thereby became less of a world intellectual center from about 1680 to 1740,
religious politics in Britain now made it a creative substitute.
England was the site of some of the most vehement and multi-sided relig-
ious conflicts. It had a centralizing monarchy which used the nationalization
of church property as a means of patronage; an old-line Catholic aristocracy
whose status was tied to traditional church ritualism; and urban, mercantile,
and artisan populations whose non-traditional community structures provided
a fertile base for the decentralized Protestant congregations. Alongside these
had emerged a newer gentry and aristocracy, based on new opportunities
thrown out by the patronage of the crown dispensing honors and commercial
monopolies (Wuthnow, 1989; Hochberg, 1984; Stone, 1967). This last group
was structurally opportunistic, capable of serving royalty in the cynical manner
of Francis Bacon, or turning against it to lead a rebellious coalition in the
manner of Oliver Cromwell. The important point is that Britain (now including
not only England but also Scotland and newly conquered Ireland) contained
well-entrenched resources for several factions, and these eventually fought one
another to exhaustion. Britain became the philosophical center between the
time of Locke and Hume largely because religious and political stalemate was
reached there first.
Secularization is not a zeitgeist but a process of conflict. Philosophical
creativity occurs in the range of stances that emerge as intellectuals take up
their new positions on various sides of the shifting balance of power. To
establish this, let us go back to the period of the Civil War, when compromise
was most definitely not the condition of British life. There is the typical
opposition of intellectual extremes: at one end Hobbes and his thorough-going
materialism; at the other end the Cambridge Platonists.
Hobbes’s position branched off from the Mersenne circle in Paris, which
he encountered as a traveling tutor on the Continent during 1634–1637, and
which he frequented while in exile in the 1640s. This connection set off his
creativity, for although he had been associated with Bacon in the 1620s,
Hobbes had produced little. Soon after meeting Gassendi and Galileo in the
1630s, Hobbes developed a grand scheme to derive everything from the motion
of bodies, including a system of government designed to overcome the turbu-
lence of the times. He first emerged in the public intellectual arena when
Mersenne invited him to critique Descartes.^13 Soon after Hobbes was writing
in geometric argumentation; like Descartes, he too attempted an optics but
found more original grounds when he applied Galileo’s physics of motion to
psychology. Hobbes gained his fame in just the territory that Descartes avoided
in his caution to stay away from political entanglements and keep from
antagonizing the religious establishment. Here political connections were de-
termining; Hobbes was in the Royalist faction at a time when the religious
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