Common Sense and the American Mind

Many of the tutors at Princeton were Edwardsians. Witherspoon, as the new president, promptly drew them out. It was not just revivalism that made Witherspoon suspicious of the Edwardsians, he had little truck either with Edwards’ appropriation of Bishop Berkeley’s immaterialism, and to understand the importance of that, we have to understand what Scotland meant to the Enlightenment in Witherspoon’s day.

Until the 18th century, Scotland was regarded as a cultural backwater. But when the English finally shut off all access to the universities to non Church of England people, they inadvertently handed the minor Scottish universities, at Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Glasgow; an enormous gift. While Oxford and Cambridge, the official Church of England’s universities, sunk into contented conformity, the brightest minds of Britain’s non-conformists headed to the only universities open to them, the Scottish ones. With them, almost by default, came the Enlightenment, as Scottish universities blossomed after the 1720’s, with solutions to English philosophies’ unsolved problems.

The Problem with Locke and Berkeley’s Unsatisfactory Answer

One of these problems came directly from John Locke. Remember that Locke did not believe that we actually could know the object of our ideas directly. He believed that we know only our ideas of the objects, so that ideas represent objects to us, rather than having the object presented directly to our consciousness. But he was confident that we could rely on those ideas to tell our minds what is a true, or at least a probable story about the objects we were sensing. An assumption for which Bishop Berkeley pointed out that Locke had absolutely no worthwhile evidence.

Berkeley, as it turned out, was not the only one who saw problems with Locke’s representational realism. Francis Hutchinson, of the University of Glasgow, objected that Locke’s description of how we know was empoverished and “unrealistic”. First, because it made minds perfectly passive in the knowing process; and second, because Locke’s description failed to account for why minds have ideas about things which mere sensations cannot account for. For example, someone gazing at a painting actually senses only oil and chemists. Yet that same person perceives beauty, something far beyond what lies in colors and shapes. In the same way, a virtuous act is perceived by a mind not just as an act, but as something which is beautiful; and it moves the perceiver to a response of moral approval.

This implied, for Hutchinson, the existence of a power, of a capacity, which he called the moral sense; which moves everyone to recognize beauty and virtue for what they are, and which ensures that morality is not just a fluctuating experience which varies according to our sensations or situations. No matter how varied are individual situations or experiences, the moral sense, that we are all equipped with, enables us to sort through the mass of sensations we receive; and to perceive what is true, right and beautiful. Thomas Reid would be who gives this moral sense epistemology the enormous influence it would achieve in the 18th century.

Bishop Berkeley had helped cripple what he thought were the atheistic tendencies in Locke, by showing purely in Locke’s own terms, that we could not have assurance that our ideas correspond to anything in the outside world. This is what allowed Berkeley to step in and assert the need for God. And God guaranties such a connection between our ideas and what exists in the outer world by both giving minds their ideas and by upholding the external reality they represent.

But all this seemed to suggest to another Scotsman, David Hume, complete intellectual skepticism. Granted that Berkeley was right about our inability to know for sure whether our ideas correspond to anything in the external world, why should we then assume that God makes the connection for us? Why assume that there are any connections? We perceive this connections and even dignify them with names: cause and effect. But that is likely merely a prejudice or a mental habit. Berkeley could invoke God as he likes, Hume said, but even God must be just another mental habit.

Reid’s Appealing Response

In his Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, Reid observed that there was a practical common consensus among everyone. That there is a reality which exists outside the mind and its ideas. Without trying to explain how this worked, or implying that one could know how it worked, the fact was there was a common sense which attested to the real existence of objects outside the mind. And it was so elemental, that denying it or questioning it was absurd.

This appeal to common sense not only threw Hume’s skepticism back into his face, but it permitted Reid to object to Locke’s representationalism and insist that not only does the external world exists, but we may know it directly, without mediating ideas blurring it. Objects are, therefore, presented immediately to our consciousness; and to deny their reality is tantamount idiocy, according to Reid.

