased from the £100 he earned as a minister at Leeds to £250 as Shelburne's librarian and traveling companion. It was preceded by anguished debate in London and Leeds. In September 1772, Franklin sent Price and Priestley a "moral and prudential calculus" that encouraged the move to Wiltshire. Franklin, Priestley, and Price were important members of the group of self-styled "Honest Whigs," who moved to the London Coffee House in 1772 and combined natural-philosophical and reformist political interests through this decade. Others included John Pringle, president of the Royal Society and a pneumatic physician who was an enthusiastic admirer of Priestley's chemistry. By 1773, many of Priestley's allies, including Lindsey, had left the established church and joined the rational dissenters at Essex Street Chapel in London, set up as a propaganda center for Shelburne's allies and to foment emancipation. Priestley worked actively for Shelburne's political maneuvers and gained the support of men such as the leading reformist Whig George Savile, a Yorkshire M.P. who was now acting as patron for the great natural philosopher and clergyman John Michell. Micheil and Priestley had already collaborated with Savile in Leeds, both on technical projects and on joint research on the active powers of matter, the materiality of the soul, and the properties of light. During 1773-1774, Priestley led the dissenters to abandon the slogan of "candour," which involved support merely for relief from the Test, and encouraged a move to an analysis of humanity, which the whole of established civil philosophy was called in question. Catholic emancipation and support for the American cause became part of their campaigns. A reconstructed account of human nature and the sources of prejudice and opposition to "rational evidence"

[26] For "candour," see Joseph Priestley, A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity (London, 1778), xxx; R. B. Barlow, Citizenship and Conscience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), 171-220. For the Tory attack, see "An Account of the Origin and Dissolution of Ld. Shelburne's Connection with the Dissenters," Gentleman's Magazine 53 (January 1783): 22-23. For the theory of civil liberty, see Joseph Priestley, Essay on the First Principles of Government (London, 1768), 10; A. H. Lincoln, Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 160. For Priestley and Lindsey on the defeat of the petition, see Priestley to Lindsey, 23 August 1771, in Rutt, 1:146; Fruchtman, Apocalyptic Polities of Price and Priestley, 40.

would allow the dissenters to "cancel the obnoxious name of Christians, and ask for the common rights of humanity."^[27]

Thus the conjuncture in which Priestley moved to Bowood provided him with all the resources he needed. His work in natural philosophy with Michell, Price, Franklin, Pringle, and the members of the Bath Philosophical Society, situated near his new home, provided him with important contacts. Shelburne gave him £40 a year for equipment and materials. The campaign of rational dissent provided him with an epistemology and a new and urgent need for a revised analysis of the mind. His targets included the Common Sense philosophers and the apparently irreligious skeptics in France and Scotland. The close links between Bowood and the philosophes, together with Priestley's journeys to Paris on Shelburne's business, confirmed his views of the important tasks of the true philosophy. This was a watershed in Priestley's philosophical and religious views. "My own sentiments are very different from what they used to be," he wrote in 1778. He dated his unitarian views in religion from the moment he went to Leeds in 1769, and he dated his "philosophical materialism" to the mid-1770s, first made public in the stream of works on matter theory and religion produced in London and Wiltshire. His productivity was extraordinary: he published a long series of works on pneumatic chemistry, a series of metaphysical texts, of which the Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit (1777) was the most important, and a detailed series of polemics, including amicable debates with Richard Price on materialism and determinism. All this work involved a deliberate construction of what Priestley saw as the right role the natural philosopher should serve. Pneumatics, as an account of the activity of matter and the vitality of the airs, and pneumatology, a philosophical account of the mind and the soul, were the principal concerns of this project.^[28]

[27] On the offer of a place at Bowood, see Franklin to Priestley, 19 September 1772 and to Price, 28 September 1772, in Correspondence of Price 1:138-139. For the "Honest Whigs," see V. W. Crane, "The Club of Honest Whigs: Friends of Science and Liberty," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 23(1966): 210-233; for work with Michell and Savile, see Norris, Shelburne and Reform, 100; Gibbs, Joseph Priestley, 91-93; Priestley to Price, 23 November 1771, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 93-94. For the "appeal to humanity," see Barlow, Citizenship and Conscience, 190, 221-271; Priestley (1773) in Rutt, 23:443-450.

[28] For support by Shelburne, see Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 139-141, and for work at Bowood see Priestley to Caleb Rotheram, 31 May 1775, ibid., 146; for the change in his philosophy and theology, see Priestley to Caleb Rotheram, April 1778, in Rutt, 1:315; Joseph Priestley, Letters to Dr Horsley (Birmingham, 1783), iii-iv. For an analysis of Priestley's finances, see M. P. Crosland, "A Practical Perspective on Joseph Priestley as a Natural Philosopher," British Journal for the History of Science 16 (1983): 223-237.

Bentham was well aware of this work: he had already read Priestley's Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768); in August 1767 he also received an abstract of the History of Electricity from his fellow attorney Richard Clark. In later life he used Priestley's edition of Hartley in his own psychological research, and he praised Priestley's attack on the Scottish philosophers. In January 1774 he began a thorough analysis of the publications on pneumatic chemistry and sent his brother copies of successive versions of the Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air. In his "Essence of Priestley," as Bentham called it, he read the full statement of a progressive and historically sensitive account of the course of natural philosophy and the role the natural philosopher should play. The summer after he completed his "Essence," he contacted Priestley directly. The opening of Bentham's Fragment on Government, which he published the following year, spelled out Priestley's vision, paraphrasing the opening of the Experiments and Observations on pneumatics. It must have impressed Shelburne with its bold indication of the work that natural philosophy could perform:

The age we live in is a busy age; in which knowledge is rapidly advancing towards perfection. In the natural world, in particular, every thing teems with discovery and with improvement. The most distant and recondite regions of the earth traversed and explored—the all-vivifying and subtle element of the air so recently analyzed and made known to us—are striking evidences, were all others wanting, of this pleasing truth.^[29]

Just as in the case of his relationship with Shelburne, so here too Bentham provided a dreamlike account of his first encounter with Priestley's work. Much later in his life, it was important for Bentham to display his debt to the utilitarianism of rational dissent and to play down

[29] Bentham, Fragment on Government, 93; for the use of Hartley, see Bentham, Intro duction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 124n; for the praise of Priestley's attack on the Common Sense philosophy, see Alan Sell, "Priestley's Polemic against Reid," Price-Priestley Newsletter 3 (1979): 41-52; Bhikhu Parekh, ed., Bentham's Political Thought (London: Croom Helm, 1973), 152n: "Another says he has a sense . . . that pronounces what is right and wrong. This is the way that . . . the triumvirate of doctors lately slaughtered, not to say butchered, by Dr Priestly [sic] make laws of nature" (1776). For Priestley's attack on Hume, see Rutt, 4:398 and Richard H. Popkin, "Joseph Priestley's Criticisms of David Hume's Philosophy," Journal of tat History of Philosophy 15 (1977): 437-447. For Bentham and Priestley's pneumatics, see Bentham to Richard Clark, 5 August 1767, Correspondence of Bentham 1:119; Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 28 January 1774, July 1775, 20 July 1774, ibid. 1:176, 186, 189; Bentham to Priestley, 1774, ibid. 1:208.

the marked division between his own views of the rights of humanity and those preached at Essex Street. Bentham recalled reading Priestley's remarkable Essay on the First Principles of Government in a coffeehouse in Oxford in 1768. There he read the sentiment that the "great standard" of civil society was "the good and happiness . . . of the majority of the members of any state." "At the sight of it he cried out, as it were in an inward ecstasy like Archimedes on the discovery of the fundamental principles of Hydrostatics, Eureka. "^[30] Despite Bentham's claim that he "purloined" the happiness principle from this book, he was also able to assemble a lengthy litany of key figures for his conception of the doctrines of utilitarianism. He told d'Alembert in spring 1778 that it was Helvetius who had provided him with the important hint. Debates on influence here are inevitably sterile and obviously reflect Bentham's capacity for the ingenious reconstruction of his own vocation. In the Fragment Bentham wrote of the English edition of Beccaria's work on penology, On Crimes and Punishments, which contained the phrase "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." He used just the terms he would later use to describe Shelburne. Bentham claimed that Beccaria was "received by the intelligent as an Angel from heaven would be by the faithful." Links with the philosophes were crucial for Bentham's development, and they were energetically pursued via Romilly and Mirabeau when he reached Bowood in the 1780s.^[31] The "fundamental principles" which Bentham gained from Priestley involved a path to political power and a role model for the reformer, that of the pneumatic chemist and devotee of moral progress through technical change. Bentham shared Priestley's views on the character of the corrupt enemy and the false philosophy they peddled. In his draft preface for the Bergman translation, Bentham recalled his own Oxford career as a picture of the wrong kind of natural philosophy. Even though he heard mechanics lectures from Nathaniel Bliss, "I learnt nothing of the air I breathed in, except that the mischief it was apt to do was owing to the spitefulness

[30] For Bentham's story about reading Priestley's Essay, see draft of 1829, Bentham MSS, University College London, 13.360, printed in Amnon Goldworth, ed., Deontology, Together with A Table of the Springs of Action and the Article on Utilitarianism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 291-292, compared with Bentham, Fragment on Government, 34. For a very useful criticism of this story, see Margaret Canovan, "The un-Benthamite Utilitarianism of Joseph Priestley," Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984): 435-450.

