1. Cf. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; rpt., London, 1984), 130: "Pollution rules, by contrast with moral rules, are unequivocal. They do not depend on intention or a nice balancing of rights and duties. The only material question is whether a forbidden contact has taken place or not."

2. Gerald Graft, "Co-optation" in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York, 1989), 169.

3. Ibid., 170.

4. Herbert Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance" in Robert Paul Wolff, Bar-rington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston, 1969), 81. Subsequent citations to this essay, indicated by the abbreviation "RT," will be given in the text.

5. Marcuse does not deny that art can carry a "regressive political message;' as in the case of Dostoevsky, but since his conception of art is a formalistic one he is able to claim that "the regressive political content is absorbed, aufgehoben in the artistic form: the work as literature" (ibid., 89).

6. In Marcuse's 1960 preface to Reason and Revolution, both art and dialectical thought are linked by the "search for an 'authentic language'— the language of negation as the Great Refusal to accept the rules of a game in which the dice are loaded" (Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory [Boston, 1960], x). On Marcuse's conception of rationality, see Alex Callinicos, "Repressive Toleration Revisited: Mill, Marcuse, Maclntyre" in Aspects of Toleration: Philosophical Studies, ed. John Horton and Susan Mendus (London, 1985).

7. See Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, 1971).

8. Catherine Gallagher, "Marxism and the New Historicism," in The New Historicism, ed. Veeser, 42.

9. Here I retain Marcuse's term for the sake of convenience but add quotation marks because the term perhaps attributes too much self-consciousness to hegemonic forces.

10. George Orwell, "Politics vs. Literature," in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (London, 1950), 64.

11. Empirically, it can be urged that cultures are not so monolithic as those who talk about "conceptual systems," or the closely related "discursive practices" and "interpretive communities," seem to assume (see Graff, "Co-optation," 175-80). On a more abstract plane, it can be argued that incommensurability is a self-refuting concept, or one that always anchors itself in one reality while denying the existence of another (see Hilary Putnam, "Philosophers and Human Understanding," in Realism and Reason [Cambridge, 1983]; Oscar Kenshur, "The Rhetoric of Incommensurability," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42 [1984]: 375-81; Paisley Livingston, Literary Knowledge: Humanistic Inquiry and the Philosophy of Science [Ithaca, N.Y., 1988]).

12. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 337.

13. See Richard Rorty, "Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,' in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, 1982)

14. On this, see Robert Markley and Oscar Kenshur, "An Exchange on Ideological Criticism," Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 647-68.

15. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan , ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmonds-worth, England, 1968), 140; further references to this work, abbreviated L, will be included in the text.

16. J. W. N. Watkins, Hobbes's System of Ideas: A Study in the Political Significance of Philosophical Theories (London, 1965), 14, 15-16.

17. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970; rpt., New York, 1982), xxi.

18. Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore, 1982), 3.

19. I make such a comparison in greater detail in "Demystifying the Demystifiers: Metaphysical Snares of Ideological Criticism," Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 335-53.

20. For an analysis of another aspect of Hobbes's ideological relationship to the Puritans in the context of later developments in moral theory, see Oscar Kenshur, "'The Tumour of Their Own Hearts': Relativism, Aesthetics, and the Rhetoric of Demystification," in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick, N.J., 1993).

21. Francis Bacon, New Organon, in The New Organon and Related Writings, ed. Fulton H. Anderson (New York, 1960), book 1, aphorism 50. Further references to this work, abbreviated NO, will be included in the text.

22. See Richard Foster Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth-Century England, rev. ed. (1961; rpt. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965), 115-18 and passim. See also Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford, 1965), chapter 3. More recent scholarship, notably that of Charles Webster (The Great lnstau-ration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626-1660 [New York, 1976]), has shown that the "Baconianism" of the Puritans was really a matter of various "Baconianisms,' various ways of interpreting the new scientific philosophy on the basis of its ideological usefulness to specific political factions among the Puritans. Such discriminations, pointing as they do to the fact that links between politics and epistemology are constructed by interested parties in specific historical contexts, will fit nicely into my overall critique. Meanwhile, for the immediate purposes of a relatively schematic argument, I trust that my monolithic treatment of the Puritans serves a heuristic function without being at all misleading.

23. See Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, 112-13.

24. The fact that bitter political enemies could reject the established learning with a single rhetorical voice has its obverse in the fact that the new science was embraced by groups of varying religious and political stripes. See Michael Hunter , Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge, 1981), chapter 5.

25. John Dury, The Reformed School, in Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of Learning , ed. Charles Webster, Cambridge Texts and Studies in the History of Education (Cambridge, 1970), 150.

26. In chapter 3 we will see how Pierre Bayle, a later writer in the Calvinist tradition, will combine two other apparently irreconcilable approaches, Cartesian rationalism and Pyrrhonistic skepticism, in an argument for religious toleration.

27. Elsewhere, in discussing the enthusiasts' mode of biblical interpretation, Hobbes, again in rhetoric reminiscent of that used in conventional attacks on Scholasticism, will characterize their failure to interpret the parts in the context of the whole as a kind of willful obfuscation: "by casting atomes of Scripture, as dust before mens eyes, [the enthusiasts] make every thing more obscure than it is" (L, 626).

28. In reference to the contemporary mode of ideological criticism that associates Hobbes's Iogocentrism with his authoritarianism, it is worth noting that Hobbes's attack on “nesses," “tudes" and "ties" is part of the general attack on the so-called occult qualities, an attack linked, in turn, to the nominalism with which Hobbes and other seventeenth-century philosophers—dualists as well as materialists—rejected the philosophical realism that the Scholastics had inherited from Aristotle. That is to say, Hobbes, like other nominalists, rejected the notion that words denoted essences. His attempt to smooth over the considerable differences between the Scholastics and the enthusiasts thus utilizes not only a rejection of spiritual entities but also the rejection of an essentialist theory of language.

29. Jonathan Swift, "The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit," in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. (Oxford, 1939-68), 1:176-77.

30. But Swift's defense of humanism and authority did not require him to defend the Scholastics. Thus he could give an edge to his attack on the modern scholar Bentley by linking him to the speculative thinking of the Scholastics. See Battle of the Books, in Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Davis, 1:145.

31. To be more precise, with respect to the early modern period, conflict gives rise to skepticism, and skepticism gives rise to epistemology. See Richard H. Popkin's discussion of the sixteenth-century revival of skepticism, and its relationship to seventeenth-century epistemology, in The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979).

32. Michel de Montaigne, "Apologie de Raimond Sebond," in Essais, ed. Maurice Rat, 2 vols. (Paris, 1962), 1:559. (Translations mine throughout, except where otherwise indicated. Archaic French orthography has been modernized throughout.)

33. The fact that ideological valences are not intrinsic to theories allows, as we will see in chapters 2 and 3, not only for diverse ideological uses for the same theory but also for a possible divergence between, on the one hand, the political valence that an author attributes to his or her views and, on the other hand, the ultimate political tendency of his or her text. That is to say, the fluidity of the relationship between theory and politics allows not only various political deployments of theories but also varying degrees of disingenuousness concerning a given explicit deployment. Consequently, the interpretive procedure that will be applied in the remaining chapters will not be one that contents itself with showing how authors assign new ideological valences to theories; instead it will strive to show how those assignments relate to larger patterns of commitments embodied in the texts.

34. See Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, 1970), 98-99. In offering his distinction, Habermas clearly recognizes that the "preideolog-ical" is no less concerned with legitimation than is the "ideological." The legitimating function of the preideological is merely carried out uncritically—that is, without any epistemological self-legitimation. Compare this with Jean-Francois Lyotard's distinction between "narrative knowledge" and science. Lyotard claims that since narrative is implicitly self-legitimat-ing, it is relatively tolerant, and that since science requires the rejection of competing modes of knowledge, it is intolerant and imperialistic (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi [Minneapolis, 1984], 27). Lyotard seems to ignore the historical fact that "narrative tolerance," to the extent that it exists, is attributable precisely to an absence of competing narratives and that it is precisely the challenge of competing narratives or the impetus to dethrone established legitimations that gives rise to the epistemological self-justification that he associates with science. Insofar as Lyotard sees science as intrinsically tyrannical, his view resembles Ryan's, not only in the political valence that it finds in objectivism but in the apparently essentialist analysis by virtue of which this valence is assigned.

35. Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979), 189-90 (emphasis added). My indebtedness to Giddens's analysis extends beyond this citation alone.

36. Steven Shapin, "The Social Uses of Science," in The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge, 1980), 131.

37. Shapin, "Social Uses of Science," 95-96. I need hardly mention that Shapin's argument for contextualism in the history of science applies equally to the history of philosophy, literature, music, and so on.

