Clarke, Samuel

« Clarke, Samuel (1675-1729) Regarded in his lifetime along with Locke as the leading English philosopher, Clarke was best known in his role as an advocate of a thoroughgoing natural theology and as a defender of Newtonianism, most notably in his famous correspondence with Leibniz.

His natural theology wasset out in his Boyle lectures of 1704 and 1705, but it left little room for revelation, and endeared him to neither side in the quarrel between deists andorthodox Anglicans.

A staunch proponent of Newtonian natural philosophy, he defended it against criticisms of its notions of gravity and absolutespace. 1 Natural theology Samuel Clarke was born at Norwich, England, and studied at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he remained until 1700.

He was a fine classicist and while still a student he published a Latin translation of the standard Cartesian naturalphilosophy textbook of the time, Rohault's Traité de Physique , which replaced the inferior translation of Théophile Bonnet.

In 1697 he was converted to the cause of Arianism, and from this time until his death in 1729 - after many years as rector of St James's, Westminster andchaplain to Queen Anne - he devoted his main energies to the development of a natural theology.

Among the key theological issues withinthe Anglican Church at this time were an internal dispute between defenders of the Athanasian Creed (which established the notion of theTrinity) and Arians, and an external dispute between Anglicans and deists.

Arianism or unitarianism had significant support withinrationalist theology in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Deism - the notion that there is a natural religionwith precedence over any revealed religion - had become a significant force with the posthumous publication of the works of Charles Blount(1654-93) in 1695, and reached its apogee in the 1730s.

English deists, unlike French Enlightenment writers, generally consideredthemselves Christians, with the result that the distance between deists and writers like Clarke, who defended natural theology at theexpense of revelation, was sometimes very small.

Clarke's aim was to reconstruct religion and ethics on the basis of natural philosophyand natural theology.

His proof of the existence of God is a version of the cosmological argument.

Its core is that if something exists now,something always must have existed because things cannot come into existence from nothing; but what it is that always has existed mustbe 'self-existent', that is, it must depend on nothing else for its existence; and what is self-existent is necessarily existent.

All these stepsare questionable but, even if supposed valid, the argument establishes a very abstract God rather than a personal God who is moral, justand truthful.

Consequently Clarke needed to bridge the gap between this God and the God of Christianity (even in its unitarian version).His account of God harbours a deep and familiar problem.

On the one hand, God is completely free, and orders the world in a way that isconstrained by nothing, for nothing could constrain such a perfect being.

On the other hand, goodness and truth are not arbitrary, and inparticular God's action must reflect natural standards of truth and goodness rather than instantiate such standards arbitrarily.

Clarkeattempts to reconcile these principles by means of a doctrine of the 'fitness of things', whereby nature has a moral aspect which mirrors itsphysical aspect, moral and physical aspects both being knowable by reason.

The idea is that any rational being will guide its conduct interms of these moral principles.

Since God is completely rational, he follows them of necessity, but we are also influenced by passionswhich act against reason and cause us to behave immorally on occasion, and it is from this that the need for established religions arises. 2 Doctrine of the soul The Boyle Lectures were set up - on a bequest of £50 per annum from Boyle - to counter deism, Hobbesianism, atheism and other unorthodox views, and in his Boyle Lectures for 1705 Clarke attacked what he perceived to be the reductionism ofHobbesian and Spinozistic accounts of mind.

The problem had come to the fore because of Locke's passing statement that it is notinconceivable that God could 'superadd to matter the faculty of thinking'.

Like other critics of Locke, Clarke believed that this wastantamount to materialism.

His response was to deny that perception and intelligence can derive from matter - either reductively or invirtue of a combination of matter and motion - on the grounds that only what possesses a perfection can cause or communicate it:something that lacks the perfection of thought cannot produce this perfection in something else.

Two critics took Clarke to task - HenryDodwell and Anthony Collins.

Collins, in particular, accuses Clarke of failing to distinguish between the powers of the parts of matter andthe powers of organized combinations of parts: the latter powers are different from the former and serve to explain thought and action.Clarke denies that there can be powers in the whole that are not powers of the parts, distinguishing various kinds of genuine from non-genuine properties of things: colours, for example, seem to be properties of the whole but not the part, yet they are in fact not genuineproperties of the object at all.

Collins accuses Clarke of asserting that the whole cannot have powers lacking in its parts, whereas he shouldbe demonstrating it.

The question is not simply one of onus of proof, however, for Clarke himself subsequently admits that something canhave qualities or powers, such as roundness, which are not present in its parts.

But consciousness, he maintains, is not like this: it is apower which must inhere in the parts if it is to be present at all.

The dispute is inconclusive, but it hard to avoid the conclusion that Clarkeset off on the wrong foot in denying that whole and parts can have different properties, and the claim that consciousness must be in all ofthe parts is not supported by any compelling argument. 3 Defence of Newton Clarke is often praised for the way in which his notes to his translation of Rohault undermine Rohault's Cartesianism in favour of a Newtonian account.

But in fact the notes to the first edition are very uncritical, accepting the vortex theory and making nomention of gravitation.

It was only in later editions that the notes took on a Newtonian edge, and by that time Newton's Principia had a wide circulation.

Clarke was, however, an able defender of Newtonianism in the 1700s, being the first to distinguish clearly between momentumand kinetic energy, and he was chosen to respond to Leibniz's accusation that the ideas of Newton and Locke were responsible for thedecline of religion in England.

Some of the questions at issue between Clarke and Leibniz are on points of interpretation, as in Leibniz'srejection of Newton's claim that space is simply God's sensorium .

Leibniz points out that if God needed an organ to perceive things, those things could not depend on him, and Clarke replies by construing Newton's doctrine as meaning that God is omnipresent and so, far fromrequiring sense organs, has unmediated perceptual grasp.

Other disputes involve substantive questions in natural philosophy, and thefundamentals of Leibniz's philosophy - notably his principles of sufficient reason and the identity of indiscernibles - are called intoquestion.

Many of the issues in the dispute are essentially continuations of the clash between Cartesian and Newtonian natural philosophy.Descartes had provided a model in which planets were carried around a centrally rotating sun by the swirling motion of the ether aroundthis sun, an account which dispensed with any need for action at a distance.

This is essentially the account that Leibniz defends, andClarke defends both the existence of a void (which undermines the idea of a swirling ether) and action at a distance, which he points outhas been shown to exist, even if its causes have not been discovered.

Other questions in dispute raise new problems, and a key issue isthe nature of space and time.

Leibniz considered these to be relations, and hence to be relative, whereas Clarke considered them to bereal and absolute.

Newton had considered that, although we cannot tell of any inertial state whether it is a state of rest or a state ofuniform rectilinear motion, there is a way in which we can detect the existence of absolute space, and he believed that the concavedeformation of the surface of water in a rotating bucket can only be explained by a rotation relative to absolute space.

Leibniz did notaccept that the idea of absolute space made sense, for in such a space no part is different from any other, and there would be no reasonfor God to create things in one place rather than another.

Clarke's response is effectively that God does not need sufficient reason: Godcreates through an act of will.

Moreover, points in space are not merely relational: they have real properties that distinguish them from oneanother, as the bucket experiment indicates.

Clarke is in a strong position here, and the challenge to Leibniz is to indicate how differencesin inert forces can be explained except by reference to space and time.. »