[31] Bentham to d'Alembert, spring 1778, Correspondence of Bentham 2:117; Bentham, Fragment on Government, 105n; Goldworth, Deontology, 52, citing Bentham MSS, University College Library, 158. See Harrison, Bentham, 113-117; Mack, Bentham, 105-110, 417-420; C. Blount, "Bentham, Dumont and Mirabeau," University of Birmingham Historical Journal 3 (1952): 153-167; Jarrett, Begetters of Revolution, 130-132.

of a god who when he was in an ill humour used to get a parcel of overgrown schoolboys to blow it in people's faces." He claimed that the Oxford professors held that chemistry was a science "fit only to make a man an atheist or an apothecary." The proper chemistry was precisely directed at reform of learning and cure of aerial disease. Thomas Beddoes, chemistry lecturer at Oxford from 1787 until his departure under a political cloud in 1793, argued famously that "nothing would so much contribute to the rescue of the art of medicine from its present helpless condition as the discovery of the means of regulating the atmosphere." Beddoes built this medical meteorology into his attack on the Pitt administration. So did his ally Joseph Priestley: hence, for example, his image of the pathology of the established universities. Priestley told Pitt in 1787 that they "resemble pools of stagnant water secured by dams and mounds, and offensive to the neighbourhood." Pneumatics and discovery were the key items in the collective strategy. The projector and the experimenter were the ideal types of the interests for which rational dissenters and utilitarians spoke.^[32]

Bentham's contacts with Priestley, and then with Shelburne, were dominated by these new interests. Priestley had an explicit account of how experimenters should work together. In a preface to one of the volumes Bentham abstracted in spring 1774, Priestley explained that "this rapid progress of knowledge" would mark "an end to all undue and usurped authority in the business of religion as well as science." This gave a political role to the projector and the discoverer. In 1791 Priestley answered Burke with the claim that commerce and true philosophy would help to inaugurate "the social millennium."^[33] Bentham worked strenuously as just such a projector of schemes in the arts and philosophy in the 1770s. He plotted an approach to the Longitude Board with whom Priestley had had such strife, suggested an improved chronometric design, investigated the rewards for discovery, and prop-

[32] For Bentham on his Oxford studies, see Linder and Smeaton, "Schwediauer, Bentham and Beddoes," 268-270, printing Bentham MSS, University College London, 156.5-7; Bentham to Jeremiah Bentham, 10 March 1762, 15 March 1763, 4 April 1763, Correspondence of Bentham 1:60, 67, 70. For Beddoes, see Thomas Beddoes, Observations on the Nature and Cure of Calculus, Sea Scurvy, Catarrh and Fever (Oxford, 1792), cited in Stansfield, Beddoes, 147-149; Trevor H. Levere, "Dr Thomas Beddoes at Oxford: Radical Politics in 1788-1793 and the Fate of the Regius Chair in Chemistry," Ambix 28 (1981): 61-69. For Priestley on the universities, see Rutt, 19:128 (1787).

[33] Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (London, 1774), xiv; Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (Birmingham, 1791), 239-243. See Arnold Thackray, "Natural Knowledge in Cultural Context: The Manchester Model," American Historical Review 79 (1974): 672-709.

osed projects for a refrigerator to be used in times of glut, a canal through Nicaragua, and state-sponsored expeditions to the southern ocean to follow those of Cook and Banks. In 1787 Bentham took Adam Smith to task for his criticism of the projecting spirit. The Panopticon was merely the most spectacular of these schemes, energetically touted in Russia from 1785 and published in 1791. The famous manifesto which Bentham prefaced to his scheme precisely captured his account of the function of the reforming projector and the knowledge which the future guardians of the moral order would command: "morals reformed—health preserved—industry invigorated—instruction diffused—public burthens lightened—economy seated as it were upon a rock."^[34]

Such knowledge depended on a revised account both of morality and of pneumatics. Bentham learned his pneumatics from Priestley, and so learned much of the rules of the experimental life. He addressed Priestley as "the Adopted father" of his chosen sciences. By the end of 1774, Bentham had sent Priestley a long essay on an improved method of making and collecting different airs, together with some important comments on chemical nomenclature. Priestley replied courteously the following month: "if you were to go to work in good earnest you would do something considerable." Many of their subsequent exchanges related to the details of chemical practice. Bentham told Priestley of new techniques for testing the virtue of air, and invented a machine, called the "Athanor," for improving Priestley's standard tests for measuring this virtue. These were highly prized techniques of pneumatic chemistry, shared, too, with other chemists such as Fontana, Schwediauer and Ingenhousz. In the following section, it will be argued that these pneumatic techniques were practical examples of what was proposed as a more general technique of medical meteorology, in which an understanding of health and disease in the atmosphere could be developed into a model of the moral economy. That analysis provides a basis, in the final sections of the paper, for the interpretation of the moral philosophy and philosophy of mind which licensed Bentham's more remarkable claims for the basis of his new science: "the science of jurisprudence," he claimed, was "as strictly and properly a science of experiment

[34] For Bentham's projects, see Mack, Bentham, 137; "Defence of Usury" (1787), in Jeremy Bentham's Economic Writings, ed. W. Stark, 2 vols. (London: Royal Economic Society, 1952), 1:167-187; on the Panopticon, see Bowring, 4:39. For the Panopticon as a project, see L. J. Hume, "Bentham's Panopticon: An Administrative History," Historical Studies 15 (1973): 703-721 and 16 (1974): 36-54.

as any branch of natural philosophy." But this meant the natural philosophy pursued at Bowood in the 1770s.^[35]

FROM PNEUMATICS TO PNEUMATOLOGY

I have argued for the importance of the relationship between Priestley's pneumatic chemistry and Bentham's legal reform. This relationship provided a knowledge which reformers could use; a description of their social function; and an account of the strategies by which reform could be achieved. This knowledge included the understanding of matter and its powers developed in the laboratories of the pneumatic chemists. Such understanding involved a new practice of rather specific policy recommendations for the better management of the social economy and the human body. The atmosphere was taken to be a major site at which principles of health and disease were produced. Under Priestley's aegis, this practice was also used to revise the picture of body. The distinction between mind and body was erased, by changing the definition of the attributes of matter. Since the mind now became just as accessible to material analysis, it also became just as accessible to management. So medical managers, using their knowledge of medical meteorology, could also be moral managers, using their knowledge of the powers of the mind. When medical management turned its attention to the discipline of minds, it produced a new story about the way interests and passions should be governed for the cause of social welfare. A revised account of pneumatology was therefore a necessary companion of the science of pneumatics. Priestley's pneumatics and Bentham's panopticism were both versions of this model of mind and body. As Foucault suggested, Bentham's Panopticon was an exercise in the economy of powers, "a marvellous machine" where the effects of power could be deployed in the setting of a laboratory: "it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments on men." Bentham explicitly considered the claim that the Panopticon made "machines under the similitude of men." It became an experimental machine for experiments upon machines. "O chemists! " Bentham exclaimed, "much have your crucibles shown us of dead matter—but our industry-house is a crucible for men!" If the Panopticon

[35] Bentham to Priestley, November [?] 1774, and Priestley to Bentham, 16 December 1774, Correspondence of Bentham 1;209, 210-216, 225-226. For work on eudiometry, see Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 9 November 1779 and December 1779, ibid. 2:314-315, 344. For Bentham on jurisprudence as a science of experiment, see Harrison, Bentham, 133, citing Bentham MSS, University College London, 70A.22.

was an exercise in political anatomy and the mechanics of power, then Priestley's technology of airs provided a similar repertoire of strategies for the investigation of powers under a regime of observation, classification, and experiment. His pneumatics investigated those powers on which life depended, and modeled an economy in which these powers were distributed. The move from pneumatics to pneumatology was the key tactic in these philosophies of mind and body.^[36]

The preface to Bentham's Fragment provides evidence of his use of Priestley's pneumatics as the mark of progress. In 1767 Priestley contrasted three forms of historiography. The first was "civil history," which had the appeal of human interest but showed the horrors of human depravity: "a man . . . cannot help being shocked with a view of the vices and miseries of mankind." The second was "natural history," which displayed wise natural order but lacked concern with "human sentiments," a necessary condition for the association of mind. Priestley argued that the history of natural philosophy was the best way of capturing human interests, through the processes of association, for the cause of progress: no history "can exhibit instances of so fine a rise and improvement in things, as we see in the progress of the human mind in philosophical investigations." Hartley's principles worked to good effect here: in Priestley's histories of electricity, optics, and pneumatics, the sympathetic reader could recapitulate the course of actual experimental advance. This was a way of showing what was wrong with Blackstone. Bentham identified the Oxford lawyer as an enemy of progress because he stood opposed to the true principles learned from the history of natural philosophy. "Correspondent to discovery and improvement in the natural world, is reformation in the moral." Blackstone resisted such a reformation. Yet the successes of the pneumatic chemists could and should be extended to the moral realm:

If it be of importance and of use to us to know the principles of the element we breathe, surely it is not of much less importance nor of much less use to comprehend the principles, and endeavour at the improvement of those laws, by which alone we breathe it in security.^[37]

The axiom of utility, the analogy between natural improvement and moral reformation, and the aim of the "security" of respiration were all

[36] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 202-203; Bowring, 4:63-64.

