Cuddle this Reason

So easy to misunderstand the past. When some knight in codpiece and tights talks about Christ and the Cross, naturally I assume these words mean to the same to both of us. It's worse when philosophers, dressed closer to the contemporary age, and speaking in the measured tones of the learned, use words like reason and innocence. Are we really talking about the same thing? In my last piece I asked this question:

Does innocence, by concentrating on the surface of things, place too much emphasis on the differences, so missing how much these modes of cognition resemble our own?

Innocence takes many forms. Spinoza equates it with a rational intellect free of the emotions and conceptual biases. A pure reason has no taint of moral value, an innocent in the court of the world. Without the bias of the practical intellect, its limits of perceptions, those moral prejudices, the rational mind can see life straight: God’s divine presence the universe’s necessary causes. Understanding these causes - His laws - is to accept the world’s workings. And knowing such truths we should try to live in accordance with them; for in grasping the nature of Nature we come to know ourselves, know the best, least painful, way of living our lives. To use our head is to benefit the body. Spinoza, despite his scholasticism, is in many ways a modern. That said, he reveals his religious roots when he marries reason to virtue. Reason is divine salvation.

Leibniz doubted that people could live moral lives unless they believed God was Good.1 At the same time he was a librarian who believed the universe was organised like a catalogue…no! he was a logician who thought God, with his own divine logic, had made a world that, built on rational principles, was reason through and through. The universe the most rational that a deity could devise.

How tell them apart? Both believe God is immanent in the world; yet Spinoza thinks the world and God are coterminous, Leibniz that God stands outside it. For Spinoza reason is a reflection of a Nature which follows its own laws (or perhaps we could say reason is embodied in these laws as their own explanation). Leibniz needs an intelligence creating and guiding the universe. Spinoza feels modern, as he empties the universe of thought; Leibniz seemingly stuck in medieval metaphysics, with its Aristotelian forms and intelligent design. And yet it’s Spinoza who constructs a philosophy from pure reason. Like Descartes he creates an entire metaphysics through a series of deductive arguments. His reason a mirror of the world.

The secret of the 17th-century. At first rejecting the Hermetic philosophy of the previous generation, which injected magical powers into the material of the universe, by century’s end Leibniz and Spinoza had come to fuse the rationalism of Descartes with the spiritualism of a Giordano Bruno.2 Here was a rational mysticism, where reason had replaced occult forces as the explanation of the world. Reason its own magic.3

We believe ourselves more sceptical nowadays. The virgin intellect to keep moral values at a distance. No longer seduced by a charming smile, that swing of the hips, a soft sweet lisping of a lover's poetry; today we give the cold shoulder, as we quote statistics and check her footnotes. Philosophers no longer courtly poets, spinning fantastic tales with their prophetic truths, but mechanics and surgeons, even butchers and wreckers, who break ideas down, take theories apart, subject the sweetest lyric to the acetylene torch of linguistic analysis. This rationality a city built upon the ruins of the Humean earthquake, which demolished an older, more human one. That medieval city, unable to accommodate the unstable houses of its early-modern architects, was purpose-built for a David Hume demolition job. One enormous shake, and reason crumpled upon its own weak foundations. Had to happen. The collapse inevitable. In trying to hold up a shaky Christianity, and legitimise modern science, the great thinkers of the 17th-century had put too much faith in reason; a rational foundation the only ground they could conceive for holding up this new universe, which their feared was expanding beyond Man’s reach.4 It was not to be. Metaphysical systems require more than reason to withstand the hard tests of Father Time. Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, all built their palaces with perishable materials.

Did they know what they were doing? Some - Bertrand Russell - doubt Leibniz’s sincerity, while others assure us his belief was genuine.5

You ask me where I stand. 