One of the great attractions of Reid’s common sense philosophy was the neatness with which it intercepted with traditional scholastic appeals to natural law, and with what was becoming a new political science of natural rights, something which was also pioneered by Locke. Strictly speaking, this was a good distance removed from orthodox Calvinism. Calvinists of the stricter sort wondered where Reid planned to explain how sin entered into this picture of natural perceptions of virtue and reality, or what capacity sinners had to understand natural law, if it existed at all outside scripture. But it was not wholly beyond the grasp of moderate Calvinists, who preferred some form of accommodation with the Enlightenment. And within that circle of moderates, that John Witherspoon was located.

The common sense philosophy had a number of intellectual gifts to bestow. First of all, the common sense philosophy taught that minds not only perceive the world directly as it is, they also simultaneously render a judgement about the certainty of that world, which no honest mind can avoid making. Therefore, Witherspoon offered what we have to call an intellectualistic kind of human psychology, not a voluntaristic one like Edwards. Because minds are incapable of denying the judgements which common sense makes. Will simply does not enter into it.

Secondly, just as common sense dictates our perception of the reality of the external world, it also reveals certain fundamental moral principles within us. Everyone possesses a moral sense, which causes them to see and approve virtue and beauty. And it does so in so immediate fashion that these truths may even be said to be self-evident. Self-evident in that they do not require explanation, they do not require divine illumination; you see something which is beautiful and immediately you respond by recognizing it as beautiful. The reason for that cannot be limited strictly to the mind as it responds to material subjects or material objects, rather, when the mind responds to beauty, it can only be because there is operating, within the human consciousness itself, a factor which stimulates you to recognize the thing which is beautiful.

Conclusion

Reid worked backwards or inductively, from the fact that all minds intuitively understand the objective reality of the world; rather than as Locke and Edwards, analyzing the mind and then deciding whether it can know such reality. So, all truths about consciousness, the world or god must be built up using the same method, by strict induction from facts.

Of course, this Scottish common sense philosophy also had some serious dangers. But in the 1770’s, those dangers were more than compensated by the way that common sense thinking allowed moderate Calvinists, in fact, allowed almost any English protestant, to have a rational epistemology without needing to resort to the radical immaterialism of Edwards or the anti-intellectual enthusiasm of the Awakeners.

From this synthesis of Scottish common sense philosophy and moderate Calvinism, represented by John Witherspoon, would flower the first creative era of the American conversation about ideas between religion and the Enlightenment, between God and nature. A conversation that in many ways we still participate in.

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Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening

Jonathan Edwards was born on October 5, 1703. The son of Timothy Edwards, a Congregationalist pastor in East Windsor, Connecticut; and of Esther Stoddard, who’s father Solomon Stoddard was the pastor of the church of Northampton, Massachusetts, and the most powerful ecclesiastical figure in Western New England. From both sides of his family, Jonathan Edwards inherited a distrust of what was going on in Boston and at Harvard.

His grandfather Stoddard had decided as early as 1660 that restricted Church membership only to those who could make a public confession of receiving God’s grace was a recipe for marginalizing the Church’s impact on society. Only a few in Northampton would ever come forward with claims so staggering, Stoddard argued. The rest will drift off to the sidelines of the Church, where the opportunity to experience that grace might never happen.

Stoddard not only threw down the barriers the first generation of Puritans in New England had put in place, but threw even the half-way covenant which had been invented as a partial membership system to the winds, and invited every member of the town to Baptism and communion. As for Harvard, the churches and the settlements of the Connecticut River Valley had long suspicions about the weak theological leaders that governed intellectual affairs in Cambridge. That is why Connecticut Puritans decided to found their own college in 1701: Yale.

Education

The young Edwards, just under the age of 13, was sent to Yale, even though the college had not yet even worked out a permanent location. It finally settled in New Haven. His education rested on the English and Dutch protestant scholastics. But whether anyone was particularly noticing it or not, Yale’s rector, Timothy Cutler, also assigned William Brattle’s Cartesian New Logic to the students, as well as the study of John Locke and Sir Isaac Newton. Edwards applied himself to these innovations in the curriculum reluctantly. Not because he lacked a taste for philosophy, but because he greatly preferred the old logic. Yet that did not prevented him from arising to the top of his class intellectually. When he graduated from Yale, the choice for giving the valedictory fell to Edwards.