38. See, for example, Thorkild Jacobsen's persuasive ideological analysis of the Babylonian creation myths in his Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion (New Haven, Conn., 1976), chapter 6.

39. See Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689-1720 (Hassocks, England, 1976), 25.

40. Paul Q. Hirst, "Althusser and the Theory of Ideology," Economy and Society 5(1976): 396-97.

41. For a recent critique of ideological essentialism in feminist aesthetics, see Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).

42. Marcuse presumably did not have the benefit of such analyses when, as in the passage quoted above (pp. 9-10), he declared that art "stands against history, which has been the history of oppression," and that "art subjects reality to laws other than the established one, to the laws of the Form which creates a negation of the established [reality]."

43. For a prominent example of this tendency, see Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago, 1980).

44. This is essentially what I take Shapin to have been arguing in the passage quoted above on pp. 39-40. Of course, I do not deny that practitioners of a given discipline may argue that its criteria are formalist or intellectualist, but I am assuming that there are recognizable higher-order criteria on the basis of which local or fashionable criteria may be challenged.

1. See Louis I. Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of Joh, Dryden: Studies in Some Aspects of Seventeenth-Century Thought (1934; rpt., Ann Arbor, 1956).

2. See Thomas H. Fujimara, "Dryden's Religio Laici: An Anglican Poem," PMLA 76 (1961): 205-17; Elias J. Chiasson, "Dryden's Apparent Scepticism in Religio Laici," Harvard Theological Review 54 (1961): 207-21; and Phillip Harth, Contexts of Dryden's Thought (Chicago, 1968), chapters 3-6.

3. The last two of these designations represent two possible ways of characterizing the position of William Empson. See William Empson, "Dryden's Apparent Scepticism," Essays in Criticism 20 (1970): 172-81, and "A Deist Tract by Dryden," Essays in Criticism 25 (1975): 74-100.

4. See G. Douglas Atkins, The Faith of Joh, Dryden (Lexington, Ky., 1980).

5. Harth, Contexts, chapters 3-6.

6. Robert E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 64-65.

7. Steven N. Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton, 1984), 104.

8. The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1958), 2:322, 11. 447-50. Subsequent line citations will be given in the text. In this, and in all subsequent quotations from Religio Laici, the italics are Dryden's.

9. Harth, Contexts, 67.

10. Ibid.

11. I use "Deist" (capitalized) to refer to the interlocutor identified as "the Deist" in the poem.

12. Harth, Contexts, 87.

13. Empson, "A Deist Tract by Dryden."

14. Father [Richard] Simon, Critical History of the Old Testament, trans. Henry Dickinson (London, 1682), 1: Preface.

15. Ibid., 3:118.

16. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, book 5, chapter 22. I quote from The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, 5 vols., ed. W. Speed Hill (Cambridge, Mass., 1977-82), 2:102-3.

17. Lord Herbert of Cherbury's "De Religione Laici," ed. and trans. Harold R. Hutcheson (New Haven, Conn., 1944), 99-101. In the Latin original, the truths are transcribed in the forum interius, which Hutcheson translates as "conscience." He justifies this translation on the ground that Herbert makes no explicit distinction between conscientia and forum interius. Elsewhere, in fact (p. 88), Herbert says that the common notions, or catholic truths, of deism "sunt enim in ipsa mente coelitus descriptae," and Hutche-son translates mente as “understanding." Although Herbert, unlike the eighteenth-century deists, held to an innatist concept of reason, he was not so precise as to require that it be engraved or imprinted in a specific organ or faculty of the mind. In seventeenth as "understanding." Although Herbert, unlike the eighteenth-century deists, held to an innatist concept of reason, he was not so -century usage, the Latin conscientia and the French and English "conscience" refer in general to internal mental events as well as carrying both the later sense of "conscience" as an internal moral censor and of "consciousness." I have taken the liberty of altering Hutcheson's translation from the generalized "conscience" to the vague "within us" in order to avoid confusion—not only because Hutcheson uses "conscience" in an archaic sense that would be unfamiliar to many modern readers but also because Bayle, as we will see in chapter 3, uses the term "conscience" in a special technical sense that he stipulates. For Herbert (as for Descartes), intuitive knowledge is not different from rational knowledge but is, rather, the core of philosophical rationalism. Herbert conceives of illumination through the natural light to be internal or innate, but he has no need to identify it consistently with a particular organ or faculty such as the heart or the intellect. I have attempted to render Hutcheson's vagueness regarding the locus of natural illumination by varying my own formulations.

18. Norman Sykes, Church and State: In England in tire Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1934), 346.

19. See Harth, Contexts, 107-8. Cf. Ernest Campbell Mossner, Bishop Butler and the Age of Reason: A Study in the History of Thought (New York, 1936), 27: "It was not uncommon for divines accepted as orthodox to treat Natural Religion in the body of a theological work and then to add, as it were, an appendix on Revealed Religion." For a prominent member of this genre, although one in which the defense of revealed religion is rather more than an appendix, see Richard Baxter, The Reasons of the Christian Religion (London, 1667).

20. Of course, Saint Paul's remarks (Romans 2:14-15) about the salvation of pagans were ipso facto orthodox, but as Norman Sykes observes, in From Sheldon to Secker: Aspects of English Church History, 1660-1768 (Cambridge, 1959), 159, "whereas hitherto, 'since the time of Augustine (De Spiritu et Littera, c. 27) the orthodox interpretation had applied this verse (sic ) either to the Gentile converts or to the favoured few among the heathen who had extraordinary divine assistance,' it was now elevated into an universal principle." (Sykes, in turn, is quoting Mark Pattison, "Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750," in Essays and Reviews [London, 1861], 273.)

21. Mossner, Bishop Butler and the Age of Reason, 27.

22. For a recent example of such an objection, directed not at Mossner but at more recent scholars, see Roger L. Emerson, "Latitudinarianism and the English Deists" in Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment: Essays Honoring Alfred Owen Aldridge, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (Newark, Del., 1987).

23. James Anderson Winn, in his recent biography of Dryden (John Dryden and His World [New Haven, Conn., 1987], 379), makes much of Dryden's discussion of the mystery of the Incarnation as evidence that the poet's expressions of Christian faith are sincere.

24. See David Berman, "Deism, Immortality, and the Art of Theological Lying;' in Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment, ed. Lemay.

25. For a recent discussion of this phenomenon, see ibid. See also Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), esp. chapter 12.

26. John Toland, Tetradymus (London, 1720), 96.

27. From a purely theological perspective, it would be hard to make sense of Dryden's position. If salvation can be achieved without belief in the Incarnation and the Trinity, then it is hard to see why the deists should be excoriated for denying us access to these doctrines.

28. In moving from the moral to the political, from the New World to the Old, I have followed the sequence reflected in the structure of Dryden's poem. In so doing, I have undoubtedly reversed the chronological development of deistic ideas. See Hutcheson's comment in Lord Herbert of Cherbury's "De Religione Laici," 57: "Deism did not develop as a revolutionary philosophy; it was the outgrowth of an attempt to solve, at first within the limits of Christian orthodoxy, the problem of sectarian persecution."

29. Ibid., 127 (emphasis added).

30. Ibid., 119.

31. By the same token, Dryden's deployment of scriptural deism is not presented as evidence of his own personal essence—as evidence, for example, that he is an opportunist rather than a sincere believer.

32. Dryden, Poems, ed. Kinsley, l:310.

33. Ibid., 1:306.

34. Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry, 121.

35. It may well be that the repressive ideological valence of Dryden's deistic toleration also follows that of the "moderate and tolerant" latitudinarians. See Richard Ashcraft, "Latitudinarianism and Toleration: Historical Myth versus Political History," in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, 1640-1700, ed. Richard Kroll et al. (Cambridge, 1992), 155: "Latitudinarianism is not a moderate middle ground between contending extremes; it is, rather, part of one of the extremes. It is the acceptable face of the persecution of religious dissent."

36. As already indicated, Dryden does argue, in the attack on deism in the first part of the poem (ll. 99-114), that we cannot have an adequate notion of penitence without the revealed doctrine of the Incarnation; but by the time he comes to discuss disputes between Christian confessions and to develop his scriptural deism, this argument seems to have been conveniently forgotten.

1. It is the first two parts that I am examining here. In June of 1687 Bayle published a third part consisting of point-by-point refutations of St. Augustine. In 1688 he added the Supplément du commentaire philosophique, in which he responds to attacks by Pierre Jurieu, his chief antagonist among his fellow Huguenot exiles.