[37] Joseph Priestley, History and Present State of Electricity, 3d ed. (London, 1775), ii-iv; Bentham, Fragment on Government, 93-94. For Priestley's historiography, see J. G. McEvoy, "Electricity, Knowledge and the Nature of Progress in Priestley's Thought," British Journal for the History of Science 12 (1979): 1-30; J. J. Hoecker, "Joseph Priestley as an Historian and the Idea of Progress," Price-Priestley Newsletter 3 (1979): 29-40.

aspects of the meteorological program which both Bentham and Priestley pursued. In the 1770s Priestley and his colleagues aimed to show how a benevolent aerial economy functioned and to mark the processes that governed this economy. Human beings were an integral part of this system, and their welfare was a consequence of its actions. Priestley's isolation of nitrous air in 1772 and dephlogisticated air in 1775 was part of this strategy. He described a series of processes that vitiated common air, by phlogisticating it. Such processes included "the amazing consumption of air by fires of all kinds, volcanos, &c." together with respiration and putrefaction. The air left above calces or remaining after animal respiration was revealed to be highly phlogisticated by a test comparison with nitrous air. "It is not peculiar to nitrous air to be a test of the fitness of the air for respiration. Any other process by which air is diminished and made noxious answers to the same purpose but the application of them is not so easy or elegant and the effect is not so soon perceived. In fact, it is phlogiston that is the test." Bad air supported neither respiration nor combustion and did not diminish in volume when shaken with nitrous air. This gave the test its key place in his pneumatics. Because Priestley applied an axiom of benevolence, he argued that the aerial economy must act to preserve the virtue of airs. So there must be processes that restored vitiated air and rendered it virtuous and respirable. "It becomes a great object of philosophical inquiry, to ascertain what change is made in the constitution of the air by flame, and to discover what provision there is in nature for remedying the injury which the atmosphere receives by this means." Evidence of restorative processes was produced in the long series of pneumatic trials Priestley made at Bowood between 1774 and 1779 using the "noble apparatus" Shelburne provided him. These processes included atmospheric purification by shaking over water and the beneficient action of green vegetable matter on air under the influence of light. Thus his isolation of dephlogisticated air and his production of evidence for photosynthesis were easily fitted into the scheme of a well-judged economy that balanced vitiation with restoration.^[38]

[38] Joseph Priestley, "Observations on Different Kinds of Air," Philosophical Transactions 62 (1772): 147-252 at 162; Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air and Other Branches of Natural Philosophy, 3 vols. (Birmingham, 1790), 1:359. For Priestley's account of the restoration of the atmosphere, see Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 2d ed. (London, 1776), 2:91-103; J. G. McEvoy, "Joseph Priestley, Aerial Philosopher: Metaphysics and Methodology in Priestley's Chemical Thought, 1772-1781," Ambix 25 (1978): 1-55, 93-116, 153-175, and 26 (1979): 16-38, at 25:96-101, 158-164. For the importance of the nitrous air test, see A. J. Ihde, "Priestley and Lavoisier," in Joseph Priestley: Scientist, Theologian and Metaphysician, ed. L. Kieft and B. R. Willeford (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 62-91; for the "aerial economy," see H. Laboucheix, "Chemistry, Materialism and Theology in the Work of Joseph Priestley," Price-Priestley Newsletter 1 (1977): 31-48.

These researches were closely linked with human welfare through the scheme of medical meteorology—restoration of respirable air and its variation in quality governed the physiological fate of the human and the social frame. The standard of the atmosphere was a mark of its fitness for human existence. This had initially suggested to Priestley that while atmospheric air was no doubt a compound of variously virtuous sections, nevertheless it must now be the best possible air for human respiration. "I had no idea of procuring air purer than the best common air." Yet his work of 1774-1775 did yield such an air, dephlogisticated air. It was only after eighteen months that Priestley managed to position his new "luxury" air as the ultimate in his scale of virtue, and thereby developed a set of techniques which the medical meteorologists, such as Ingenhousz and Fontana, soon baptized "eudiometry," a strategy for matching the virtues of airs to their physiological benevolence. Priestley planned a collection of airs from different sites. In 1777 he asked his friend, the Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton, for "air as it is actually breathed by the different manufacturers in this kingdom." He also sampled the air left in rooms at Shelburne's house after gatherings there. "Eudiometric tours" were common. Beddoes and Price also worked on the "insalubrity" of varying airs. Fontana and his colleagues in Tuscany and Milan used eudiometry for hospital reform and proposed marsh drainage to remove the evils of "bad air." Ingenhousz was an early advocate of seaside holidays for consumptives, identifying ocean air as peculiarly virtuous for the human frame. Priestley himself wrote that the new "pure air" might be "peculiarly salutary to the lungs in certain morbid cases," and that "pure dephlogisticated air might be very useful as a medicine," even if too powerful in common measure: "a moralist may say that the air which nature has provided for us is as good as we deserve."^[39]

[39] Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 2d ed. (London, 1776), 2:40-49, 100-103; Priestley to Matthew Boulton, [?] 1777, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 161-162; on eudiometry, see ibid., 164-166, 174-175, and Joseph Priestley (with Richard Price), "On the Noxious Quality of the Effluvia of Putrid Marshes," Philosophical Transactions 64 (1774): 90-98; Felice Fontana, "Of the Airs Extracted from Different Kinds of Waters," Philosophical Transactions 69 (1779): 432-453; Jan Ingenhousz, "Observations sur la construction et l’usage de l'eudiomètre de M. Fontana," Journal de physique 26 (1785): 339-359; and P. Knoefel, "Famine and Fever in Tuscany: Eighteenth-Century Italian Concern with the Environment," Physis 21 (1979): 7-35 at 20-35; H. Reed, "Jan Ingenhousz: Plant Physiologist," Chronica Botanica 11 (1949): 285-396.

Bentham began work on eudiometry when he contacted Priestley in 1774-1775. He told Priestley that "in using nitrous air as a test of the comparative purity of the atmosphere in different places, it is of importance to be certain of its being utterly free from all previous admixture with Common air." To use such a test in this way was to declare allegiance to the principles of pneumatics. Throughout the 1770s Bentham was concerned with the development of this program: his "Athanor" was one contribution to it, anticipating eudiometers made by Cavendish and Fontana in the 1780s. He talked to Fontana about publications on the improvement of the virtue of airs and better ways of making artificial airs. He also became involved in Priestley's disputes with chemists such as Scheele, who denied that vegetation purified airs.^[40] Natural philosophical understanding of the atmospheric powers was to become ever more closely linked with civil policy. John Pringle was a typical practitioner in this field. His treatises in the 1750s on hospital and jail fevers based themselves on the pneumatics of restored and corrupted airs. As Christopher Lawrence has suggested, Pringle and his reformist colleagues, including Priestley, were instrumental in the construction of a specifically aerial analysis of epidemic fevers, locating their aetiology in noxious components of the atmosphere detectable by pneumatic chemistry. Priestley defended Pringle's doctrine against Scot-fish critics in 1773, while successive volumes of Experiments and Observations on Air during the 1770s carried testimonies by physicians on the medicinal uses of airs and the aerial causation of fever. When Pringle presented Priestley with the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1773, he placed Priestley's pneumatics in the context of the aerial system of fevers, and also linked it with the model of a benevolent economy which Priestley had begun to map: "from these discoveries, we are assured that . . . every individual plant is serviceable to mankind, if not always distinguished by some private virtue, yet making a part of the whole which cleanses and purifies our atmosphere." Storms and tempests would shake "the waters and the air together to bury in the deep those putrid and pestilential effluvia which the vegetables upon the face of the Earth have been insufficient to consume."^[41] The pneumatic system pro-

[40] Bentham to Priestley, November [?] 1774, and Priestley to Bentham, 16 December 1774, Correspondence of Bentham 1:210-216, 225-226. For work on eudiometry, see Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 9 November 1779 and December 1779, ibid. 2:314-315, 344. For Priestley's dispute with Scheele, see Priestley to Kirwan, August 1780, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 182-186.

[41] For Pringle's work on pneumatic medicine, see D. W. Singer, "Sir John Pringle and His Circle," Annals of Science 6 (1948-1950): 127-180, 229-261 at 150-153 and 229-247 for work with Priestley; for the Copley address of 1773, see the reprint in Douglas McKie, "Joseph Priestley and the Copley Medal," Ambix 9 (1961): 1-22. For Priestley's medical interests, see Christopher Lawrence, "Priestley in Tahiti: The Medical Interests of a Dissenting Chemist," in Science, Medicine and Dissent:Joseph Priestley, ed. R. G. W. Anderson and C. Lawrence (London: Wellcome Trust, 1987), 1-10; for Priestley's defense of Pringle, see Priestley, "On the Noxious Quality of the Effluvia of Putrid Marshes," 91; compare Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 2d ed. (London, 1775), vol. 1, appendix, 288-324.

posed by Priestley and Pringle gave an account of the circulation of virtuous power in the world. It was deeply influential on the work of radical physicians in the 1790s, including both Darwin and Beddoes. It also provided an image of the perfectly managed economy in human society, where medical administration and civil hygiene, the "burial of pestilential effluvia," were equally important.^[42]

Hygiene became a key principle of Bentham's vision of civil order. In his mature survey of that order, the Constitutional Code, the "Health Minister" was to discharge a range of eudiometric functions. What he called the "exemplificational-antimalarial function" involved the control of dangerous exhalations; other roles included registration of changes in the air and its relation to health. These were, perhaps, Hippocratic commonplaces: their management and the knowledge that sustained them were not. The utilitarian state was to be compared with the strategy of medical police fostered by the German cameralists. Where authorities such as Justi, Sonnenfels, and Frank argued during the period 1750-1780 for a centralized state bureaucracy invigilating over social and moral conduct in order to control welfare and population growth, Priestley and Bentham proffered an account of philosophical necessity and reasoned self-interest in civil society; the role of the state was as guarantor of that society, not as its despot. The progress of society was safely left in the hands of expert philosophers and medical managers whose legitimacy was derived from their understanding of the natural powers, not from their subservience to the civil powers.^[43] Pneumatics

[42] For pneumatic medicine in the 1790s, see Stansfield, Beddoes, chap. 7; Ludmilla Jordanova, "Earth Science and Environmental Medicine: The Synthesis of the Late Enlightenment, " in Images of the Earth, ed. L. J. Jordanova and Roy Porter (Chalfont St. Giles: British Society for the History of Science, 1978), 119-146. For Beddoes, see Thomas Beddoes and James Watt, Considerations on the Medicinal Use of Factitious Airs (Bristol, 1794), vol. 1; for Darwin, see Erasmus Darwin, Temple of Nature, 21n and Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (London, 1796), 1:115.

