Such unreasoning prejudice (particularly in the name of religion) feels all too recognizable right now.īut oddly enough, the troubles with the French Revolution feel more intellectually familiar to me: the Revolution gone mad, transformed into the Terror, with a subset of the intellectual elite manipualting the masses into an orgy of violence and bloodshed. the case of Newton’s antitrinitarianism) or even promoted the kind of violence that drove Priestley to leave England for America. Although a certain amount of “tolerance” held sway over the country, the prohibitions against holding opinions counter to the state-sanctioned doctrine kept intellectuals silent (cf. The more central aspect of the narrative is that, throughout the so-called “Age of Reason,” the Church of England steered between the Scylla and Charybdis of Catholicism and Protestantism, subject to the capricious changes in the monarchy ruling over it.
It seems that narrative contains a kernel of truth, except, of course, that the Puritans took over England a few decades later, botched the job, then returned the power to the monarchy in time for kings to invade New Amsterdam and eventually tax Americans to the point of starting a not-so-popular rebellion. Of course, any American should recollect the experience of the Puritans leaving their homeland for the New World,-at least, the version of the story related in classrooms and elementary-school history books. Religious persecution in England? Brutal uprisings in France? Exactly how reasoned is the epoch? Having just referred to this selfsame time period by its common name, “The Age of Reason,” I suddenly feel troubled by this designation. Deeply embroiled in the politicks of the Eighteenth Century, on either side of a narrow channel with differing social circumstances, both became martyrs of a sort for freethinking and for science. Recently I have been engaged in reading a most excellent biography of Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier, in which the author reveals much of the mayhem surrounding the two scientists: these joint “discoverers” of oxygen,-one of whom isolated the gas, the other of whom named it, to oversimplify somewhat-who in fact lived lives of great combustability.
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