It is easy to make clear and distinct a past that was murky and blurred. Russell, that supreme philosopher of the analytic mind, was bound to concentrate on the logical errors, the ramshackle nature, of the Leibnizian construction. But this overlooks how easy it is for the cleverest amongst us to shift-shape words and concepts to meet their own ends. The God of the Old Testament no longer fit for purpose? Fine! We’ll turn him into the Great Clockmaker.6 The supremely smart, and this where Spinoza is right, are usually innocents; for they mistake their own thoughts with what is actually the case. Nobody more deluded than the clever ones who believe cleverness cannot err. But this - dear souls! - is just what’s most likely to happen, if not checked by the hard reality of facts or the shrewd criticisms of others as clever as themselves. Think of Descartes’ confidence in his new metaphysical system….7

The clever ones are less likely to understand a world as invent it. Marvellous for science and technology, less good in politics and community work, which depend for their efficacy on common sense and the commonplace feelings. Indeed, never let a clever one into Westminster or city hall: the damage could be immense.8

Until Luther’s Reformation Monsieur Reason had the solid rock of the Church to rest upon; thus not even those crazy scholastics, with their mad games with logic, could bring him down.9 For sure, around this time, there was much ridicule of scholasticism; from Erasmus to Galileo to Locke, one couldn’t establish one’s fashionable credentials unless you attacked those old monastic geezers. Yet this camouflaged the new men’s own excessive use of the rational faculty - Galileo’s theories were based on thought not actual experiments.10 Both old and new were partial to Monsieur Reason, who now, under a surfeit of new theories, was suffering an identity crisis: was he a concept, a logical argument or a mathematical axiom? Or just a ruler for measuring things?11

Coming out of a monotheistic tradition, all the major thinkers tried to squeeze these multi-identities into a single entity, one category, a universal method of thought; though some - Descartes and Leibniz - were more sceptical of success than others: Spinoza. How turn meaning, words, ideas, into a mathematico-logical system, insulated from experience and the physical world? Leibniz wanted to create a conceptual calculus where concepts could be read off as formulas. Spinoza, mathematically far less sophisticated, believed that ideas themselves were a species of mathematical reasoning, and that he could create a self-enclosed system of arguments by giving water-tight definitions and linking them in logical sequence. And our Locke? By attacking Descartes and the scholastics he thought to hide the sleight-of-hand of his philosophical reasoning. Locke’s empiricism far more metaphysical than the Cartesian he ridicules.12

The great rationalists wanted to make a universe out of reason; God a benevolent professor handing out his axioms. And if all exercise their reason, all to end up thinking the same thing, as reason, being everywhere the same, brings us altogether under one truth.13 Reason God’s essence, which we intuit when thinking with rigour and clarity. No longer to rely on good works, confession or the goad of a minister’s sermon for salvation. No, those days were gone. The mind divine when uncovering abstract ideas, defining terms, applying the deity’s own logic. Reason to save us, if used properly.

Did they realise they were creating a new religion?14

With Spinoza I think the answer is yes; it is why a theory of knowledge is such an intimate part of his Ethics. Defining God as outside all human values, he argues that the divine, and reason, which shares God’s essence, is beyond good and evil. Spinoza thought he had found the (rational) truth to the universe; where moral values are but distortions of our rational faculty. Alas, he has only redefined sin and sinlessness, where sin is a mind captured by the senses and passions. Not to enter the confession box, but to put our thinking caps on…everybody to be a Jesus Christ if reason like a logician. Faith no longer our salvation but rational arguments. This a God of the philosophers.15

It is to put too high a value on reason. No wonder David Hume came along and turned off the heater to Spinoza’s hot air balloon.16 Nothing can be built on reason for reason is not a substance that can be built on. It is an activity. Reason is like the waves of the sea; creating new beaches they also bring down whole cliffs.

Reason is a tool for either good or evil. It may help physical, mental or social harmony; but reason can be used to undermine any social form. Indeed, left to itself, reason is apt to smash up things. Deep down Spinoza knew this:

…[Spinoza] argued that, unless we accept the self-evidence of some proposition as not only a necessary, but also a sufficient, condition of its truth, we must be led into total scepticism by way of an infinite regress….17

Faced with such a truth he ran away from it. He had to convince himself that rational propositions were self-evident truths: merely to think them a guarantee of their certainty. Descartes went deeper, knew better. The relationship between these two great thinkers fascinates. Spinoza, so reliant on the Frenchman, upon which much of this own thinking depends, nevertheless tried to demolish the master’s philosophy, of whose weaknesses he is acutely aware. How accept a complete rational system if some of the links of logic are missing or faulty? If one link is broken then the whole thing must fail…. An agnostic takes what is useful and discards the rest. We see this with Leibniz. But how does a great disciple break free from a great master, whose influence has penetrated and suffused his soul? Well, you start at the foundations: Descartes’ God does not exist.18 From that you create a brand new metaphysical system, one that turns the old one almost upside down; reason not above the world but immanent in it.

