Naturalism and William Paley

Abstract

MARK FRANCIS? I This article is an attempt to establish William Paley’s work as the source of higher political wisdom in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Paley’s works were texts at Cambridge University for more than half a century, and he was an author who was required reading at universities in the British ‘outback’ when they were established-Durham University and Sydney University until the middle of the nineteenth century and at the University of Manitoba even in the century’s closing decades. Paley is an English political thinker who needs to be retrieved from the flood of secondary literature on Scottish philosophers and economists. Why late eighteenthand nineteenthcentury English political theorists such as Paley have been ignored while comparatively unimportant Scottish ones have been commemorated is of interest in the same way that Byron thought English bards and Scotch reviewers were of interest. We have been too easily enticed by the strictures of the Edinburgh Review which was so seemingly modern and so open to continental influences. In addition, England in the early nineteenth century was chiefly known for its economics, and following the well-known dramatic dictum of not crowding the centre stage, English political theory was pushed out of it.’ William Paley’s The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy was the most widely used text-book on morals and political philosophy in England from 1785 until the middle of the nineteenth century. It is now one of the least understood historical texts. This obscurity is partly due to the twin foci of modern English historiography upon political philosophy as a debate engaging sixteenthand seventeenth-century minds and upon moral sense philosophy as occupying eighteenth-century ones. In comparison, the nineteenth century, especially the early part of it, is regarded as a non-reflective historical period filled with reform activities of a practical kind and with the spread of methodism and evangelical thought.2 In addition to this quite indefensible periodisation, writers who do not fall into century-long divisions, or whose thought bridges such divisions, are neglected. Paley, like the poets Cowper and Crabbe, is regarded as falling into a void between the eighteenth century and Victorian England. What critical literature there is on Paley usually reflects on the fact that he did not fit a large historical patterning. First, though he taught from Locke, he was uninterested in applying the great seventeenth-century devices of rights, social