[43] For the work of the Health Minister, see Bowring, 9:439-445. For medical police and cameralism, see George Rosen, From Medical Police to Social Medicine: Essays on the History of Health Care (New York: Science History Publications, 1974), 120-141, 189-190; Michel Foucault, "The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century," in Gordon, Power-Knowledge, 166-182; Marc Raeff, The Well-ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 119-135. For Bentham and medical reform, see Benjamin Spector, "Jeremy Bentham: His Influence upon Medical Thought and Legislation," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 37 (1963): 25-42.

was an important example of this understanding. The Benthamite reforms of the 1830s testify eloquently to this fact. Edwin Chadwick was Bentham's amanuensis at the time when his master was composing the Constitutional Code. Chadwick's great 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population was a homage to the connections between management and medical meteorology which Bentham had discussed: "bad ventilation or overcrowding, and the consequences on the moral habits" were demonstrably based on "an original cause we have high scientific authority for stating to be easily and economically controllable." As Roger Cooter has suggested, Bentham's loyal disciples among reforming physicians made the atmosphere the key site of medical management: Cooter cites the work of Southwood Smith, a convert from Calvinism to Priestley's unitarianism and the personal physician to Bentham. Southwood Smith's anticontagionism refused to speak of disease-causing miasmas and refused to define the aerial principle that might be pathogenic. In his Treatise on Fever (1830), he argued that disease was spread via air because "poverty in her hut . . . striving with all her might to keep out the pure air and to increase the heat, imitates Nature but too successfully." As a result, "penury and ignorance can create a mortal plague." Cooter argues that at the hands of the Benthamite anticontagionists, the air became the proper concern of expert managers and the way to moralize society. The human and the social body were engrossed by pneumatics.^[44]

Bentham's campaign was to go further: the legislator could wisely extend the accomplishments of the medical manager. In the 1770s he argued that "the art of legislation is but the art of healing practised upon a large scale. It is the common endeavour of both to relieve men from

[44] Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), ed. M. W. Flinn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965), 29-43, 167; Thomas Southwood Smith, Treatise on Fever (London, 1830), 324; Roger Cooter, "Anticontagionism: History's Medical Record," in The Problem of Medical Knowledge: Examining the Social Construction of Medicine, ed. P. Wright and A. Treacher (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982), 87-108. Compare Southwood Smith, Treatise, 349: "Vegetable and animal matter, during the process of putrefaction, give off a principle or give origin to a new compound, which, when applied to the human body, produces the phenomena constituting fever." For Southwood Smith's career, see Mrs. C. L. Lewes, Dr. Southwood Smith: A Retrospect (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1898); F. N. L. Poynter, "Thomas Southwood Smith—the Man," Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 55 (1962): 381-392.

the miseries of life. But the physician relieves them one by one: the legislator by millions at a time." This was just the sense of Southwood Smith's parliamentary evidence in 1840: the Government must relieve the poor of "the sources of poison and disease," for otherwise "the effect is the same as if twenty or thirty thousand of them were annually taken out of their wretched homes and put to death." The accumulation of numbers and the collective origin of social pathology were essential principles of reformist medical management. Bentham insisted that "this is not a fanciful analogy": it was to be taken as a literal account of the managers' work.^[45] Once again, the comparison of the body politic and the body natural was banal, but by using a specific account of how medical management worked, Bentham gave his political reform a peculiar slant. The attention to detail and the production of "docile bodies" were characteristics of this anatomical strategy. The "Code" and the "Punishments" were respectively described by Bentham as the "principles" and the "materia medica" of his political therapeutics. But, most importantly, the references to medical management pointed to the significance of a science of mind, a pneumatology. The reformer stood in urgent need of a science that would locate the "springs of action." This was the principle of utility. Bentham called it a "moral thermometer" in the hands of the expert jurist and natural philosopher. In his texts on Legislation, first drafted in the late 1770s, Bentham argued, with Priestley, that the progress of philosophy was opposed by prejudices, which enlightened understanding of the springs of mental and physical action would remove. The name for the branch of philosophy that investigated and extirpated such obstacles was "mental pathology." "By pathology, I mean the study and the knowledge of the sensations, affections, passions, and of their effects upon happiness." Thus it was a founding axiom of Bentham's reform that the link between aerial physiology, natural philosophy, and materialist epistemology be made more than a figure of speech: "Medicine, commonly so called . . . has for its basis the observations of the axioms of pathology, commonly so-called. Morals is the medicine of the soul. The science of legislation is the practical part of this medicine." Hence, "mental pathology" should provide the axioms for the science of legislation: "God forbid that any disease in the constitution of a state should be without its remedy."^[46]

[45] Mack, Bentham, 264, citing Bentham MSS, University College London, 27.13; Lewes, Southwood Smith, 104.

[46] For "docile bodies," see Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135-141. For Bentham on the medical comparison, see Bowring, 1:304-305, 367 and 2:204; Harrison, Bentham, 141, citing Bentham MSS, University College London, 32.6; Mack, Bentham, 264-266. For "mental pathology, " see Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, vii; for the cure of disease in the state, see Bentham, Fragment on Government, 224.

Mental pathology was a foundation of reform. Bentham's successive drafts for his Table of the Springs of Action examined the relationship between this psychology, the philosophy of mind, and the reformer's work. This "Table" was supposed to be the analogue of an "anatomical table," which showed "the seats of physical enjoyment and sufferance and the source of physical action." Bentham proposed the same for psychology. Equipped with such a table and the utility calculus, the wise expert would show that certain actions were in citizens' interests, and the legislator would make these actions depend on these interests. In a manuscript of the 1770s, Bentham figured this relationship in heavenly terms:

Between us two might the philosopher and the lawyer say, there is a great gulph. I have endeavoured to throw a bridge over this gulph: so that on it, as on Jacob's Ladder, if not Angels, man, however, may continually henceforth be seen ascending and descending.... Should I be found so happy as to succeed in bringing these celestial artizans into a more close acquaintance, what a rich and serviceable manufacture may not be hoped for from their united labours.^[47]

The Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, completed by 1780, was Bentham's first sustained analysis of the link between these powers and his juridical and political plans. The study of mental pathology identified the sources of pleasure and pain, sensibility and will. So this reconstruction of pneumatology indicated two functions for the study of mind: understanding and control. Such an inquiry would provide a knowledge of mental powers which the reformer needed. For Bentham, "intellectual powers" were always compared to the appropriate "physical powers," and this was an identity guaranteed by the medical function of the philosophical reformer. The "science of law " was merely a branch of the superior "logic of the will." It would also locate the sources of resistance to reform derived from corruption and interest. The interests that opposed reform were just as susceptible to analysis and management as those on which reform depended.^[48]

[47] Bentham, A Table of the Stings of Action, in Goldworth, Deontology, 71; Mack, Bentham, 130, citing Bentham MSS, University College London, 27; Harrison, Bentham, 270-271. For a discussion of the Table, see Paul McReynolds, "The Motivational Psychology of Jeremy Bentham, part 1," Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 4 (1968): 230-244.

[48] For the "logic of the will," see Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, xiii. Compare Parekh, Bentham's Political Thought, 146-156, which prints Bentham MSS, University College London, 69.70-75.

The doctrine of association, developed in Hartley and edited by Priestley, satisfied these demands. The mind was materialized since matter could think. Mental principles could be translated, or, as Bentham put it, "paraphrased" as their physical correlates. Speech about the pernicious "fictions" in which the law dealt must be turned into talk of material entities. Punishments must be spelled out in physical terms, just as pain and pleasure must be read as corporeal principles. Because it used fictions, the existing condition of the legal establishment was marked by all the evils of the condition of natural philosophy before the recent advances of the pneumatic chemists. Common law was a "fictitious composition which has no known person for its author, no known assemblage of words for its substance... like that fancied aether, which, in default of sensible matter, fills up the measure of the universe."^[49] Bentham's assault on this form of legal fiction was part of a strategy that modeled itself on the reforms of pneumatic chemists and in particular on the language they used. In 1774, as we have shown, he began corresponding with Priestley on the proper nomenclature to be used in medical and chemical philosophy. "Much more I could offer you on the same subject... other articles on Nomenclature." Bentham condemned Scheele for his "metaphysical" inquiry as to whether "fire be a real or fictitious entity." At the same period, he identified the close connection between the forms of chemical nomenclature and the flourishing of corrupt fantasy. "In speaking of an pneumatic (or say immaterial or spiritual ) object, no name has ever been employed, that had not first been employed as the name of some material (or say corporeal ) one. Lamentable have been the confusion and darkness produced by taking the names of fictions for the names of real entities." Priestley agreed: his pneumatics showed the proper understanding of spirits and the disasters visited upon true philosophy by assuming that material entities were really immaterial substances. Utilitarianism expelled fictions from legal discourse: pneumatic chemistry expelled them from philosophy. This great expulsion was accompanied by a revision of the principle that individuated human subjects. The belief in an immortal soul was simply the understandable consequence of the wrong state of mind: "a human soul would be a ghost, " according to Bentham, if it were separable and

[49] For Bentham on "paraphrasis" and fictions, see Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, xiii; for an analysis of these techniques, see Ogden, Bentham's Theory of Fictions, cxiii-cxxi, on Bowring, 3:177, 241; Harrison, Bentham, 53-74. For Bentham's comments on the connection between the disease of fiction and the immaterial principles of mind, see Bowring, 8:174; Parekh, Bentham's Political Thought, 48; Ogden Bentham's Theory of Fictions, 18.

immaterial. "At this time of day, custom scarcely does, fashion certainly does not, command us to believe in ghosts."^[50]

GHOSTS AND MACHINES

The reformers' strategies were built on the principles learned in pneumatics and mental pathology. Their roles aped those of medical managers and expert naturalists. As we have seen, this made them a vulnerable target for anti-Jacobins in the 1790s. It was alleged that the friends of the Revolution had the wrong state of mind, because they abandoned the established moral sanctions for a rationalized account of the right structure of society and of human nature. Brissot offered Priestley and Bentham seats in the National Convention: Burke said that Brissot's sanguinary addresses to the nation would allow the English "to judge of the information of those who have undertaken to guide and enlighten us."^[51] Guidance and enlightenment looked occult and enthusiast because when the reformers condemned orthodox religious pneumatology as a tissue of fictions, they had nothing better than a heretical ghost story with which to replace it. This story, exemplified in schemes for social machines such as the Panopticon, seemed to destroy conventional moral sanctions and install tyranny in their place. Bentham answered possible criticisms of his "inspection house": was it advisable "to give such herculean and ineludible strength to the gripe of power?" Yes, for this was a power that could manage the mind and guarantee its happiness. What authority could this new machinery of mental powers command? Priestley's answer helped itself to the combination of pneumatics and philosophy developed in the 1770s. The theology he proposed from the 1770s was supposed to satisfy the demands of reform. Anglican and Calvinist priestcraft was challenged quite directly with the rational principles of unitarianism, a denial of the immortal soul, an empirical psychology, and the claims of reformist managers to discharge functions hitherto the proper preserve of the pulpit and the

[50] For Bentham on nomenclature see Bentham to Priestley, 1774, Correspondence of Bentham 1:214, 216; for Scheele, see Bentham to Samuel Bentham, 9 November 1779, Correspondence of Bentham 2:31.5; for pneumatic objects, see Bowring, 8:119-120; for souls and ghosts, ibid., 195-109, and Ogden, Bentham's Theory of Fictions, 8-9.