2. John Locke, who evidently drafted his Epistola de Tolerantia (1689) in Amsterdam just weeks after the revocation, employs the same sort of cataloging: "For if it be out of a principle of charity, as they pretend, and love to men's souls, that they deprive them of their estates, maim them with corporal punishments, starve and torment them in noisome prisons, and in the end even take away their lives . . . " (A Letter concerning Toleration, ed. Mario Montuori, trans. William Popple [The Hague, 1963], 9). On the time and place of composition of the Epistola, see Montuori's introduction, p. xv.

3. Pierre Bayle, De la tolérance: Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jésus-Christ "Contrains-les-d'entrer," ed. Jean-Michel Gros (Paris, 1992), 117. The original title began with the words "Commentaire philosophique." The words "De la tolerance" were presumably added to make this new paperback edition—to my knowledge, the first complete edition in French since the eighteenth century—seem less recondite. In the few instances in which I found obvious inaccuracies in the new edition, I have corrected them, using as my source the version that appeared in volume 2 of the Oeuvres diverses, 4 vols. (The Hague, 1727). Subsequent page citations, appearing with the abbreviation CP, will be given in the text.

4. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. (Oxford, 1939-68), 11:132.

5. Even Bayle's use of the adjective diabolique is not metaphorical, in that he is suggesting that the perversion of Christianity to evil deeds may be literally the work of the devil.

6. The version of the title on the title page is longer still, and more polemical, but does not include the entire biblical verse.

7. Lord Herbert of Cherbury's "De Religione Laici," ed. and trans. Harold R. Hutcheson (New Haven, Conn., 1944), 99-101. The passage that I largely paraphrase here is quoted above on pp. 60-61.

8. Eventually, in the Seconde partie (198), Bayle suggests that the term contrainte "en cent autres occasions signifie les empressements de civilité et d'honnêteté," thus implying that compelle should be interpreted as a kind of friendly urging rather than as violent constraint. But this is offered not as a positive exegetical argument but rather as a parenthetical part of an argument against literal interpretation. Indeed, later in the Commentaire (296), he will suggest that the parable may have "des sens mystiques que tout le monde n'est pas obligé d'entendre."

9. This is not to imply that I do not consider Bayle to be a sincere Calvinist. I am stressing political and strategic considerations precisely because being a sincere Calvinist had drastic political implications, and I am assuming that Bayle's overriding concern in the Commentaire is to make the most persuasive possible case for religious toleration.

10. It was on the basis of this similarity and by dint of ignoring the poem's fundamental rationalism that Louis Bredvold evidently was able to convince a generation of Dryden scholars that the Religio Laici was dominated by a proto-Catholic fideistic skepticism. See chapter 2, p. 49.

11. Cf. Bayle, Commentaire philosophique, 277.

12. Although Bayle has said that his commentary will be philosophical rather than exegetical, he does permit himself, in the fourth chapter of the Première partie, to characterize the general morality of the gospels as being inconsistent with coercion. The argument for toleration based on a general interpretation of the nature of Christianity derives most conspicuously from Erasmus. (Cf. Henry Kamen, The Rise of Toleration [London, 1967], 24-27.) Bayle evidently cannot resist bringing in this Erasmian tradition, even though it violates the letter of his renunciation of conventional exegesis. He argues, however, that the gospel morality of peace and charity merely elaborates what we know independently through natural light. This position will be echoed in the article "Tolérance" (by M. Romilli le fils) in the Encyclopédie: " Il nous paraîit inutile d'opposer aux intolérants les principes de l'Evangile, qui ne fait qu'étendre et développer ceux de I'équité naturelle" (Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, 28 vols. [Paris, 2751-72], 26:393). Bayle's treatment of Christian and natural morality will be discussed in the first section of chapter 4 below.

13. This is in fact the repeatedly declared rationale of the Spanish Inquisition. See Bartolemé Bennassar, L'inquisition espagnole XVe-XIXe siècle (Paris, 1979). Bayle sardonically echoes this rationale in the Premiere partie, chapter 9, where he sets forth an imaginary conversation between an early Christian and a Roman magistrate who uses the literal interpretation of compelle intrare as a warrant for suppressing the Christians on the ground that if they had the power they would force the Romans to be baptized. The Christian interlocutor uses the formula of the Inquisition (and of the French persecutors): "Il est vrai monseigneur, que si nous étions les plus forts, nous ne laisserions personne au monde qui ne se fit baptiser; mais en cela paraîtrait notre charité pour le prochain; nous voyons qu'on se damne éternellement, si l'on ne suit notre religion; nous serions donc bien cruels de n'employer pas la contrainte" (163).

14. The most conspicuous alternatives to such a view would be the sort of rationalist minimalism that we have found in Herbert of Cherbury and in Dryden—according to which the few doctrines about which all can agree are the only ones necessary to salvation—or a willingness to accept the notion that conscientious error is punishable but that we are nonetheless not obliged to protect others from the eternal consequences of their errors. Locke, in his Epistola, combines these two alternatives by embracing a minimalist viewpoint but also arguing that, just as we are not responsible for saving others from squandering their wealth or from other temporal imprudence, we are not responsible for preventing them from endangering their eternal souls. See Letter concerning Toleration, passim.

15. For an earlier example of an argument for toleration that wards off pious objections by claiming that God excuses innocent error, see Jean Bodin's Colloquium Heptaplomeres de Rerum Sublimium Arcanis Abditis, ed. Ludovicus Noack (Paris and London, 1857) which, although unpublished until 1857, enjoyed a clandestine vogue during the seventeenth century. (For an English translation, see Jean Bodin, Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime, trans. Marion Kuntz [Princeton, 1975].) Bayle differs from Bodin—or, more precisely, from Bodin's character Senamus—insofar as he is concerned with exculpating actions that are performed in good conscience, whereas Bodin seems to be concerned only with God's acceptance of diverse forms of worship and belief. On Bodin's attitude toward religion, see J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory front Bodin to Freud (New Haven, Conn., 1987), chapter 1.

16. Cf. Elisabeth Labrousse, Bayle, trans. Denys Potts (New York, 1983), 83: "Bayle's solution to the problem of toleration is the opposite of the one usually found. He does not try to deny that heretics are in error in so far as doctrine is concerned."

17. However, as Bayle points out in a later attempt to defend his own orthodoxy, even the paragon of Calvinist orthodoxy, his enemy Pierre Jurieu, asserts the rights of an erring conscience. (See “Réponse aux questions d'un provincial," in Oeuvres diverses, 3:1015a-b.)

18. Here I use the term "toleration" informally to indicate the withholding of moral condemnation. Otherwise, throughout this chapter and chapter 4, I use the term to refer to civil toleration, as opposed to ecclesiastical toleration. Bayle does not object to ecclesiastic intolerance—that is, to the practice of churches to exclude from their communions those whose beliefs depart from orthodoxy. His concern, and the concern of the other writers discussed in chapter 4, is with the issues of civil toleration, comprising the moral question of whether those who wield secular power have the right to attempt to enforce doctrinal conformity as well as the pragmatic question—which will take center stage in chapter 4—of whether such interference with conscience is politically prudent. On the distinction between civil and ecclesiastical toleration, and Bayle's attitudes toward each, see Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1964), 2:520-43.

19. The response concludes with a final sentence (De la tolérance: Commentaire philosophique, 311) that essentially reasserts Bayle's right to try to disabuse the persecutors of their errors, an assertion that, as I have already suggested, is unimpeachable but irrelevant to the actual objection.

20. Walter Rex, Essays on Pierre Bayle and Religious Controversy, Intermational Archives of the History of Ideas, no. 8 (The Hague, 1965), 181.

21. Ibid., 184-85.

22. In fact, when I originally planned this chapter, I thought that Rex was correct.

23. When Bayle dismisses the conventional maxim that "the ways of God are not our ways," he may be seen to be attacking all attempts to turn obscurity into an argument for submission to authority: "vouloir recourir ô la maxime, les voies de Dieu ne sont pas nos voies, c'est en vérité radoter, et qui pis est, jeter toutes les connaissances humaines et même la révélation divine dans le pyrrhonisme le plus détestable" (De la tolerance: Commentaire philosophique, 193).

24. In De Cive, Hobbes employs a very similar technique, quietly embedding "the breach of contracts"—the transgression whose status as invariably illicit is crucial to his political theory—in an exemplary list of crimes that would always violate the "immutable and eternal" laws of nature. (Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: The English Version, ed. Howard Warrender [Oxford, 1983], chapter 3, section 29.)

25. In the "Réponse aux questions d'un provincial," 3:1014a-b, Bayle will restate the paradox of the persecutor's conscience and will resolve it by explicitly stating that the persecutor's ignorance is not invincible.