An heroic attempt, which leads to the mere assertion of a belief: that reason underwrites itself. In trying to burn down his master’s palace Spinoza turned Monsieur Reason into a fanatic.19 Easy meat for a sophisticate. Hume the flâneur who turned a wry gaze onto these mad monks parading in the street. David Hume called himself a man of letters; a well-dressed mind in the company of dowdy preachers. How threadbare he made their clothes look.

No disciple is free of their master. Such is the influence, their style of thought, their method of analysis, that all we can do is change the content; it is why disciples often just turn the original theory on its head. Rebels only. Descartes’s central insight - that reason requires a rational idea (God) for its foundation - was rejected in favour of the belief that reason is its own ground. Spinoza could do this because he turned reason into a thing: God is reason; reason is existence. Being two attributes of the same substance, when we employ reason we earn the hard currency of existential fact, for we touch what exists: the idea of the object and the object itself are one. A concept is the thing it describes. The conclusion follows like the letters in an alphabet…when we are rational we uncover the world as it is. A strangely anthropomorphic way of looking at the universe (though Spinoza attacks others for seeing God in Man’s image). Descartes was more profound. There is a separation of the human from Nature, reason from experience, knowledge from existence. He had noticed something peculiar about humans: our minds. Rather than explaining this peculiarity away he dealt with it directly (though he went too far, believing that if we used the right method we could bridge the Grand Canyon between what’s in and outside our heads). Unlike Spinoza, Descartes knew our reason had to have an existential ground; absolute certainty to come only from our feeling the existential fact of our thinking self - cogito ergo sum.20 That could not be doubted. It is our absolute certainty, as a living organism. Such physical awareness of our thoughts guarantees that our thinking is real, and thus certain. However what we think - the absolutes of knowledge - though they depend on this rational faculty, and its correct use of reason, requires a God to underwrite them. In the last analysis there must be a foundation outside the self to guarantee the content of our thoughts about the world outside that self. Spinoza wanted the certainty, had imbibed the method, and was enamoured of his master’s reason; but how live with a Christian god, especially after he had rejected his own? Here is the source of his Double-Aspect theory: God and Nature two sides of the same coin. For Spinoza the certainties of reason have a ground because they are part of physical existence. Nature is reason. When we think rationally we touch reality itself. The peculiar nature of reason, its uniquely human quality, is thus elided.21 

Reason is God.

Without doubt a deeply religious individual, Spinoza carries his old religious sensibility over into his philosophy.22 That same need for wholeness and a total certainty, where Nature is suffused with meaning. Not being a Christian he could not base his philosophical faith on a benevolent Christ; nor he could not rely on God to be reasonable.23 Instead, he made the universe divine: Nature to have its own headpiece.

The knowledge of good and evil is nothing but an effect of joy or sadness, insofar as we are conscious of it.24

Morality is an illusion, Man’s mask hiding the animal within. Moral ideas but justifications of physiological processes. We must think beyond good and evil, wipe our minds clean of these man-made values, to consider only Nature’s causes. Yet even Spinoza is human…he has to believe in some kind of value; thus he creates his own naturalistic morality, with reason as the ultimate Good. In using our rationality to understand Nature we create the possibility of the benevolent life, one in tune with natural process. Reason its own medicine and faith. In short, to think with clarity is to be innocent of man-made faults; it is to touch the divine essence, freeing ourselves of the perversions of our senses and their imaginative fictions. A cool intellect etherealises the mind and saves the body. But in truth an intellectual distance has been transmogrified into a holy innocence. No wonder he was popular for a while.25

In was in the 19th-century that such innocence was found to produce its own horrors. With Turgenev we learn that reducing the human animal to a scientific object leads to nihilism.26 In Nietzsche to be beyond good and evil is not to enter the temple of the divine but to step on stage: it is the call of the artist, re-making the world as a work of art. An artist creates. But some want to destroy…in the debasement of Nietzsche’s thought, transformed into a terrible Social Darwinism by some of his followers, reason was used to justify the erasure of millions. In the 20th-century we learned a terrible lesson. Reason, being value-neutral, is an exceptionally dangerous commodity, to be handled with extreme care. Only the radiation suits of the better emotions to protect us from its worst, its inhuman, effects. 