Despite his loyalty to the “old logic”, Edwards could not keep his curiosity from wandering to the new philosophy. By the time he graduated, he began dabbling in two scientific essays, on insects and on spiders. He began keeping commonplace books with his own speculations on epistemology and natural science. Once outside of Yale, he briefly server as pastor to a small congregation in New York City, but in June 1724, he accepted an invitation from Yale to return as a tutor. He spent the next three years working out more deeply his explorations into epistemology, pursuing a more clear and immediate view of God, concerning his operation with matter and bodies. And rather than embracing an outright naturalism (that all substance is material), or dualism (that material and spiritual substances coexist), Edwards was gradually pulled to an immaterialism similar to that of Bishop Berkeley; in which that which is truly the substance of all bodies is the infinite, exact, precise and perfectly stable idea in God’s mind.

As Pastor of Northampton

There was, however, little professional future for junior tutors at Yale. In November 1726, the Northampton church called Edwards to become his grandfather’s Stoddart assistant pastor. Edwards was ordained by the Northampton church on February 1727, and in 1729, after his grandfather’s death, Edwards became pastor of the town. The notations in his philosophical notebooks trailed off, as the demands of a busy pastor were over him. But from time to time they surfaced again in Edwards’ sermons, where it became clear that for Edwards, immaterialism had become an effective weapon for the defense of traditional Calvinism. Invited in 1731 to deliver a public lecture at Boston, Edwards warned against the tendency of man to depend on his own power and goodness, which was good Calvinist theology. The reasoning behind this is strongly influenced by the new philosophical immaterialism: God acts in immaterialist fashion as an extrinsic occasional agent on the mind. Whatever ideas we have are the products not of sensation, nor of the mind as a machine, but of the direct action of God.

Echoing the European Awakeners, Edwards was careful not to make this action simply a matter of God presenting ideas directly to the mind and leaving the mind to do with it what it pleased. God’s action works not upon the reason or ratiocination, but upon a sense of the heart, which immediately perceives a beauty, a divine and transcendent glory in God. Edwards thus made immaterialist philosophy serve the interest of Calvinist piety.

The Awakenings

The promotion of piety became Edwards’ particular burden in the 1730’s. Specially when in 1734 a very remarkable blessing of heaven fell on Northampton. In the Puritan path, the experience of religious conversion had been largely a matter of individual spiritual renewal, under the careful direction of pastors and family elders. The novelty introduced by the Awakeners of the 18th century was to turn the experience of grace into a communal experience, a group revival of religion that could involve whole towns, sometimes entire regions. Solomon Stoddart, with his eye always on the improvement of his parish, had welcomed several small revivals like these in Northampton; and so had Edwards’ father, Timothy Edwards, in their home parish in East Windsor. But this revival, which occurred in 1735, saw, as Edwards described it, more than three hundred souls saved and brought home to Christ in his town.

Not only the numbers, but the character of the revival was, as Edwards said, unprecedented. It involved not only males and females alike, but children as young as four years old. An outburst of enthusiasm and worship, some, he said, weeping with sorrow and distress, others with joy and love, other with pity and concern for the souls of their neighbors. Edwards struggled both to defend and analyze this eruption in “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God”, which was published in England in 1737.

Edwards had hardly digested the lessons of the 1734 revival before a second wave of awakenings came to Northampton in 1740, on the shoulders of the celebrated English preacher George Whitefield. Whitefield had emerged as one of the princes of the European Awakeners. A preacher of fabulous talent, dramatic intensity and superb self-confidence. In 1737, he dedicated himself to establishing an orphanage in the new American colony of Georgia, and undertook a fundraising-preaching tour of the colonies, which quickly turned into a riot of awakenings. What had been mere awakenings now became the Great Awakening in British North America. Whitefield came to Northampton to preach and to recognize Edwards as a fellow laborer. The outbreak of revivals consumed not only Edwards’ Northampton, but much of Western New England.