26. In this respect, it departs from what might be called "pure fideism," which presumably would require that acts of faith not be grounded in rational arguments. Cf. Terence Penelhum, who has observed that Christian fideists who have employed skepticism have likewise found it "essential to maintain that the faith the fideist professes not be offered for reasons" ("Skepticism and Fideism,' in The Skeptical Tradition, ed. Myles Burnyeat [Berkeley, 1983], 301).

27. He cannot avoid outraging at least some of them, including Jurieu

28. Throughout his essay on the Commentaire, Walter Rex demonstrates the extent to which Bayle's theory of toleration is compounded of elements to be found in the tradition of Calvinist rationalism. In this respect Rex's project resembles Harth's contemporaneous attempt to show that the elements of Dryden's Religio Laici are to be found in the tradition of Anglican rationalism. Rex, however, unlike Harth, is willing to recognize that traditional elements can be combined in such a way as to strain the tradition to its breaking point or to transcend it altogether.

29. Since Bayle would later, in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), prove himself to be a consummate practitioner of skeptical techniques, and since commentators have claimed that Bayle saw skepticism as conducive to religious faith, the decisive rejection of skepticism in the Commentaire may seem puzzling. However, as I have shown elsewhere, Bayle consistently presents skepticism in the Dictionnaire as a never-ending search for truth and religious faith not as the end product of skepticism but as an alternative to it. See Oscar Kenshur, "Pierre Bayle and the Structures of Doubt," Eighteenth-Century Studies 21 (1988): 297-315. In this regard at least, the treatment of skepticism in the Commentaire is in no way inconsistent with the later stance.

30. See Bayle's 1682 work Pensées diverses sur la comète, ed. A. Prat, 2 vols (Paris, 1939), 2:5-20.

31. Paul Hazard's assertion that the Commentaire allows one to conclude that "an atheist who believes it his duty to be an atheist is in no wise to be accounted less worthy than the most orthodox of Protestants" (The European Mind, 1680-1715, trans. J. Lewis May [Cleveland, 1963], 104) thus turns out to be rather misleading. For Bayle does not allow for the possibility that an atheist can be an atheist in good conscience since—according to his definitions—that would be a contradiction in terms.

32. Arguments, by Bayle and others, over the pragmatic dimensions of religion and religious toleration will be a central focus of chapter 4.

33. According to traditional Calvinist doctrine, this love of God, which motivates one to act in accordance with one's conscience, is inspired by God himself through an act of grace. (Cf. Bayle, Pensées diverses, 2:67.) If Bayle had reasserted the doctrine of grace at this point, however, he might have found himself forced to conclude that God not only tolerates error but even inspires it, a potentially disquieting idea that Bayle, by omitting mention of grace at this point and treating the problem in strictly epistemological terms, avoids raising.

34. Marc Shell has recently argued for the conduciveness of religious particularism to toleration and of religious universalism to intolerance ("Marranos (Pigs), or From Coexistence to Toleration," Critical Inquiry 17 [1991]: 306-35). My comparison of Dryden and Bayle, although using more a philosophical than an anthropological methodology, and using the term "universalism" in the sense of rationalist minimalism rather than in the sense of a community of coreligionists, might nonetheless seem to support Shell's view. it is important to note, however, that I deny that it is the nature of universalism of either sort to be intolerant or of particularism to be tolerant and claim only that each can be put to different uses in different contexts. Although Shell recognizes some historical variability, he still seems to tend toward ideological essentialism.

35. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. R. G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 273 (London, 1933), 13.

36. For Gibbon's Erastian conception of pagan religion, see chapter 4 below.

37. René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, in Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Ferdinand Alquié, 3 vols. (Paris, 1988), 1:592-93.

38. See, however, Alquié's footnote regarding this matter: ibid., 592 n. 4.

39. Michel de Montaigne, "Apologie de Raimond Sebond;" in Essais, ed. Maurice Rat, 2 vols. (Paris, 1962), 1:562.

40. For an analysis of the relationship between skepticism and fideism in the Dictionnaire, an analysis that bears on this psychological issue, see my "Pierre Bayle and the Structures of Doubt."

41. Bayle is quite aware that there is a distinct danger that Calvinists themselves would be intolerant if they had the opportunity. Paul Hazard quotes from a letter of 17 December 1691: "God preserve us from the Protestant Inquisition; another five or six years or so and it will have become so terrible that people will be longing to have the Roman one back again, as something to be thankful for" (Dieu nous garde de l'inquisition protestante; elle serait dans cinq ou six ans si terrible, que l'on soupirent après la romaine comme après un bien [The European Mind, 93]). As we will see in chapter 4, Bayle saw the history of Christianity as a history of intolerance. Although his animus in the Commentaire is against the Catholics, in principle any potential persecutor, of any religious stripe, would stand in need of the lessons of Bayle's argument.

42. And by extension, all the religious authorities who urge him to carry out his persecutions and all the secular authorities who follow their urgings.

1. Leonard Krieger, "Series Editor's Introduction," in Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Discourse on Universal History, trans. Elborg Forster, ed. Orest Ranum, Classsic European Historians (Chicago, 1976), ix.

2. It was widely believed by those who favored Catholic unity that Protestantism in France was on the decline. See Paul Hazard, The European Mind, 1680-1715, trans. J. Lewis May (Cleveland, 1963), chapter 1.

3. See Jean Orcibal, Louis XIV et les protestants (Paris, 1951), 114.

4. See Olivier Abel, "De l'obligation de croire: les objections de Bayle au commentaire augustinien de 'Contrains-les d'entrer,'" Etudes théologiques et religieuses, 61 (1986): 36.

5. Cf. Orest Ranum, "Introduction," in Bossuet, Discourse on Universal History, trans. Forster, ed. Ranum: "He was never reluctant to judge all of the past in the light of the single most important historical event of all time: the brief passage of the man-God Jesus through a life on earth" (xxvi). Ranum also points out that the chapter on Jesus and his teachings lies at the physical center of the book in all its various editions.

6. Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Discours sur l'histoire universelle, in Oeuvres, ed. L'Abbé Velat and Yvonne Champailler (Paris, 1961), 830-31. Subsequent citations, with the initials DHU, will be given in the text.

7. The imaginary virtuous heathens of More's Utopia and of Swift's Gulliver's Travels —including, arguably, the virtuous Houyhnhnms—may be seen to exemplify this tradition.

8. Regarding Bossuet's general attitude toward Louis's adulterous behavior, see Ranum, "Introduction," ix-xlvi.

9. See Erich Haase, Einführung in die Literatur des Refuge: Der Beitrag der franzözischen Protestanten zur Entwicklung analytischer Denkformen am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1959), 306.

10. Hazard, The European Mind, 1 4. Cf. DHU, 957: "Une coutume nouvelle était un prodige en Egypte: tout s'y faisait toujours de même; et l'exactitude qu'on y avait ô garder les petites choses, maintenait les grandes."

11. See DHU, 959.

12. Since Bayle was arguing not for a deistic minimalism that would level out religious differences but for religious toleration that would allow groups to follow divergent doctrines regarding the Christian mysteries, the historiographic implications of his rationalism may seem less radical than those of the deists. But since Bayle's whole argument depends on the indubitability of independently available moral principles that serve as criteria for interpreting Christian revelation, and hence that allow one to condemn religious intolerance and persecution, he needs to follow the deists in closing the remaining gap between Christian ethics and natural ethics. This he does explicitly in the Commentaire philosophique (De la tolérance: Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jésus Christ "Contrains-les-d'entrer," ed. Jean-Michel Gros [Paris, 1992], 104-6), where he rejects the notion that natural morality is worldly and self-interested but assimilates it to the Christian rejection of the world and suppression of the passions. Although theological orthodoxy, as we have seen in Bossuet, allowed one to acknowledge the presence of the natural light among pagans and treat it as a glimmering of the moral truths that would be revealed and explained by Jesus, Bayle's argument would seem to require him to say that moral truths are no less clear and distinct to the pagans than they are in Scripture. But, unlike the deists, Bayle does not claim that the natural light tells us enough about religion to allow us to dispense with revelation, only that it allows us to reject certain false interpretations of revelation—namely, those that conflict with moral truth.

13. Bayle and other writers, however, will not neglect to cite the fact that Turks and other Muslims were also much more tolerant than the Christians.

14. Compare Roy Porter's characterization of the historiographic principle that animated late seventeenth-century British historians: "What came first was right, so the historian's business was to discover what came first" (Gibbon: Making History [New York, 1988], 18).

15. The advice comes from a long speech, "reported" by Dio, in which Maecenas advises Augustus regarding the governance of the empire. (See Dio's Roman History, trans. Earnest Cary, 9 vols., Loeb Classical Library [London, 1917], bk. 52.) Although contemporary scholarship considers this speech to be "in reality a political pamphlet setting forth Dio's own views of government" which, complete with anachronisms, was put into the mouth of Maecenas (see Cary's introduction, 1:xv), Bayle—elsewhere a pioneer of critical historiography—does not question its authenticity.