Reason is a tool.  A hammer to bang in nails or to hit someone's head…. 

A hammer innocent? An odd phrase. Yet this is just what Spinoza assumes of reason. Free of the emotions, the distortions of our senses, reason becomes pure thought - the ultimate virtue, putting us in touch with the divine essence, Nature itself. Good and evil but the failures of a faulty intellect. It is another way of writing the Adam and Eve story, but with the central theme turned inside out: now they eat the apple to regain their innocence.27 

Spinoza was a realist. He knew such cold intelligence is rare. Only professors beneficent.28

Indifference can be and often is an evil. But what about innocence as commonly understood, is that a good? For children yes, they need a safe, stable, innocent world where trust is absolute; one reason that school is such a risk both for individuals and a society: schools may remove that innocence too soon, too drastically.29 Yet in the modern world few can risk being innocents for long. We have to know the world; a world full of strangers and impersonal institutions, and it must be known from an early age, if we are to enjoy success.30 Then, when successful, adults can be innocents again; a calculated naivety removing our psychic pains. It is the gift of the comfortable. To explain everything away, by reducing all bad things to their causes, we remove our guilt, our shame. Typically Spinoza turned a technique into humanity’s salvation. The intellectual distance that saves us from the pain of our own existence believed a universal virtue, that secures the well-being of society. Too often it is a social opt-out. The billionaire taking the lift from dirt-sprayed street to vacuum-clean penthouse.31

School is our rite of passage.32 Once upon a time the stress was on Spinoza’s value-free enquiry. This produced huge benefits, but some of its negative effects I have mentioned. It is why we appear in retreat from such rigorous training, such impersonal reasoning; though it aids both the troubled mind and a sick society. But no: back to the warm bath of morality! is the call. For we have learnt the wrong lessons from the 20th-century horror-show. A proper understanding of a subject is to follow Spinoza’s example: treat it without emotion or moral judgement. When undressed of sentiment, shorn of the skirt of wishful thinking, the petticoat of special pleading, the hostess appears without the camiknickers of good and evil. Naked Nature! Is there a better way to view a body? It is to look at life naturalistically (although my version of naturalism differs from Spinoza’s: there are times it’s better to see a body fully-clothed). To consider how things function, this offers the best clues into how things, people, communities, actually work.33 Dispassionate understanding (though too dispassionate and we miss the human factor in human relations). But understanding is not acting. We shouldn’t confuse an intellectual investigation with our ethical duties, which are determined by our emotions. Justice is an instinct not an axiom. Knowledge can help hone that instinct, but never should knowledge or reason replace our instincts, so intimate with our feelings. 

Spinoza’s species of reasoning is extinct in the Galapagos Islands: modern philosophy departments.34 Thinking of such an extreme metaphysical kind, concerned only with eternal truths, is apt to desensitise us to the realities of political and social life. So easy to dismiss the corruptions of ordinary living as the debased thinking of cretins and crooks. What use such thinking? To really see what’s happening in Bangor if stuck on top of Snowden? Here we concur with Descartes and Locke: it is better to engage with the world than escape from it into abstract rationality. Practical reason, especially in those areas that lead to human benefits - medicine a favourite of Leibniz and Descartes - to be the focus of our lives.35 Moreover, what Spinoza or Plato regards as mere opinion, is usually the most important aspects of the society, whether in a modern metropolis or a pre-historic village. A society hostess reveals more when dressed for a ball than when naked in bed.

It is here that we see the fundamental weakness in Spinoza’s philosophical enterprise; that large hole in his firm’s accounts. If all is Nature, then the emotions, the passions, the fictions, the dreams, and the moralities, must also be treated as natural objects, each with their own validity. In principle Spinoza agrees, but in practice devalues these as natural objects by emptying them of reason, that godly essence. Here is error. An understanding of Nature is equated with a reason believed universally and eternally the same. A lot of truth here; when considering all its attributes it does seem that reason as a method of thinking is ubiquitous across the human race; and that such reasoning, when allied to science, does produce an accurate picture of the universe. But apply this epistemological equality to individuals and a satanist is the same as a saint: they are identified as human by the traits they share. The mistake is in not recognising that the material reason works upon is as important as reason itself, if we are to know the subject. An art critic, when discussing art, is on the same intellectual level as a mathematician or philosopher; indeed the latter, if relying on pure reason, to end up in the desert of logical analysis, that old scholasticism. When planting vegetables, the cabbages, fertiliser and soil surpass the spade. In rejecting Aristotle in toto, in junking his unique substances, Spinoza went to the other extreme, in seeking a single substance that could explain all things. Drunk on the spirits of rationality. Though this error was shared, in their different ways, by Leibniz and Descartes. All sought a rational foundation to the universe. They had confused the human mind with the rest of Nature. Far out on their metaphysical seas, they had mistaken a man-made raft for an island.