Whifield’s preaching also generated angry criticism from both the Boston elite, who spurned revivals as raw enthusiasm; and from nervous country persons who feared the destabilizing effect of mass revivals on the peace of their folks. By 1742, the New England clergy had become polarized into an old-like faction, which condemned the revivals; and a new-like faction which encouraged them and which found in Edwards its principal theorist of revivals and religious experience.

Edwards not only participated fully as a preacher in promoting revivals, but he also published three important defenses of “revivalism”: “Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God”, “Some thoughts concerning the present revival in New England”, and “A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections”. Of all the three, the religious affections was Edwards’ most profound effort, laying out in 12 signs, as he put it, the distinction between true and false religion, and the right place of the emotions or affections (to avoid the pejorative term passions) in religious experience. Both, “Some thoughts concerning the present revival” and “The religious affections”, however, show signs of stress in Edwards, since the aftermath of the Greak Awakening in Northampton proved to be a severe disappointment for Edwards, as many of the awakened gradually subsided into religious indifference.

In 1744, in an ill-considered effort to stimulate genuine conversions, Edwards reimposed the test of a public confession of grace on new members of the Church, which had been abandoned by Solomon Stoddart. The Northampton Church turned with resentment on Edwards. In 1750, Edwards was forced to resign.

The Mission and the Later Philosophical Works

Thrown upon the wide ocean of the world, as he put it, Edwards accepted the offer of the Boston commissioners of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England to take charge of the Indian mission at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 60 miles West of Northampton. He was an indifferent missionary, but the mission worked giving time to turn back to his philosophical notebooks. Between 1751 and 1757, Edwards produced two manuscript dissertations, as he called them, on ontology and ethics. The first of them, concerning the end for which God created the world; and the other on the nature of true virtue. These, plus two major treatises on Freedom of the Will, in 1754, and Original Sin in 1758.

Freedom of the Will was the greatest piece of philosophical speculation pined by an American in the 18th century, and the only one which managed to command any serious European readership. But its real intent, as in much of Edwards’ work, was not so much to articulate philosophy or embrace the Enlightenment, but rather to justify in the most enlightened vocabulary and method available the ways of God to man. Edwards had noticed how the threat of Hobbes and his bleak materialism had frightened the religious thinkers in the Enlightenment. He also noticed how Hobbes’ denial of free will caused panic even among Calvinists, who began defending human free will. This affirmation of free will is contradictory to Calvinism’s teaching that God, and not human free will, determines the outcome of all events.

Calvinists, and for that matter anyone who believes in God as more than a well-intentioned mumbler, could not run away from the fact that a God who is really God determines everything. Edwards’ great achievement was to try to demonstrate, in one logical sweep after another, how God’s determination of the will does not deprive anyone of freedom, much less force anyone over the cliff into materialism. And it was a logical sweep.

Defenses of Calvinist theology before the Great Awakening had stiffen unimaginatively into the style and rhetoric of the catechism, with certain theological axioms laid out scholastic-style, and then adorned with scriptural proof texts as if all that was needed to halt the Enlightenment’s incoming tide was a biblical quotation.

What has continuously surprised readers of Edward’s Freedom of the Will was how very unlike the catechism model his writing was. Freedom of the Will reads much more like a treatise on psychology than like an apology for Calvinism. This was because the Enlightenment was simultaneously Jonathan Edwards’ friend and enemy. His serene confidence in traditional Calvinism made him hostile to the Enlightenment’s pretensions to base human behavior on reason and nature; and it made him receptive to the notion that true spiritual harmony was possible only by overcoming the superficial allure of reason and nature. Yet, he believed just as firmly, that reason, once it was sanctified by conversion of the heart, was an instrument to be well used in examining nature. Edwards’ intellectual life was rooted in one of the Enlightenment’s principal questions about epistemology.

People who try to stay astride of conflicting intellectual movements, with one foot in one camp and one foot on another, or one foot in one answer and one foot in another; are usually destroyed by the conflict between the two. Edwards is that rare exception, who instead, turns conflicts into a creative intellectual fusion, in this case, of Enlightenment and piety. In so doing, Edwards fashioned a new Evangelical form of piety, a form which would become one of the two great long-term forces in the history of American ideas.

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