16. Bayle, De la tolerance: Commentaire philosophique, ed. Gros, 72. Subsequent citations, appearing with the abbreviation CP, will be given in the text.

17. See Walter Rex, Essays on Pierre Bayle and Religious Controversy, International Archives of the History of Ideas, no. 8 (The Hague, 1965), especially the essay on the article "David" in Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique. Although Bayle's position might seem to be the most prudent one for the representative of a persecuted minority to take, it was bitterly opposed by his coreligionist Pierre Jurieu, who argued for the right of revolution against Louis XIV. Jurieu also argued, as did "Maecenas," against the toleration of new religions. See his Le vrai système de l'église et la véritable analyse de la foi (Dordrecht, 1686). See also Guy Howard Dodge, The Political Theory of the French Huguenots of the Dispersion (1947; rpt., New York, 1972), esp. 139-65.

18. In the body of the Commentaire (244), Bayle writes:"Toute secte qui s'en prend aux lois des sociétés, et qui rompt les liens de la sûreté publique, en excitant des seditions . . . mérite d'être incessamment exterminée."

19. The incident to which Bayle refers is the subject of Juvenal's Satire 15. Although Juvenal ultimately focuses more on the barbarism that results from the conflict than on the superstitious exclusivism that generates it, Bayle's characterization of the cause is quite consistent with what we find in Juvenal:

summus utrimque

inde furor volgo, quod numina vicinorum
odit uterque locus, cum solos credat habendos
esse deos quos ipse colit. (ll. 35-38)

This quotation is from Juvenal and Persius, rev. ed., trans. G. G. Ramsay, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1940), 288-90.

20. Pierre Jurieu would actually argue that sects that are not well established should be abandoned or persecuted, while sects that are well established should be immune from persecution. See Le vrai système, 165 ff. The fact that Jurieu could argue for such a distinction provides one more reason to doubt that Bayle could have had such a thing in mind.

21. See the first chapter of Bayle's "Réponse aux questions d'un provincial," 3:1011b.

22. See Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1964), 2:502.

23. See Bayle, "Réponse aux questions d'un provincial" 3:1011b.

24. Ibid., 3:1012b.

25. It might seem that in the context of Bayle's theory of toleration the paradox also presents some practical difficulties since it presents grounds both for suppressing Christianity and for tolerating it. However, in chapter 6 of the Seconde partie of the Commentaire, Bayle will explain that the right of a government to suppress the threat of sedition that comes from a dangerous religion—in this case Roman Catholicism—does not extend to impinging on the rights of conscience. One can disarm those who threaten the public peace without having to try to change their religious beliefs.

26. Bayle also refers to taking revenge on those who have sacked Delphi, but this case, as he indicates, does not involve claims to truth or desires to compel consciences. Only in the Egyptian example is there mortal hatred that is generated by the fact that the inhabitants of each town think that their religion is the true one.

27. (gibbon cites Bayle frequently and approvingly in the Decline and Fall (twenty-two times, according to the count of David P. Jordan; see his Gibbon and His Roman Empire [Urbana, Ill. 1971], 169). Gibbon looked on Bayle as a kindred spirit—in part because both had made youthful conversions from Protestantism to Catholicism—and considered the skepticism of Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique to serve as an annihilator of "false religions." See Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (London, 1966), 64-65. For arguments that have helped to move scholarly opinion toward accepting Bayle's protestations that he was a sincere Calvinist, see Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, vol. 2, and Richard Popkin's essays on Bayle in The High Road to Pyrrhonism, ed. Richard A. Watson and James E. Force (San Diego, 1980), 29. See also Richard H. Popkin, "Introduction," in Pierre Bayle, The Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, trans. Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis, 1965). For a recent case study of the eighteenth century's appropriation of Bayle, see Elisabeth Labrousse, "Reading Pierre Bayle in Paris," in Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany, ed. Alan Charles Kors and Paul J. Korshin (Philadelphia, 1987).

28. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 2 vols. (London, 1889), 2:339-40. Subsequent citations to this work, abbreviated NHR, will appear in the text. Page numbers will appear without the volume number.

29. Elsewhere, in his essay "Of Superstition and Enthusiasm," Hume associates superstitious fear with a willingness to submit to the power of priestly mediators and distinguishes such superstition from the enthusiast's disposition "to regard himself as a distinguished favorite of the Divinity." This allows for a clear distinction between superstitious Catholics and enthusiastic sectarian Protestants. J. G. A. Pocock argues that Gibbon's account of the shift between early Christianity and Catholic hierarchy is a movement from enthusiasm to superstition informed by Hume's distinction ("Superstition and Enthusiasm in Gibbon's History of Religion," Eighteenth-Century Life, n.s. 8 [1982]: 83-94). In my view, Hume's tendency in the Natural History is less to distinguish between early Christian enthusiasm and Catholic superstition than to assimilate early Christianity to Catholicism, particularly with respect to morality and intolerance, and this assimilation informs Gibbon's general contrast between paganism and Christianity. This is not to say that the enthusiasm/superstition dichotomy has no role in Gibbon's analysis. But I will show that the dichotomy is less an organizing principle than a single element in a complex structure of dichotomies.

30. We have briefly encountered such republicanism in our discussion of Usbek's enlightened viewpoint in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes. For a deservedly influential study of the transmutation of republican theory to meet the ideological needs of competing parties in the eighteenth century, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975).

31. On Bossuet and Livy, see Ranum, "Introduction," xxv.

32. Livy, trans. B. O. Foster, 14 vols., Loeb Classical Library (London, 1919), 1:69.

33. Niccolo Machiavelli, Discorsi, in Il Principe e Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tiro Livio (Milan, 1977), 161. Translation is that of Leslie J. Walker, in The Discourses of Niccolo Machiavelli (New Haven, Conn., 1950), 241-42.

34. Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, "Dissertation sur la politique des romains dans la religion, lue à l'Académie de Bordeaux le 18 Juin 1716," in Oeuvres completes de Montesquieu, ed. André Masson, 3 vols. (Paris, 1950-55), 3:38. The "Dissertation" is of interest, despite the fact that it was not published until 1799, because it represents a striking combination and distillation of ideas—some of which we have encountered separately in Bayle, Livy, and Machiavelli—that inform a strand of Gibbon's analysis of Roman paganism. Subsequent citations will be abbreviated "DPR" and given in text; page numbers will appear without the volume number.

35. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, 7 vols. (London, 1896), 1:22. Subsequent citations will be abbreviated DF and appear in the text.

36. Gibbon's irony is transparent at least to those "similarly enlightened." See Patricia B. Craddock, Edward Gibbon: Luminous Historian, 1772-1794 (Baltimore, 1989), 62.

37. In addition to the episode in Juvenal referred to by Bayle (see p. 123 above, and n. 19), another ancient discussion of Egyptian intolerance is to be found in Plutarch, who offers several explanations for religious divisions among the Egyptians, including, most prominently, the notion that these divisions were instituted by a cunning and evil Egyptian king in order to keep his volatile people from uniting in rebellion against him.

See Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, ed. and trans. J. Gwyn Griffiths (Cardiff, 1970). Such an explanation, of course, would go against the grain of the Enlightenment argument for secular control of religion but would also be unattractive to early modern proponents of intolerance. Hence it would be surprising to find it mentioned in the discourse under discussion in this chapter.

38. "But," as Gibbon notes in the following sentence, "insulted Nature sometimes vindicated her rights, and this new species of martyrdom served only to introduce a new scandal into the church."

39. For the purpose of this analysis, I am leaving out of account Gibbon's use of the idea that the civic virtue that had obtained in the Roman republic has, by imperial times, undergone a process of corruption. While Gibbon certainly appeals to this notion, his use of it does not require us to see the relationship between elite and masses as specific to the empire. For while it is true, for example, that the legions that were once motivated by patriotism now, during the empire, are pushed by "other motives of a different but not less forcible nature—honour and religion," this does not mean that the same people who were once motivated by civic duty now require the spurs of honor and religion. Rather, it means that an army of the propertied with a stake in the republic ("citizens with a country to love and property to defend") has given way to a mercenary army "drawn from the meanest, and very frequently from the most profligate of mankind." Machiavelli and others in the early modern discourse of civic humanism follow Livy (see pages 135-37) in treating religion as an instrument of social control imposed very early in Roman history. Gibbon's notion of the decline of civic humanism in Rome does not seem to depart from this view and hence does not treat the masses as any more virtuous during the republican period, or any less in need of religious control, but merely as less conspicuous. On Gibbon's relationship to the tradition of civic humanism, see J. G. A. Pocock, "Between Machiavelli and Hume: Gibbon as Civic Humanist and Philosophical Historian," Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 105, no. 3 (Summer 1976): 153-69.