To understand a subject we must have an understanding of its specific qualities. Physics tells us something of Rembrandt’s Man with a Beard, but little that is unique to the picture, the aesthetic details of the portrait. Back to where I began. For the philosophers of old, reason elevated knowledge up to some super-high rational plane. It was a lift taking us to the top of a Wolkenkratzer. We have learnt the inadequacy of such thinking. We know the value of looking at things close to the ground. With this shift, the nature of reason changes; less about gluing everything together, now it is a knife cutting things to pieces. Yet we, like Spinoza, have gone too far: every natural and social object, some argue, to be understood through analysis.36 Spinoza had too much faith in philosophy. We a blind belief in science. There are times when we should look at things in the round. Look down at the world from the height of our metaphysics.37 There is much in the universe, and in Bangor, that cannot be understood under the microscope. Some things need the mountain view.

____________

Notes

1.  Discourse on Metaphysics; Correspondence with Arnauld; Monadology. 

2.  Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition.

3.  What makes Newton so modern was his rejection of such an all encompassing reason. He described phenomena and admitted he could not explain them, accepting that their causes were a mystery. This reduced reason to mere explanation; it is no longer, as with Leibniz, a creative being, or with Spinoza, part of the structure of the universe. 

4.  Newton’s great insight. For a classic account of the scientific shift: Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe.

5.  Maria Rosa Antognazza, Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography.

6.  In the Discourse on Metaphysics Leibniz uses an interesting analogy to explain God’s free will: if a prince makes someone a general he knows the men the general will select. That is, he doesn’t choose the men, but he knows they will be chosen and thus the actions they will perform (pp.78-9). As a piece of logic it fails badly, but as an image it works brilliantly. For Leibniz there is a (crucial) distinction between a God who knows and a God who causes; it’s almost as if God didn’t so much create as reason the universe into existence. The consequence? What happens in organic life is produced not by causes but by each life form knowing their relation in the world. In so doing, we freely choose to follow the divine plan.

Leibniz the logician is at odds with Leibniz the metaphysician and moralist. He needs to believe in freedom, for without it he cannot conceive of a moral order; yet how fit that freedom into a rational universe? What the Discourse shows is a thinker trying desperately to reconcile his logic with his faith; both of which are essential to him.

7.  His replies to the objections to his Meditations are instructive: though he welcomes criticism in the abstract, in practice he finds it almost impossible to accept any of it. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume II. He proves his own maxim true: the more intelligent you are the less likely to change your mind.

8.  Surely the message of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.

9.  For just how mad reason can get, Edward Grant, God & Reason in the Middle Ages.

10.  Newton was an exception. Richard Westfall, The Life of Isaac Newton. It is Newton who is the father of British empiricism; Locke his stenographer.

11.  According to Descartes it is measurement that is the key to understanding Nature.

12.  Clearly brought out in Leibniz’s New Essays on Human Understanding. This shows how dogmatic and at times crude is Locke’s reasoning. What is revealed is a polemicist who pushes his own insights too far. For Locke is more interested in destroying his opponents’ position than grasping the complexities and paradoxes of the human mind. Leibniz in contrast, comes across as reasonable and scientific. Locke is the classic philosopher, working with simple and fixed concepts; Leibniz the scientist, always open to new facts, new ways of looking at phenomena. It is empiricism that is shown to be dogmatic and prone to the intellectual airy-fairy.

13.  This is the dream of modern education and the knowledge industry: if only properly educated we all to live the good life.

14.  For its full effects: David F. Noble: The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. Different aspects of this religion are described in John Gray, The Immortalisation Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death.