[51] For Bentham, Priestley, and the Convention, see J. H. Burns, "Bentham and the French Revolution," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 16 (1966): 95-114; Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, 246-257; Gibbs, Priestley, 152, 216. For Burke on Brissot, see "Preface to the Address of M. Brissot to his Constituents" (1794), in Works of Edmund Burke, 6 vols. (London: George Be ll, 1891), 3:525.

bench. The Panopticon's chapel was placed inside the guard tower, where there would be no "thronging or jostling on the way to church," rather than occupying its traditionally independent site as autonomous from the system of discipline. Thus in order to complete an analysis of the social setting of the philosophy of mind and body made by reformers in the 1770s, it is necessary to provide an account of the counter-theology which they developed. As Foucault suggested, the reformers replaced the established Christian soul with a new "non-corporal" element, now defined as the product of disciplines and the target at which discipline should be directed. This substitution had important implications: the new model of the soul was used to explain why error had survived and how it could be corrected. It explained this error both in individual humans and in the body politic. Reformers sought to accomplish these aims with a therapy, the philosophical history of mind. That history gave each individual a chance of redemption and immortality: redemption through the pursuit of the calculated dictates of reason, and immortality through the progress of reform.^[52]

Both Bentham and Priestley lambasted established religion as superstition and false consciousness, that is, as a case of mental pathology. In a manuscript of 1773 entitled "Obstacles to Improvement," Bentham declared that "a man who after reading the scriptures can bring himself to fancy the doctrines of the Athanasian Creed" was in "that state of prepared imbecility which is necessary to a mind for the tranquil reception of one parcel of Nonsense." Priestley referred the prevalence of patent absurdities in church doctrine to political interest: rational clergymen in the established church "must every time they officiate not only profess, but in reality act upon the profession, of what they do not believe."^[53] Because of the bad faith of such priests, their religion was merely an ally of corruption. Their mental state was to be contrasted with that of the enlightened philosopher. An enlightened mind was both the most important subject for natural-philosophical research and the most important resource possessed by the researcher. Thus the mind was rep-

[52] Bowring, 4:47, 63. For Foucault on the "non-corporal" soul, see Discipline and Punish, 29. For Priestley's materialist theology, see Ira V. Brown, "The Religion of Joseph Priestley," Pennsylvania History 24 (1957): 85-100 and Erwin N. Hiebert, "The Integration of Revealed Religion and Scientific Materialism in the Thought of Joseph Priestley," in Kieft and Willeford, Priestley, 27-61. For an analysis of Bentham's anticlericalism, see James E. Crimmins, "Bentham on Religion, Atheism and the Secular Society," Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (1986): 95-110.

[53] Bentham, "Obstacles to Improvement," in Mack, Bentham, 300; Priestley, "General History of the Christian Church," in Rutt, 10:538-541.

resented as a "laboratory," since it could be subjected to experimentation and observation, and as a "state," since it could be managed and reformed. In 1775 Priestley argued that mind was the result of "a certain organized system of matter," the brain, which was itself a "great laboratory and repository" for the purpose of converting phlogiston into electric fluid. Further inquiry would reveal the details of the forms of matter that acted in this way. It was demonstrated in pneumatics and optics that matter exhibited a wide range of power. "Nothing but a precise and definite knowledge of the nature of perception and thought can authorize any person to affirm whether they may not belong to an extended substance which has also the properties of attraction and repulsion." These "mental powers" were just as accessible to "observation and experiment" as were the powers of pneumatics and optics, even though "we ourselves are the subjects of the observations and experiments."^[54]

These remarks implied that a materialist philosophy of mind was the guarantee of the accessibility of the mind to research. Such research, however, was itself a means of reforming the mind, purging it of false doctrine and destroying its prejudices. Priestley referred to Hartley's celebrated claim that "the greatest and noblest use of philosophical speculation is... the opportunity it affords of inculcating benevolent and pious sentiments upon the mind." Ultimately, this mind would be a communal property, not exemplified in any specific individual but in the enlightened state of the whole social body. Priestley's example encouraged many of his colleagues to argue that only through the understanding and transformation of mind could reform succeed. This had implications for the collective work of radical natural philosophers, lawyers, divines, and writers. In 1778 Priestley encouraged his Cumbrian friend Adam Walker to take up public natural-philosophy lectures in London. Walker interspersed his lectures with the argument that governments warped the "qualities and tendencies" of the human mind, while proper natural philosophy restored them. In the 1780s, under Priestley's influence, William Godwin abandoned Calvinism for Socinianism, experimental philosophy, and the doctrines of David Hartley. These concerns were made evident both in his political treatises and fictions of the 1790s. In his Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793) Godwin based his celebrated critique of government on a psychology

[54] Joseph Priestley, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (London, 1777), 24-30; Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 2d ed. (London, 1775), 277-279; An Examination of Dr. Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (London, 1774), lvii.

that relied explicitly on the doctrine of association, while in his reflections on the work of the novelist he described his enterprise as "the analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive, and recording the gradually accumulating impulses." For these men a combination of natural philosophy and the "logic of the will" was the key to moral understanding and progress. This was because the mind was no ghost but a part of the bodily machine.^[55]

In 1776 Bentham attacked traditional talk of the "will" as a faculty. He ridiculed the view that "there is really any such thing as a little being that under the name of will gets into men's heads, and exercises acts of volition or any other acts.... it is Man that exercises those various acts, that perceives these various emotions." The following years, in his Disquisitions concerning Matter and Spirit and in his comments on the doctrine of philosophical necessity, Priestley agreed with this monism. Will was unitary and identified with bodily powers. Insofar as notions such as "will" or "soul" were used as the specially privileged principle of individuation in each human subject, they would lead to delusion and philosophical error. Just as the term "our country" corresponded to "a part of the world subject to that form of government by the laws of which we ourselves are bound, as distinguished from other countries," so "the idea of self" referred to a "substance, which is the seat of that particular set of sensations and ideas of which those that are then recollected make a part, as distinguished from other substances which are the seats of similar sensations and ideas." Each body was to be seen as a unified state, constituted by a single network of powers, ruled as a single polity.^[56] It was for this reason that knowledge of material powers brought the right state of mind. Bentham explained that "the vast mass of mischief, of which perverted religion is the source," had a "preventive remedy" in a natural philosophy that generated "that mental strength and well-grounded confidence which renders him proof against so many

[55] Priestley, History of Electricity, xix; compare David Hartley, Observations on Man (London, 1749), part 2, 245-248. For uses of these principles, see Adam Walker, A Sys-tern of Familiar Philosophy (London, 1799), preface; William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. D. McCracken (1794; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1790), 339; Enquiry concerning Political Justice, ed. Isaac Kramnick (1798; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 360-376. Compare Martin Fitzpatrick, "William Godwin and the Rational Dissenters," Price-Priestley Newsletter 3 (1979): 4-28.

[56] Parekh, Bentham's Political Thought, 146, printing Bentham MSS, University College London, 69.70 (1776); for Priestley on the will, see Rutt, 3:451 (1777) and 25:96 (1791). For Priestley on the "self" as a state, see Priestley, Disquisitions, "Objections to the System of Materialism Considered: 5, from a Separate Consciousness Not Belonging to the Brain," 89-91.

groundless terrors." This was to be a natural philosophy that laid ghosts and anatomized minds. He drew an important contrast between the law of terror, spirits and fictions, and the law of utility, bodies and material interests. The former "drags men to its purpose in chains, from which... the captives break loose in crowds," while the latter, "transcendental legislation, leads men by silken threads round their affections and makes them its own for ever." This remark avoided all reference to a doctrine of the suffering soul—no threats of sin and redemption were present in "transcendental legislation." The Panopticon, which substituted the illuminated space for inspection for the dark confinement of the dungeon, relied on the power of these "silken threads" over subjects' minds and the knowledge of how they worked.^[57]

Bentham's language of "groundless terrors" and "bungling clumsiness" in castigating existing schemes of justice referred to real features of the treatment of the condemned. Historians as different as Douglas Hay and Michel Foucault have argued for the importance of awesome spectacle and the physical presence of power at the moment of the execution of justice upon the body of the eighteenth-century criminal. Clumsy executions were loudly criticized by large and enthusiastic audiences; on the scaffold, the priest, the surgeon, and the criminal joined in a state-supported theatrical performance. Bentham and his English allies sought to emulate the influence which Beccaria's utilitarian critique of these performances had enjoyed in France. One of the more significant aspects of the ritual was the explicit connection between secular and divine judgment, for the rituals of execution were also rituals of the fate of the soul. This was what utility challenged. Michael Ignatieff cites the sermon preached by John Wesley at Bedford Assizes in 1758: Wesley contrasted "the few" who would "stand at the judgement seat this day" with the fate of all his audience. "We shall all, I that speak and you that hear, stand at the Judgement Seat of Christ. And we are now reserved on this earth which is not our home, in this prison of flesh and blood, perhaps many of us in chains of darkness too, till we are ordered to be brought forth."^[58] While by no means blind to the force of imagination

[57] Bowring, 8:13; Mack, Bentham, 293, printing Bentham MSS, University College London, 149.63 (1794).