40. See note 29.

41. Hume's distinction between enthusiasm and superstition is part of this tradition. My reservations about Pocock's perceptive observation that Gibbon organizes his treatment of early Christians and Roman Catholicism around the distinction between enthusiasm and superstition (see note 29) are based partly on my sense that the basic distinction is older than Hume and partly on my sense that Gibbon does not use it as a consistent organizing principle but simply as one phase in a shifting structure of dichotomies.

42. See Bayle, "Reponse aux questions d'un provincial," 3:954a.

1. Another way of exploiting the apparent success of scientific inductivism, and philosophical empiricism, could be by linking it to the social and political structure that produced it. Although this procedure is peripheral to my concerns in this chapter, it is worth noting, as Peter Gay has done, that it is implicitly employed by Voltaire in the Lettres philosophiques: "The letters on natural philosophy are not directly political, but they make a political point: a society like France, with its useless aristocracy, its privileged clergy, its irrational tax structure, its medieval system of social status, is fated to engender social discord, economic waste, feeble philosophy. The very existence of a Newton and a Locke is a reproach to France— these men are representative of a reasonable, open society where merit is the passport to advancement" (Voltaire's Politics: The Poet as Realist, 2d ed. [New Haven, Conn., 1988], 61-62).

2. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle l, lines 23-32. Here and throughout, my text is that edited by Maynard Mack (London, 1950) in the Twickenham edition of The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, vol. 3, pt. 1. Subsequent epistle and line citations, preceded by the abbreviated title Essay, will be given in the text.

3. Voltaire, Discours en vers sur l'homme, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. L. Moland, 52 vols. (Paris, 1877-83), 9:415. Subsequent citations, preceded by the abbreviation DVH, will be given in the text.

4. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, "Pride in Eighteenth-Century Thought," in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948).

5. Basil Willey, The Eighteenth-Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period (1940; rpt., Boston, 1961), 48.

6. A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, 1936), 45-55, and passim.

7. For Lovejoy's notion of unit ideas, see ibid., 3-23.

8. Jaakko Hintikka, "Gaps in the Great Chain of Being: An Exercise in the Methodology of the History of Ideas" in Reforging the Great Chain of Being: Studies of the History of Modal Theories, ed. Simo Knuuttila (Dordrecht, 1981), 13-14.

9. Samuel Johnson, "Review of A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil," in Works, 11 vols. (1825; rpt., New York, 1970), 6:48-49.

10. Soame Jenyns, A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, in The Works of Soame Jenyns, Esq., 4 vols. (London, 1790), 3:90-91. Subsequent citations, preceded by the abbreviation FIE, will be given in the text. Volume number will be omitted from page citations.

11. Johnson, "Review," 6:70-71. Johnson's approbation is expressed thus: "Si sic omnia dixisset. To this account of the essence of vice and virtue it is only necessary to add. . . . "

12. The same passage is quoted in Johnson, "Review," 6:54. Subsequent citations will be given in the text, and the volume number will be omitted from page citations.

13. See Jacob Viner, The Role of Providence in the Social Order: An Essay in Intellectual History (Philadelphia, 1972), 96: "British social thought from 1660 to 1776 was marked by wide-ranging and intense controversy on theological, ethical, political, and economic doctrine. There was, however, almost complete unity of expressed opinion with respect to general social policy bearing on such matters as class-stratification, the rights and duties of the poor, the proper location of political power, the functions and limitations of public alms and private charity."

14. See James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LLD., ed. G. Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1934-50), 1:408, 442, 447; 3:155, 383.

15. See Johnson, "Review," 6:251: "I must . . . again remark that consequences cannot have greater certainty than the postulate from which they are drawn, that no system can be more hypothetical than this [scale of being], and, perhaps, no hypothesis more absurd."

16. On the discrimination of the two traditions, see Viner, Role of Providence in the Social Order, chapter 4.

17. For commentators "whose inherited hermeneutical impulse—at least where Johnson is concerned—is largely one of appreciation" (Elizabeth Hedrick, "Reading Johnson's Dictionary," in Annals of Scholarship 7 [1990]: 92), Johnson's ability to combine his defense of social order with his rejection of Jenyns's brutality toward the poor is more likely to be seen as evidence of his "sensibility" than as a demonstration of his ideological finesse. A striking example of such an "appreciation" of Johnson is to be found in Richard B. Schwartz, Samuel Johnson and the Problem of Evil (Madison, Wis., 1975), where the praise of "sensibility" is even more deeply infused with the language of capitalism than is Johnson's own discourse: "In his defense of the poor . . . we particularly admire Johnson's sensibility: the temper that can embrace both hierarchy and social and financial mobility, that recognizes the fact that subordination need not be equated with the status quo, that defends old values but welcomes new enterprises" (37).

18. This was a common theme among several of Pope's contemporary apologists (and was adopted by Jenyns). See Viner, Role of Providence in the Social Order, chapter 4.

19. John Andrew Bernstein ("Shaftesbury's Optimism and Eighteenth-Century Social Thought" in Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany, ed. Alan Charles Kors and Paul J. Korshin [Philadelphia, 1987], 89) claims that Pope (along with Shaftesbury and Bolinbroke) "used the Great Chain to assert the unity of mankind within the variety of the cosmos, not the stratified plurality of mankind upon the cosmic model."

20. It would, of course, be possible to suppose that the Chain of Being does indeed extend into the social realm, that there are ontological differences between social classes, but that these differences do not correspond to differences in happiness. This second possibility would justify both God's goodness and the social order but would, as I indicated earlier, violate the traditional Christian notion that all souls are equal before God. For if social hierarchy were seen as an extension of the Chain of Being, then social elites would be seen as closer to God and presumably as more worthy of salvation.

21. See, however, W. H. Greenleaf, Order, Empiricism, and Politics: Two Traditions of English Political Thought (Oxford, 1964), chapter 2. Greenleaf does not distinguish between general claims, in Pope and in other writers, that order is hierarchical and the specific metaphysical claims regarding degrees of being or of spirituality. None of his citations linking social hierarchy to general concepts of order attribute greater being or greater spirituality to the members of higher social ranks.

22. Voltaire to Thieriot, 13 November 1738, in Correspondence, ed. Theodore Besterman, 51 vols. (Geneva and Toronto, 1968-77), 5:363.

23. Voltaire is, of course, subversive to the degree that he wishes to challenge the entrenched status of the nobility and clergy in favor of the bourgeoisie. But the result of the reforms that he favored would be equally hierarchical, with centralized royal authority on the top and the poor on the bottom. In this respect, he resembles most of the writers discussed in chapter 4. See Gay, Voltaire's Politics, passim.

24. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, ed. Gustave Lanson, 2 vols. (Paris, 1909), 2:6.

25. Ibid., 1:168.

26. Condillac, in his Traité des systèmes (1749), introduced the distinction between esprit systématique and esprit de système. It was the second term of this polarity that corresponded to what Voltaire had earlier called the esprit systématique. To avoid terminological confusion, one could ignore Voltaire's actual usage in the Lettres philosophiques and pretend that Voltaire had anticipated Condillac's usage. (For an example of this procedure, see Gay, Voltaire's Politics, 25.) Instead, I choose to quote Voltaire's usage and then ignore Condillac's distinction since it has no bearing on my analysis.

27. For a useful survey of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century views on hypothesis, see Ellen McNiven Hine, A Critical Study of Condillac's "Traité des systèmes" (The Hague, 1979), chapter 5.

28. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755). Compare Johnson's definition to the following passage from Voltaire's Elémens de la philosophie de Newton (1738): "mais une hypothèse, quand même elle rendrait raison de tout, ne doit être admise. I1 ne suffit pas qu'un système soit possible pour mériter d'être cru, il faut qu'il soit prouvé" (Oeuvres completes, ed. Moland, 22:501).

29. Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, 28 vols. (Paris, 1751-72), 8:417-18.

30. See, for example, Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York, 1959), 279-80: "One might say that progress can . . . come about in two ways: by gathering new perceptual experiences, and by better organizing those which are available already. But this description of scientific progress, although not actually wrong, seems to miss the point. It is too reminiscent of Bacon's induction; too suggestive of his industrious gathering of the countless grapes, ripe and in season, from which he expected the wine of science to flow: of his myth of a scientific method that starts from observation and experiment and then proceeds to theories…. Out of interpreted sense-experiences science cannot be distilled, no matter how industriously we gather and sort them. Bold ideas, unjustified anticipations, and speculative thought, are our only means for interpreting nature; our only organon; our only instrument for grasping her."

