- Leibniz stresses the argument for innate ideas in his Discourse, written in 1686
but left unpublished; Locke’s Essay was completed the following year. - Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who had been English ambassador to France during
the religious maneuvers of the 1620s, had argued for a minimalist religion based
on common notions and the common consent of mankind; this argument was put
forward in 1645, amidst the fervors of the Civil War, as a critique of religious
authoritarianism. Locke has a network contact here too; Locke’s friend at the time
he wrote the first draft of his Essay (during his stay in France in the late 1670s)
was Cherbury’s grandson Thomas Herbert, who as earl of Pembroke was to receive
the dedication of the publication (Fraser, [1894] 1959: xxviii). Pembroke later
received the dedication of Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge in 1710—an
indication of the emerging split within the network of Locke’s successors. - An exemplary figure is Dryden (110 in the key to Figure 10.1). A supporter of
Cromwell in the 1650s, he shifted to the Royalist court thereafter and was made
poet laureate and court historian. In the early 1680s he wrote poetic satires
defending the king’s party against the Whigs; in 1685 he followed court fashion
and converted to Catholicism. Even with the Glorious Revolution he landed on
his feet; in the 1690s he launched the dramatic career of Congreve (later recipient
of Whig sinecures), and protected the Deist Blount. - These writers not only gave prestige to their political patrons but propagandized
on their behalf as well. Swift in London during 1710–1714 edited the Tory party
magazine. In the opposing literary circle, Addison made his reputation for poems
celebrating Whig military victory and wrote the Whig attack on the Treaty of
Utrecht which brought down the Tory ministry in 1714. Steele started as a gazeteer
for Lord Harley, and edited Whig periodicals including Tatler and Spectator.
Addison was rewarded by becoming secretary of state; Steele received a parliamen-
tary seat. - The lineage of Boulainvilliers’s teachers goes back to the controversies over natural
religion at Amsterdam in the 1650s. After La Peyrère’s scandalous pre-Adamite
thesis got him arrested, he recanted and took refuge in the Oratorian college at
Juilly. There Richard Simon continued La Peyrère’s project, producing in 1678 a
historical critique of the Old Testament, which was in turn banned by Bossuet. In
the next generation Simon’s student was Boulainvilliers. In Boulainvilliers’s phi-
losophy the cogito implies a universal Being wider than matter; on this Boulain-
villiers erects a natural religion, in which the body after death returns to universal
matter while the soul remains an idea in the infinite mind (EP, 1967: 1:354; Roger,
1964: 6–7; Heer, [1953] 1968: 188). - Burrage (1993); Ariès (1962: 195–237); Heilbron (1994). The same collapse of
enrollments and loss of professional credentialing is characteristic of the universi-
ties in England after 1670. In both places intellectuals operated in secular life and
scorned the formalities of university lectures and examinations as “silly and obso-
lete,” “childish and useless exercises” (Green, 1969: 50; Stone, 1974b). - Condillac, the one member of the circle of Encyclopedists who came from a
university background in theology, was the one who took up a traditional philo-
sophical topic, although he did it using the new anti-metaphysical capital imported
Notes to Pages 600–606^ •^1001