[58] For the eighteenth-century spectacle of punishment, see Douglas Hay, "Property, Authority and the Criminal Law," in Douglas Hay et al., Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), 17-64; Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 32-69. For popular protest, see E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the Eighteenth-Century Crowd," Past and Present 50 (1971): 76-136. For Beccaria and Brissot, see McManners, Death and the Enlightenment, 392-401. For Wesley, see Ignatieff, Just Measure of Pain, 55.

on the multitude, neither Bentham nor Priestley held that such sentiments could bind men to right action or proper morality. The sanction of damnation disappeared. This was a fundamental assault on the commonplaces of law and religion. In 1792 Thomas Beddoes argued that the experience of temporal justice generated subjects' false doctrines of divine retribution and of the torments of Hell. A better society would change the state of mind of its citizens. He agreed with Priestley that "the material world easily supplied the notion of power," while reaching the extreme conclusion that hence "visible tribunals... led to the idea of remunerative justice, and that with scarce an exception in another life. Thus man created God, an Heaven and an Hell." Priestley and his allies supposed that "Chains of darkness" were removed by the science of "mental pathology," not the dictates of atonement and resurrection. Priestley classed these as "corruptions" of true Christianity, and their use alongside the public spectacle of state terror and popular enthusiasm was a mark of this corruption.

Our mode of respiting, for the sake of benefiting the souls of the Criminals, has arisen from a notion that such repentance as that of a condemned criminal may be of some avail to him with respect to his future state; a notion false and dangerous in the extreme, as it encourages the whole community to persist in evil courses, thinking that a few days, or hours, of repentance may cancel all their guilt, and prepare them for future happiness.^[59]

Bentham, as usual, took a calculated view of the problematic effects of established religion on criminality. He told Dugald Steward that since Scots Calvinists paid clerics less than did English Anglicans, and since the crime rate was lower north of the border, religious work was obviously more effective in Scotland. In general, as he argued in 1780, "the dictates of religion would coincide in all cases with the dictates of utility," were men possessed of the right account of God. This account would recognize divine benevolence in the sense in which it was attributed to humans, and thus account for the "theological sanction" in mental pathology as a derivative case of utilitarian rationality. Bentham envisaged no minister of public religion in his ideal polity: the correct analysis

[59] Thomas Beddoes, Letter to a Lady on Early Instruction (London, 1792), 16-17, cited in Stansfield, Beddoes, 84; Joseph Priestley, Lectures on History and General Policy (Birmingham, 1788), Lecture 47. For interesting remarks on Bentham's mission and law reform, see Himmelfarb, "Haunted House of Jeremy Bentham," 34-36.

of the powers of the human mind would fulfill all the functions hitherto discharged by priestcraft.^[60]

Priestley shared this view. The principle of benevolence, rather than retribution, was the key to his theology. "Benevolence" was given a remarkably secular interpretation. We have seen that this principle governed his pneumatics and the model of the natural economy he made in the 1770s. The argument against retributive justice also dominated his critique of Anglican or Calvinist accounts of the soul and its fate. The doctrines of a future state and of an immortal, separable, soul were fundamental resources for the natural philosophy, the legal philosophy, and the established religions which Bentham and Priestley attacked. In his metaphysical texts composed after his abandonment of Calvinism and of Arianism, Priestley turned against the textbooks he had studied in the dissenting academies. Doddridge had introduced the pneumatology of John Locke and of the Aberdonian metaphysician Andrew Baxter into the curriculum at Northampton, and they had remained as standard authorities at Daventry. Doddridge himself had insisted upon the immateriality of the soul and denied that matter could think. Doddridge and Baxter deduced from the principle that inertial force was essential to matter the consequence that it could not possess any innate activity. Doddridge's readings of Locke and Baxter were extremely influential, and they provided Priestley with much of the target he chose in establishing philosophical materialism in the 1770s. In these texts, he turned the weapons of Hartleian associationism and pneumatic chemistry on the devotees of immaterialism. Spirits were redefined as rarer forms of matter; powers were revealed in the laboratory and in the mind; the political and theological dangers of using the immaterial soul as the principle of consciousness and of subjectivity were spelled out in considerable detail.^[61]

[60] For Bentham on Scottish priests, see Bentham to Dugald Steward, 27 June 1783, in Bowring, 10:129—130; on religion and utility, see Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 138-139. For the state indifference to religion, see Crimmins, "Bentham on Religion."

[61] For "benevolence" in Priestley's pneumatics, see J. G. McEvoy, "Enlightenment and Dissent: Joseph Priestley and the Limits of Theoretical Reasoning," Enlightenment and Dissent 2 (1983): 47-67 at 49-50. For Doddridge's teaching, see Doddridge, Course of Lectures, 52-53, 205-209. For Doddridge and Andrew Baxter on immaterialism, see Yolton, Think ing Matter, 94-97, 144; P. M. Heimann and J. E. McGuire, "Newtonian Forces and Lockean Powers: Concepts of Matter in Eighteenth-Century Thought," Historical Studies in Physical Sciences 3 (1971): 233-306. For Doddridge and dissenting textbooks, see Isabel Rivers, "Dissenting and Methodist Books of Practical Divinity," in Rivers, Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, 127-164. For Priestley's early reading, see R. E. Schofield, "Joseph Priestley: Theology, Physics and Metaphysics," Enlightenment and Dissent 2 (1983):69-81 at 71-72.

The critique of immaterialism involved a sensitive reformulation of the language of philosophy and a direct attack on the established authority in philosophical discipline. The reassessment of the status of matter was accompanied by a reassessment of the power exercised by Newton and his interpreters. Immaterialism made matter too base. Priestley described Baxter as "the ablest defender of the strict immaterial system" while suggesting that Baxter's metaphysics implied that it was a "pity that so mischievous a thing as he every where represents matter to be, should have been introduced at all." In Priestley's vocabulary, "matter" was to be defined as the subject of powers. He attacked Locke's timorous hesitancy before this obvious conclusion. In the Disquisitions, Priestley argued that it was "unaccountable in Mr. Locke" to concede that "the faculty of thinking may be a property of the body, and yet to think it more probable that this faculty inhered in a different substance, viz., an immaterial soul." Baxter himself was a well-chosen target. He was held up by Anglican apologists as the best example of the way Newtonian natural philosophy could be used against the joint dangers of deist materialism and the extreme immaterialism of the Tory philosophers such as Berkeley. Bishop Warburton described Baxter as "a great genius," whose metaphysics was unjustly neglected and "infinitely" superior to Berkeley's "miserable sophisms." Baxter's system emphasized the most committed form of voluntarism, for since matter was always and everywhere utterly inert, His subjects could see that "God hath not given the reigns of the world out of his hands, nor planted the laws by which it is governed, in brute matter."^[62]

By choosing Baxter as his main enemy, Priestley could blacken court Whig naturalists, such as Samuel Clarke and Henry Pemberton, with the sins of their Scottish contemporary. They had all succumbed to the hypochondriac fear of what Priestley called "the contagion of matter." Priestley replied that matter was the source of life, not death. In the Disquisitions he implied that Newton's immediate circle of interpreters had betrayed their master's legacy. Their false conception of matter defined

[62] Priestley, Disquisitions, 8, 66, 31-32. For Warburton on Baxter and Berkeley, see A. C. Fraser, ed., Works of George Berkeley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1901), 3:400; S. C. Rome, "The Scottish Refutation of Berkeley's Immaterialism," Philosophy and Phenomenological Reseach 3 (1943): 313-325. For Baxter on God's power, see Andrew Baxter, An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul (London, 1733), 45, and compare ibid., 11 on inertia and "a new theory of matter."

body as the mere object of divine will, rather than the noble seat of activity in the world. His controversies with Price in the 1770s concentrated on the propriety of Priestley's rewording of Newtonian utterances in the Opticks. A direct assault on Newtonian orthodoxy was a very dangerous strategy. As John Yolton has shown, controversies soon flared in the public sheets about the relative merits of Priestley's materialism and its Newtonian enemies. Contributors to The London Review and The Monthly Review during 1775 strenuously debated the mortalism and materialism they found in Priestley's new version of Hartley. Newtonian authority was satirized by Priestley's friends: "Dr. Clarke was confessedly so merely a reasoning machine, that he would almost tempt one to think that matter might think and that he himself was a living proof of it."^[63] In his own succession of defenses, Priestley implied instead that with the new lessons of experimental philosophy and reformed religion it was possible to purify Newton's doctrine of its more corrupt implications, notably those about the impenetrability and passivity of bodies. From an early age, Priestley had greeted new phenomena in the laboratory with the exclamation: "Oh, had Sir Isaac Newton seen such an experiment!" Indeed, in his Disquisitions Priestley argued that a strict application of Newton's rules of reasoning, to which he professed "a uniform and rigorous adherence," was precisely the strategy needed to show how little ground there was to the orthodox notion of inert matter. "The principles of Newtonian philosophy were no sooner known that it was seen how few, in comparison, of the phenomena of nature, were owing to solid matter, and how much to powers." Hence Priestley's use of the "nutshell" image to describe the quantity of solid matter in the world. He treated the transmission of Newtonian natural philosophy as he did any other important and established doctrine: he contrasted the purity of an original revelation with the subsequent corruption of the creed due to the interests of its interpreters.^[64]

[63] Priestley, Disquisitions, 170-173 on Andrew Baxter, Matho; or The Cosmotheoria Puerilis, 2d ed., 2 vols. (London, 1745), 2:212. For a critique of Newton's interpreters, see Disquisitions, 112 on the "rigid immaterialists"; for remarks on the Opticks, see ibid., 114 and Priestley, Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity (London, 1778), 8-9, 26-31, 231, 237. For assaults on Priestley and his defense, see Yolton, Thinking Matter, 117, which cites The London Review of English and Foreign Ligature, November 1775, 564.