31. See, for example, Peter Caws's article, "Scientific Method," in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, 8 vols. (1967; rpt., New York, 1972), 7:340-41; Mary Horton, "In Defence of Francis Bacon: A Criticism of the Critics of the Inductive Method," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 4 (1973): 241-78; and Curt J. Ducasse, "Francis Bacon's Philosophy of Science," in Theories of Scientific Method: The Renaissance through the Nineteenth Century, ed. Edward H. Madden (Seattle, 1960), 50-54.

32. See Hine, Condillac's "Traité," 130-33.

33. Voltaire, Elémens de la philosophie de Newton, 22:511.

34. Ibid., 22:517.

35. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, 2:3.

36. Ibid., 2:5.

37. See Charles H. Hinnant, Samuel Johnson: An Analysis (New York, 1988), 1-10.

38. Voltaire, Elémens de la philosophie de Newton, 22:42-47.

39. Houdar de la Motte, Discours sur la fable, in Oeuvres, 10 vols. (Paris, 1754), 9:13-14. The article "Fable" in Chambers's Cyclopaedia has as its core an English paraphrase of la Motte's observations (Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia: Or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences [London, 1728], n.p.). Cf. Karl-Heinz Stierle, "Story as Exemplum, Exemplum as Story: On the Pragmatics and Poetics of Narrative Texts" in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism, ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton, 1979).

40. W. V. Quine and J. S. Ullian, The Web of Belief, 2d ed. (New York, 1978), 66.

41. It might seem that the phenomenon that I have grandly labeled "counterhypothetical fiction" is a form of satire, one, in fact, with a long history. And indeed the speeches of the various animals, insofar as they aim to reduce the anthropocentric hypothesis to absurdity, are distinctly satirical. Moreover, it might be argued that any counterhypothetical fiction, in seeking to undermine a hypothesis without supplanting it, employs ridicule and is therefore satirical. On the other hand, the case could be made that the technique of canceling one hypothesis or system by counterbalancing it with another that is no more and no less plausible is the traditional skeptical procedure of equipollence. (On this, see Oscar Kenshur, "Pierre Bayle and the Structures of Doubt," Eighteenth-Century Studies 21 [1988]: 297-315.) This issue, along with other theoretical implications of the concept of counterhypothetical fiction, remains to be explored.

42. Ira Wade, Voltaire's "Micromégas": A Study in the Fusion of Science, Myth, and Art (Princeton, 1950), 12-36. For a contrary view, see W. H. Barber, "The Genesis of Voltaire's Micromégas," French Studies 11 (1957): 1-15.

43. See Wade, Voltaire's "Micromégas," 15-20.

44. My text for Micromégas is that edited by Wade in Voltaire's "Micro-mégas," 119-46. My citations, given in the text, are to chapter number and line number.

45. The view that there is intelligent life on other planets was widely held in Voltaire's time and was subscribed to by Voltaire himself. However, Voltaire is on record as having rejected as ridiculous the notion that there was some basis upon which we could calculate the sizes of the inhabitants of other planets. (See Wade, Voltaire's" Micromégas," 37-60.) Thus the counterhypothesis that Voltaire devised for Micromégas was one that he is likely to have considered sufficiently plausible to undermine the hypotheses that he disliked, but insufficiently implausible to supplant them.

46. This is not to say that there are no traces of traditional fabulation in Micromégas. There are occasional instances of positive hypothesizing, particularly on the issue of intellectual method itself, as when the Saturnian concludes, "Il faut tâcher d'examiner ces insectes; nous raisonnerons après." Since, as we have seen, Voltaire's counterhypothetical fictions operate in the service of a theory of intellectual method, it is not surprising to find the theory being represented. Voltaire, like many other epistemologists, seems to be less troubled by hypothesizing about intellectual method than he is by hypothesizing about metaphysics. (In fact, as I hope to show on another occasion, Candide has a counterhypothetical structure that yields the paradoxical hypothesis that hypothesizing results in inconclusive conflicts between rival hypotheses.) But on the issues of whether the world was made for humanity's benefit, and whether human beings have grounds to complain about their limitations, Voltaire seems to rely entirely on a counterhypothetical procedure.

47. In claiming that Micromégas arose out of the dilemma of the Discours sur l'homme, and in alluding (in note 46) to Candide's status as a counter-hypothetical fiction, I am not claiming that Voltaire's conte philosophique is an intrinsically counterhypothetical genre. Further investigations are needed to ascertain the extent to which the counterhypothetical procedure operates throughout the contes philosophiques.

1. This parallel between Johnson's Baconian remarks and the similar and exactly contemporaneous remarks of Voltaire anticipates by some twenty years another more famous parallel between the two writers—namely, the publication of Johnson's Rasselas and Voltaire's Candide in 1759. (This second parallel will require our attention later in this chapter.) One might add a third, intervening parallel: Voitaire's rejection of cosmic optimism in Candide was preceded by a sort of preliminary statement in the Poème sur le désastre de Lisbon (1756). This harbinger of the more famous Candide could be paired with Johnson's review of Soame Jenyns's A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1757). A corollary to this rejection of the metaphysics of plenitude is Voltaire's and Johnson's very Newtonian rejection of the physics of plenitude in favor of vacuity. Celestial vacuums go against the grain of a theory that abhors gaps. (See chapter 5, "Voltaire's Dilemma: Method versus Metaphysics.") For a general comparison that undertakes to find numerous similarities between Voltaire and Johnson, without, however, pausing over the significance of their shared inductiv-ism, see Donald Green, "Voltaire and Johnson," in Enlightenment Studies in Honor of Lester G. Crocker (Oxford, 1979).

2. The third sense of "experimental" in Johnson's Dictionary (London, 1755) reads as follows: "Known by experiment or trial."

3. Johnson's The Life of Boerhanve (1739) appeared, in revised form, in the first volume of R. James's Medicinal Dictionary (London, 1743). I quote from this version, where, along with other minor changes, the laboriousness of the inductive method is emphasized by the substitution of "amassing observations" for the original "making observations."

4. Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1905), 1:99-100.

5. For the claim that Johnson does not bring his inductivism into the moral realm, see Jean Hagstrum, "The Nature of Dr. Johnson's Rationalism," ELH 17 (1950): 198.

6. Cf. Leo Damrosch's remark in his Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson (Madison, Wis., 1989), 153: "The problem for Johnson, as for many of his contemporaries, is that he is deeply committed to the empiricist philosophy whose logic threatens the foundations of Christian belief." Damrosch's study has certain affinities with this one in that it argues that eighteenth-century social conservatism bridges differences between otherwise dissimilar writers and between antagonistic ideas.

7. David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 2 vols. (London, 1889), 2:368.

8. We saw in chapter 1 that Hobbes linked the Puritans to the Scholastics by portraying both as opposed to a rationalistic method.

9. By the time we get to the Romantics, of course, the association of truth with society and judgment, and of error with isolation and imaginative reverie, will be turned on its head, resulting in Wordsworth's famous characterization of Newton's statue in King's College Chapel as "the marble index of a mind forever/Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone."

10. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, ed. Gustave Lanson, 2 vols. (Paris, 1909), 2:3.

11. Cf. Arieh Sachs, Passionate Intelligence: Imagination and Reason in the Work of Samuel Johnson (Baltimore, 1967), ii.

12. Here and throughout, the citation is to chapter number, followed by the page number of the text in the Yale edition of The Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 16, Rasselas and Other Tales, ed. Gwin J. Kolb (New Haven, Conn., 1990).

13. See Hobbes, Leviathan, part l, chapter 8; Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, book 2, chapter 11, section 2. For an analysis of the early modern distinction between judgment and fancy in the context of the traditional distinction between order and chaos, see Oscar Kenshur, Open Form and the Shape of Ideas: Literary Structures as Representations of Philosophical Concepts in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Lewisberg, Pa., 1986), chapter 4.

14. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. John W. Yolton (London, 1961), book 2, chapter 33, section 6. Earlier seventeenth-century philosophers, including Hobbes and Spinoza, discussed the same phenomenon under different names. See, for example, Hobbes's discussion of the "Trayne of Thoughts Unguided" (Leviathan, pt. 1, chap. 3), in which he gives an example of what Locke would call the "association of ideas."

15. George Berkeley, Alciphron, Or the Minute Philosopher, ed. T. E. Jessop, in The Works of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, 9 vols. (London, 1948-57), 3:47.

16. Ibid., 194. On Berkeley's attack on the Shaftesburyean model of sociable or "polite" philosophy, see Lawrence E. Klein, "Berkeley, Shaftesbury, and the Meaning of Politeness," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 16 (1986): 57-68.

17. Isobel Grundy (Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness [Athens, Ga., 1986], 158), while not concerned with inductivism per se, points out the repeated references to seeing and observing.