15.  Nietzsche, acute as always, noticed this: Roger Scruton, Spinoza. Although Scruton attacks Nietzsche for the dismissal of his subject.

16.  It is surely no accident that the subtitle of his great A Treatise of Human Nature is: An ATTEMPT to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning INTO MORAL SUBJECTS. It is here that reason must break down. And with it any kind of rational unity, so beloved of a Spinoza or Leibniz.

17.  Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza: An Introduction to His Philosophical Thought.

18.  Newton underwent the same rebellion; but went in completely different directions to Spinoza.

19.  Think of Spinoza’s early Cartesian as a conversion, with all the fragility and thus fanaticism inherent to it. No doubt why he had such an influence of the wild boys of the new science and new politics. For the fanatics and extremists to which he appealed: Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemason and Republicans.

20.  Descartes’ views on the relationship between mind and body are very complex, and cannot be easily reduced to the common belief of a simple mind-body dualism. See all three volumes of his Philosophical Writings, edited by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch. Thus here: we know we exist through a physical fact, an existential awareness in our mind, thinking a natural instinct felt by us. Thought is an activity of the mind, of a mind linked to the body…the thrust of Descartes’ dualism is less in the split between mind and body - most of his ideas on their relations would sit comfortably within the cognitive revolution of the 1960s - as between an idea and its mind/body. It is the content of thought - each idea -  that is of a different substance. Was he wrong? What is an idea made of?

21.  The value of Aristotle is his stress on this uniqueness, which makes us alive to differences between people, social classes, species and physical entities. His failure: he projects this human quality onto all of Nature, each substance to be its own unique self. For excellent discussion: Spinoza, pp.22-3.

22.  How religious was Descartes? I suspect a low temperature believer. Conveniently he had his own definition of God: ‘pure intelligence’, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume I, p.5.

23.  The influence of the Jewish faith, and its roots in the Old Testament, that irascible Jehovah?

24.  Ethics, p.120.

25.  For the influence, Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750.

26.  Fathers and Sons.

27.  This leads to a question: how much of Spinoza’s philosophy was simply a reversal of his Judaism? Although if talmudic we’d say Adam and Eve ate the wrong apple: the apple of good and evil rather than the apple of reason.

28.  The reality is quite different. For a representative sample: Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards.

29.  The reason, I suspect, schools were such a feature of Dickens’ satire; think of Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby, Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit or the Blimbers in Dombey and Son.

30.  We are educated to be members of institutions, which have become our natural environments. Benjamin Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap.

31.  The fundamental error of Spinoza is to equate the individual with society; thus his belief that what is best for a person will translate into the beneficence of all. Alas, society and its institutions run on different laws. The great insight of Durkheim, with his ‘social facts’.

32.  Most traditional societies wait until the teenage years to educate the children into the secrets of the adult world - the rite of passage.

33.  Compare the fluffy rhetoric of Big Tech with how it actually works: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.

34.  Although it is sneaking back in through the literature and sociology departments: Marx and Foucault conflate the moral with the epistemological. 

35.  For Descartes, philosophy should only take up a fraction of our time. See his letter to Princess Elizabeth in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume III: The Correspondence, p.228. Richard Popkin, in his classic work of the period - The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle, p.171 - misinterprets this letter; this misinterpretation reflecting his book’s central weakness: the belief that scepticism is the heroine of the 17th-century epistemological drama. The evidence points all the other way. This a time when religious thinking was at its height; a time when a new faith - in reason - was being born. Naturally, because reason is complex and variegated, there were many disagreements and illusions about its nature; these disagreements exaggerated by the complex relationship of these thinkers to the Christian faith. Add the religious wars, the intolerance of Church and sect, and we have an impossibly complicated origin to this new (rational) religion; which although ultimately free of Christianity was at this time erroneously linked to it. Where scepticism was at its height was in debunking that link between reason and Christian theology. Although, as Popkin makes clear, there is a large irony here: scepticism was at first used to protect the faith from the new science.

A comparative study, between the early years of Christianity, when its concepts were being formulated - what a mad time! - with the crazy scramble to put reason in Christ’s place in the 17th-century, would be enlightening.

36.  For the revolution in philosophy: Mary Midgley, Wisdom, Information & Wonder.

37.  Hampshire is very good on the scientific prescience of Spinoza’s work.