[64] Timothy Priestley, Funeral Sermon Occasioned by the Death of the Late Joseph Priestley (London, 1805), 42-43; Disquisitions, 1-2, 5-7, 17. For Priestley's defense of his own version of natural philosophy against critics, see Priestley to Bretland, 7 March 1773, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 116-118, and Priestley to Kenrick, June 1778, in Free discussion, 183.

Priestley used exactly the same strategy in his analysis of the true idea of matter and the true idea of the soul. Both involved this appeal to the history of pristine truth and subsequent decay into error. Both could be restored by an appeal to the authority of experimental philosophy. It is important to emphasize the significance of this "historical method" in the philosophy of reform. We have already seen the way Bentham used Priestley's account of the history of philosophy in his own critique of Blackstone in the 1770s. Priestley's technique was useful because it showed how to establish truth against the errors of what Bentham baptized "sinister interests." The work that established the true pneumatology was coextensive with the work that analyzed the dangers of established interests. Priestley argued that "an opinion, and especially an opinion adopted by great numbers of mankind, is to be considered as any other fact in history, for it cannot be produced without an adequate cause, and is therefore a proper object of philosophical inquiry." This set up a very close connection between the philosophy of mind and the correction of error. A proper philosophy of mind would simultaneously correct these errors and explain their source. Thus this philosophy contested the orthodoxies of immaterialism by writing the history of immaterialism.^[65]

The events of the 1770s show how this therapeutic historiography worked. It was during this period that Priestley broke with the dogmas of immaterialism and then reflected on his conversion experience. He told his fellow rational dissenter Caleb Rotheram that only after 1775, when he began working on an edition of Hartley to accompany his experiments at Bowood, did he recognize that the doctrine of the immaterial soul "had been imported into Christianity" and was "the foundation of the capital corruptions of our religion." The scale of this break is most marked in the comparison between Priestley's Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, composed at Daventry Academy in the 1750s and completed in early 1772, and the doctrines of the Disquisitions, written in Wiltshire in 1776-1777 to defend his interpretation of Hartley and Newton. In the earlier text, matter was characterized as "sluggish and inert," while God was an ominpotent and omnipresent "immaterial being or spirit." In the latter text, God was "far from being immaterial" and matter was in no way different from the dynamic conception of spirit. In the Institutes, the doctrine of the "sleep of the soul" as a separate

[65] Rutt, 5:15 and 480; see Margaret Canovan, "The Irony of History: Priestley's Rational Theology," Price-Priestley Newsletter 4 (1980): 16-25. For Bentham on "sinister interests," see Harrison, Bentham, 200-206.

immaterial substance was stoutly defended, while by the later 1770s Priestley argued that this view was the basis of false religion.^[66] Both in his Disquisitions and in his debates with Richard Price in 1777-1778, he then analyzed the process by which this false view of the soul had commanded such authority. Characteristically, this analysis took the form of therapeutic history. Priestley said that in its pristine form the soul was "conceived to be an aerial or an igneous substance," "what we should now call an attenuated form of matter. " What had gone wrong? The defenders of priestcraft had realized that this original and truthful account would imply that "the soul and the body being in reality the same kind of matter must die together." So dualism was invented to keep mortalism at bay and the wrong authority in power. Both Locke and Descartes were authors of this falsehood. The Scottish philosophers of Common Sense were merely the most recent defenders of this corruption, and Bentham applauded this assault on the interests of Thomas Reid and his allies. Finally, when pneumatics, optics, and electricity demonstrated just how powerful matter could be, the resources were available for a philosophically authoritative attack on immaterialism. His experiments showed that "spirits" were indeed developed from rarer forms of matter, and so returned the pneumatology of the philosophers to its original truth.^[67]

This philosophy posed as a restoration of pristine truths established through rational analysis of mind and controlled experiments on body. It carried a history of civil society and of the doctrines that society had produced. All this made the philosophers look like a new sect. Any new sect needed sacred texts, well-established authorities, and a means of proselytizing. Both Priestley and Bentham spoke the language of sectarianism. New "saints" were found, new scriptures were edited. For example, during the 1770s Priestley produced his heavily edited version of Hartley's revelation of the powers of mind. He also made a remarkable new use of the natural philosophy of the Jesuit Roger Boscovich, who had argued for a model of matter as a network of point centers of forces. Both the treatment of Hartley and that of Boscovich were controversial because many protested against the new meanings Priestly found in these texts. Just as Priestley was forced to defend his rereading of Hartley against criticisms from Price, so he was forced to defend his use of Boscovich against the comments of fellow dissenters and those of

[66] Priestley to Caleb Rotheram, April 1778, in Rutt, 1:314-315; Priestley, Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, vol. 1 (London, 1772), 15-16, 156-159; Disquisitions, 16, 145-146; compare Priestley, Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind (London, 1775), xx.

[67] Priestley, Disquisitions, 72, 170-173; Free Discussion, 262-268.

the author himself. Boscovich met Priestley in 1775 and they discussed shared views of the penetrability of matter and the relation of body and power. Priestley then combined his own pneumatics, the views of John Michell on the forces innate in matter, and Boscovich's doctrine that "matter consists of powers only, without any substance" and published them in 1777. The Jesuit was horrified. He wrote to Shelburne protesting Priestley's use of his ideas to prove materialism and mortalism. Priestley was equally angry at the danger this posed to his relationship with his patron, and told Boscovich that "I have not made you an accomplice" in establishing the principles of philosophical materialism. Boscovich was unconvinced by these "impieties and absurdities."^[68] The life of body and the death of the soul were the most important principles which Priestley sought to establish through these editions. He made two shifts of emphasis in his interpretation of Hartley. First, he chose to emphasize Hartley's argument that "the whole man is of some uniform composition" rather than spelling out in detail the mechanism of vibration which Hartley used to explicate the process of thought. An ontology of pneumatic powers could do the work hitherto performed by an aether. The uniformity of body effaced the division between matter and spirit and guaranteed the truth of mortalism. Priestley told Price that powers of thought "reside in the organized body itself and therefore must be suspended till the time when the organization shall be restored." Mortalism was a central doctrine because it was the best way to guarantee the proper faith and the proper civic philosophy. So, secondly, Priestley swept aside Hartley's reservations about mortalism. Hartley's text argued that if body "could be endued with the most simple kinds of sensation," then it might also "arrive at all that intelligence of which the human mind is possessed." But he also pointed out that "the immateriality of the soul has little or no connexion with its immortality." Priestley disagreed. To show from pneumatics that the soul was material was to show that it was as mortal as body. This demonstration was a precondition of the proper conduct of philosophy and the proper conduct of moral life.^[69]

[68] For Priestley and Boscovich, see Priestley, History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light and Colours (London, 1772), 390, 393-394; Disquisitions, xii and 11; Priestley to Bretland, 7 March 1773, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 117; Priestley to Boscovich, 19 August 1778 and Boscovich to Priestley, 17 October 1778, ibid., 166-171.

[69] Priestley, Hartley's Theory, xx; Priestley to Caleb Rotheram, 31 May 1774, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 146. For Hartley and mortalism, see Free Discussion, xvi; Hartley, Observations on Man, part l, 511-512.

THE USES OF THE DEAD

Ultimately, the lessons of a philosophy of mind and body were made manifest at death. As has been argued, Hardey's system was at least as important for Priestley because of its account of life in the world to come. The combination of philosophical materialism and conjectural history implied a revised account of a future state. The rational subject would find consolation and hope in the prospects of general enlightenment rather than an individual fate. Visionary accounts of society's advance were consequences of this revised account of the progress of reason. Philosophical materialism argued that body and soul were indistinguishable in life. Orthodox pneumatology argued that the two substances became separated at death. So the materialists needed to define their own art of making a good end. For the pious, the idealized setting of the deathbed showed the superiority of secure faith over the darkness of irreligion. The existence of spirit was meant to sustain important moral sanctions. The stories told of the horrors of impious suffering, or of deathbed conversions, were important elements in the contest with materialism. Bentham was extremely critical of the force of these anecdotes: rational subjects "should be exempt from those horrors—from those pains of mind... infused... by the opium of the existence of man in a life to come." This "opium" should be replaced by a prospective account of the development of the new social and intellectual order, wisely guided by expert managers and gradually advancing toward a rational utopia. Optimism became a regulative principle for the reformer's life, and the future reputation of his philosophical sect took the place of the soul's immortality. This was a commonplace among the philosophes. Diderot put the point pithily: "posterity is to the philosopher what the next world is to the religious believer." Bentham echoed the sentiment at the end of his life: "my fear was—lest by dying... my fellow men... should be deprived of the happiness which it is my hope thereby to give them."^[70]

[70] For Hartley's millennium, see R. Marsh, "The Second Part of Hartley's System," Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959): 264-273; Fruchtman, Apocalyptic Politics of Price and Priestley, 16-20. For Bentham on the future see "J. B.'s Instructions for Living Happily or Not At All" (1831), in Mack, Bentham, 213. For enlightenment and orthodox immortalism in France, see Bernard Groethuysen, The Bourgeois: Catholicism versus capitalism in 18th-Century France (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1968), 50-77 and McManners, Death and the Enlightenment, 148-190; Diderot's remark is cited at p. 168. For an important treatment of the role of "posterity" in the formation of the intellectual, see Daniel Roche, "Talent, Reason and Sacrifice: The Physician during the Enlightenment," in Medicine and Society in France, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 66-88.