18. The hermit of chapter 21 will report, "I employed my hours in examining the plants which grow in the valley, and the minerals which I collected from the rocks," but that "enquiry is now grown tasteless and irksome" (82).

19. Cf. Edward Tomarken, "Perspectivism: The Methodological Implications of 'The History of Imlac' in Rasselas," in The Age of Johnson, ed. Paul J. Korshin, 5 vols. (New York, 1989), 2:271: "He acts like a younger Imlac, the character from the past evoked by and in the poet's autobiography."

20. The significance of the fact that the poetic profession serves as the privileged vantage point that is exempted from the moral and epistemological debunking to which other occupations are subjected will be discussed in the final section of this chapter.

21. For an analysis—couched in the language of deconstruction—of the relationship between philosophy and eloquence in Rasselas, see Charles Hinnant, Samuel Johnson: An Analysis (New York, 1988), 90-93.

22. Cf. W. K. Wimsatt, "In Praise of Rasselas: Four Notes (Converging)," in Dr. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1986), 85: "Who says this? Imlac, Rasselas, Nekayah, the Stoic philosopher, the hermit, the mad astronomer, the old man? Any one of these, at the right moment, might say it. . . . Who says this? Any one of several characters might say it." Wimsatt is referring not to the words of the hermit but to other pieces of wisdom uttered by other characters.

23. Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief: A Study of Henry Fielding, with Glances at Swift, Johnson, and Richardson (Berkeley, 1966), 14-15, 16.

24. Wimsatt observes: "the local colour of Rasselas is not luxuriant. It is even very thin" ("In Praise of Rasselas," 77). The local color of Candide is, of course, thinner still.

25. Voltaire, Poème sur le désastre de Lisbon, in Mélanges, ed. Jacques van den Heuvel (Paris, 1961), 307.

26. Cf. Wimsatt's reference to "Johnson's quasi-oriental and ceremonious no-tale" ("In Praise of Rasselas," 87).

27. The episode may have been partly based on a narrative in Hill's Account of the . . . Ottoman Empire, but this does diminish one's sense that Johnson, at this one point, wishes to imitate the genre that he is appropriating and that he is not incapable of narrating events. On the source of the episode, see Arthur J. Weitzman, "More Light on Rasselas : The Background of the Egyptian Episodes," Philological Quarterly 48 (1969): 265-66.

28. Richard B. Schwartz, Samuel Johnson and the New Science (Madison, Wis., 1971), 73-74. Schwartz's book contains an extensive discussion of Johnson's scientific interests in general and his Baconianism in particular.

29. Francis Bacon, The New Organon and Related Writings, ed. Fulton H. Anderson (New York, 1960), 15.

30. Cf. D. D. Raphael, The Moral Sense (London, 1947).

31. See Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England, trans. James P. Pettegrove (1953; rpt., New York, 1970), 162-65.

32. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, "An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit," in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. J. M. Robertson (1900; rpt., Indianapolis, 1964), 267. Montesquieu's attempt in the Lettres persanes to ground his view of republican civic virtue on a conception of morality as free and unconstrained represents another expression of Shaftesbury's position.

33. Samuel Clarke, Discourse on Natural Religion, in British Moralists, ed. L. A.Selby-Bigge, 2 vols. (1897; rpt., Indianapolis, 1964), 2:3.

34. Ibid., 2:34, 34-35.

35. Cf. Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 2d ed. (London, 1787), 253: "Dr. [Samuel] Clarke supposes all rational agents as under an obligation to act agreeably to the relations that subsist . . . or according to what he calls the fitness of things. Johnson was ever an admirer of Clarke, and agreed with him in this."

36. Samuel Johnson, "Preface to the Preceptor, Containing a General Plan of Education," in Allen T. Hazen, Samuel Johnson's Prefaces and Dedications (New Haven, Conn., 1937), 186-87.

37. The fear of punishment and hope of reward were not seen by Johnson simply as psychologically efficacious but as the essence of religious faith. In the Dictionary, the first sense that Johnson gives for the word "Religion" is: "Virtue, as founded upon reverence for God, and expectation of future rewards and punishments." On this conception of religious faith, see Nicholas Hudson, Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Oxford, 1988), 24.

38. Samuel Johnson, "Review of A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil," in Works, 11 vols. (1825; rpt., New York, 1970), 6:71, 72.

39. Dryden uses this argument as part of his attack on deism in the first part of Religio Laici (I1. 66-67): "These Truths are not the product of thy Mind, / But dropt from Heaven." Johnson takes the same line in his allegorical Vision of Theodore, The Hermit of Tenerife: "when she [Reason] had once been taught [the truths of Religion], she clearly saw that it was right; and Pride had sometimes incited her to declare that she discovered it herself, and persuaded her to offer herself as a guide to Religion" (Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 16, Rasselas and Other Tales, ed. Kolb, 209).

40. Johnson, "Review of A Free Inquiry," 6:71.

41. Elsewhere, when he is not concerned with the threat that teleological criteria pose for his conceptions of religion and authority, Johnson may allow himself to take a different attitude toward the evaluation of moral actions in terms of their consequences. It needs to be stressed that in my analysis here I—unlike Nicholas Hudson, who uses some of the same evidence to argue that Johnson is not a utilitarian—am not attempting to define the essence of Johnson's moral outlook. Not only do I doubt that there is any such essence, but I also am more interested in the ideological uses of ideas in particular contexts than in attempts to ascribe overall theoretical positions—especially in the case of such an unsystematic thinker as Samuel Johnson. From the perspective of ideological analysis, it would make perfect sense for Johnson to condemn utilitarian criteria in a context in which they appear to threaten obedience to religious authority and to accept these criteria in a context in which one is concerned with ascertaining which sorts of actions are conducive to social order. In this chapter, I focus on Johnson's rejection of utilitarian principles because this is the view that bears most conspicuously on the ideological dilemma embodied in Rasselas. For a comprehensive discussion of Johnson's moral outlook that attempts to depict him as an "altruistic utilitarian," see Robert Voitle, Samuel Johnson the Moralist (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), esp. chapter 4. For Hudson's argument that Johnson is not a utilitarian but a "Christian Epicurean," see Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Thought, 166-85.

42. Johnson, "Review of A Free Inquiry ," 6:71-72.

43. The tension between Johnson's moral traditionalism, on the one hand, and his acceptance, on the other hand, of the legitimacy of moral inquiry independent of religious authority parallels a common tension in the eighteenth-century attitude toward religious knowledge. Cf. Hudson, Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Thought, 27-28: "On the one hand, orthodox Christians were relying on the authority of tradition and disparaging a reliance on individual judgment; on the other hand, they were making the individual act of study among the most important acts in the religious life." On Johnson's more specific ambivalence regarding moral epistemology, see 44-48.

44. Since Nekayah had done nothing more than accede to Pekuah's request that she not be compelled to enter the pyramid, she had little apparent reason to reproach herself in the first place. One might therefore suspect that Johnson is straining to use this as an occasion for his attack on utilitarianism. I am grateful to an anonymous reader for the University of California Press for pointing this out.

45. Walter Jackson Bate, "Johnson and Satire Manqué," in Eighteenth-Century Studies in Honor of Donald F. Hyde, ed. W. H. Bond (New York, 1970), 157.

46. The one case that I have omitted in this sequence is that of the prosperous man of chapter 20, who is deprived of happiness by the constant fear occasioned by the jealousy of others. Here the emphasis seems to be more on the lack of happiness than on the lack of moral knowledge, and Johnson would appear to be engaging in a version of the argument that we encountered in our discussion of Pope and Voltaire in chapter 5. (In Johnson's pessimistic version, however, all stations are equally unhappy rather than equally happy.) Even here, though, there is at least a minor cognitive dimension in the assertion that "appearances are delusive" and in the fact that the man's unhappiness is tied to his uncertainty ("I know not how soon my defenders may be persuaded to share the plunder with the Bassa" [20, 79]).

47. Frederic Bogel, "Johnson and the Role of Authority," in The New Eighteenth-Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York, 1987), 205.

48. In a provocative analysis of historiographical genres ("The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," Critical Inquiry 7 [1980]: 5-27), Hayden White distinguishes between annals, chronicles, and "full-fledged" histories on the basis of the degree to which events are shaped by "narrativity," the degree, that is, to which the events are given a narrative structure that conduces to the establishment or legitimation of a social order. The shaping "narrativity" of history writing is ultimately associated with a "moralizing impulse." White seems to assume that events themselves are the sine qua non of every type of historiography and that narrativity involves merely their moral shaping. He fails to consider the possibility of what we have found in Rasselas, that the moralizing impulse can result in the suppression of the events themselves.