This implied that accounts of the future state were important items of a politics of philosophy. By the 1790s, it was obvious that the reformers' account of death had at least two political consequences. First, despite their own criticisms of the sanctions of public executions, many reformers seemed to endorse the judicial murders of the Revolution. As early as 1790, Jacobin pamphlets published in Birmingham debated Priestley's mortalism. The following year, just days after the Birmingham riot, the cartoonist James Gillray imagined a conversation between George III, facing death on the scaffold, and Priestley, ministering to the condemned monarch. "We must all die once," Priestley is envisaged as saying; "in fact a Man ought to be glad of the opportunity of dying, if by that means he can serve his country in bringing about a glorious Revolution. As to your soul, or any thing after death, don't trouble your self about that; depend on it, the idea of a future state is all an imposition." It was held that materialism licensed murder by making men machines. During the Revolutionary decade the regicide Terror was all too easily displayed as an inevitable consequence of the philosophy espoused by writers such as Beddoes, Godwin, or Erasmus Darwin. Since these materialists banned spirits from nature, anti-Jacobins could make fun of their enemies by populating the world with vengeful ghosts. Reformers would be haunted by their victims and by the souls which they had denied.^[71] The second consequence of the reformer's philosophy of mind was the emphasis placed on the confrontation between the enlightened, rational mind and the prospects of the future. When he answered Burke in 1791, Priestley ended his response with an account of a blissful future. He drew a vivid contrast between his own "pleasing dream" and the darker apocalypse prophesied by his adversary. Priestley lampooned Burke's self-appointed role as establishment's mes-

[71] For Priestley's mortalism in Birmingham, see John Money, Experience and Identity: Birmingham and the West Midlands, 1760-1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), 145-148; for Gillray's cartoon, see James Gillray, "The Hopes of the Party Prior to July 14th," 19 July 1791, in The Satirical Etchings of James Gillray, ed. Draper Hill (New York: Dover, 1976), no. 21. Compare "The Progress of Man: A Didactic Poem," in Edmonds, Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, 102-110, and this satire by David Davis, printed in., Priestley, 99:

Here lie at rest
In oaken chest
Together packed most nicely,
The bones and brains,
Flesh, blood and veins,
And soul of Dr. Priestley.

siah. "If, in these circumstances, you can save the church, as well as the state, you will deserve no less than canonization, and St. Edmund will be the greatest name in the calendar." Against the deceitful pieties of the conservatives, the reformers argued that confidence and optimism must be pursued in life and demonstrated in death. Both Bentham and Priestley provided exemplary instances of the right way to die. These instances were subsequently published as demonstrations of the right principles of philosophy and as aids to the dissemination of those principles.^[72]

Both Priestley and Bentham recognized the death of Socrates as the origin of philosophy and as the proper model for their own decease. The Socratic model referred both to the sufferings of the intellectual under the burdens of persecution and to the future hope of an immortal reputation. Priestley's son sent a graphic description of his father's last days to Theophilus Lindsey with the express purpose of proving the consistency and effectiveness of the doctrines of unitarianism and philosophical materialism. The account emphasized the sustained labor of composition, publication, and experiment which Priestley continued up to the moment of his death. "He had the satisfaction of witnessing the gradual spread of his religious opinions and the fullest conviction that he should prevail over his opponents in chemistry. He looked forward with the greatest pleasure to future exertions in both these fields." His final actions included plans for improvements to his laboratory and the study of the scriptural account of the raising of Lazarus, paying specific attention to the gospel's emphasis on the empirical basis of the story: "many of the Jews which had seen the things which Jesus did, believed on him." His very last deed involved correcting the proofs of a pamphlet on the comparison between Jesus and Socrates. Here virtue was displayed as care for the future distribution of rational philosophy and the strenuous exertions of the naturalist.^[73]

Bentham's death was equally exemplary. As is well known, at the age of 21 Bentham planned that "if I should chance to die of any such disease" whose study would advance "the art of Surgery or science of Physic... by observations to be made in the opening of my body," then

[72] Priestley, Letters to Burke, 153-154, and Fruchtman, Apocalyptic Politics of Prize and Priestley, 83.

[73] For an annotated account of the death, see Jack Lindsay, ed., Autobiography of Joseph Priestley (Bath: Adams and Dart, 1970), 133-139, and Joseph Priestley, Socrates and Jesus Compared (Northumberland, Pa., 1803); Thomas Cooper to Benjamin Smith Barton, 6 February 1804, in Schofield, Scientific Autobiography of Priestley, 321.

Fordyce or some other physician or surgeon should be given the body for an anatomy, "to the intent and with the desire that Mankind may reap some small benefit in and by my decease." During the 1820s, he pursued research with the anatomists John Armstrong and Edward Grainger on processes of preservation, work that culminated in the production of Southwood Smith's "The Uses of the Dead to the Living" (1824) and Bentham's own "Auto-icon; or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living" in 1831. The following year Bentham confirmed his original provision for a postmortem dissection and laid down strict instructions for the preservations of his body. The body was to be displayed at future meetings of "my personal friends and other Disciples"; a codicil by Southwood Smith stated that the anatomy was to be used "to communicate curious, interesting and highly important knowledge, and secondly to show that the primitive horror at dissection originates in ignorance and is kept up by misconception and that the human body when dissected instead of being an object of disgust is as much more beautiful than any other piece of mechanism as it is more curious and wonderful." In the "Auto-icon," Bentham amplified this account of the utility of a corpse, suggesting ingenious machines that could animate "Dialogues of the Dead," notably between his own body and that of Socrates on the history of the principle of happiness.^[74]

In every respect, Bentham's body was used as a means of instruction and demonstration. Southwood Smith's famous performance over the corpse of his master at Grainger's Anatomy Theatre in June 1832 and the Anatomy Act of that year were irresistible symbols of "the uses of the dead." It was reported that during the postmortem, Bentham's features were dramatically illuminated by a chance thunderstorm and "rendered almost vital by the reflection of the lightning playing over them." Disciples such as James Mill and his colleagues were there as mute witnesses.

With the feelings which touch the heart in the contemplation of departed greatness, and in the presence of death, there mingled a sense of the power which that lifeless body seemed to be exercising in the conquest of

[74] Bentham's will, 24 August 1769, Correspondence of Bentham l:136; Thomas South-wood Smith, "The Uses of the Dead to the Living," Westminster Review 2 (1824): 59-97; C. F. A. Marmoy, "The Auto-icon of Jeremy Bentham at University College London," Medical History 2 (1958): 77-86; Crimmins, "Bentham on Religion," 105-108.

prejudice for the public good, thus cooperating with the triumphs of the spirit by which it had been animated.^[75]

From his earliest works on law reform, Bentham had connected the well-arranged "demonstrations" of rational argument with the theatrical "demonstrations" of the public lecturers. Southwood Smith's anatomy was a demonstration in both these senses. In common with the general strategy of the reformers, it was simultaneously the act of an expert in the principles of mind and of an investigator of the principles of body. The doctrine of mind explained how education and reform would work, the doctrine of body provided what educators and reformers should know. The examination of the means by which these initial aims were transmuted under the criticisms of conservatives and the realities of patronage and power has many important implications for further inquiry into the work of reformers in the nineteenth century. It has been suggested that behind the apparent simplicities of utilitarian and unitarian activists of the 1820s and 1830s lies a complex philosophy of mind and body designed to account for extraordinary future developments in the social body. Development of society demanded relentless observation of its members' habits. The ensemble of subjects' bodily and mental habits which observers could survey would replace old models of matter and spirit. With resources drawn from the principles of utility and association, educators and civil servants such as James Mill could combine a confidence about the future with a presentation of the mind as an observable network of matters of fact. New disciplines appeared: psychology, political economy, statistics. Each of these disciplines explicitly relied on the contrast between the pathological complexities of the social order and the luminous simplicities of the mental principles on which these diseases depended and from which experts could learn the means of cure. Under the care of these experts, it was intended that the whole nation become an inspection house, a Panopticon where the mentalities of citizens would be made clearly visible to the inspectors' gaze. "If I had time to write a book," Mill claimed in 1817, "I would make the human mind as plain as the road from Charing Cross to St. Paul's." The following year, pursuing this goal of clarity, Mill finished his article on the sub-

[75] For Southwood Smith's lecture and its effects, see Thomas Southwood Smith, Lec ture Delivered over the Remains of Jeremy Bentham (London, 1831); Lewes, Southwood Smith, 45-47; M.J. Durey, "Bodysnatchers and Benthamites: The Implications of the Dead Body Bill for the London Schools of Anatomy, 1820-1842," London Journal, 1976:200-225.

ject of colonies for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. There he added notorious remarks on the wisdom of rational birth control as a solution to the crisis of population: "if the superstitions of the nursery were discarded, and the principle of utility kept steadily in view, a solution might not be very difficult to be found." So, for the reformers, the principles of a philosophy of mind would become principles for the management of individual bodies and of entire populations. These were projected as disciplines which, as Foucault observed, "characterized a power whose highest function was perhaps no longer to kill but to invest life through and through."^[76]

[76] James Mill to Francis Place, 6 December 1817, in William Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 121; Mill, "General Remarks on the Principle of Population," in Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Edinburgh, 1824). 3:261. For Mill, Bentham, and Malthus, see Patricia James, Population Malthus: His Life and Times (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 382-388. For the emergence of new disciplines of the body and of population, see Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (Har-mondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), 139; Ian Hacking, "How Should We Do the History of Statistics ?" Ideology and Consciousness 8 (1981): 15-26; T. M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).