A Letter to Dion Part 1

A Letter to Dion.

by Bernard Mandeville.

INTRODUCTION

The _Letter to Dion_, Mandeville's last publication, was, in form, a reply to Bishop Berkeley's _Alciphron: or, the Minute Philosopher_. In _Alciphron_, a series of dialogues directed against "free thinkers" in general, Dion is the presiding host and Alciphron and Lysicles are the expositors of objectionable doctrines. Mandeville's _Fable of the Bees_ is attacked in the Second Dialogue, where Lysicles expounds some Mandevillian views but is theologically an atheist, politically a revolutionary, and socially a leveller. In the _Letter to Dion_, however, Mandeville a.s.sumes that Berkeley is charging him with all of these views, and accuses Berkeley of unfairness and misrepresentation.

Neither _Alciphron_ nor the _Letter to Dion_ caused much of a stir. The _Letter_ never had a second edition,[1] and is now exceedingly scarce.

The significance of the _Letter_ would be minor if it were confined to its role in the exchange between Berkeley and Mandeville.[2] Berkeley had more sinners in mind than Mandeville, and Mandeville more critics than Berkeley. Berkeley, however, mere than any other critic seems to have gotten under Mandeville's skin, perhaps because Berkeley alone made effective use against him of his own weapons of satire and ridicule.[3]

[1] In its only foreign language translation, the _Letter_, somewhat abbreviated, is appended to the German translation of _The Fable of the Bees_ by Otto Bobertag, _Mandevilles Bienenfabel_, Munich, 1914, pp. 349-398.

[2] Berkeley again criticized Mandeville in _A Discourse Addressed to Magistrates_, [1736], _Works_, A. C. Fraser ed., Oxford, 1871, III. 424.

[3] _A Vindication of the Reverend D---- B--y_, London, 1734, applies to _Alciphron_ the comment of Shaftesbury that reverend authors who resort to dialogue form may "perhaps, find means to laugh gentlemen into their religion, who have unfortunately been laughed out of it." See Alfred Owen Aldridge, "Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto," _Transactions of the American Philosophical Society_, New Series, XLI (1951), Part 2, p. 358.

Berkeley came to closest grips with _The Fable of the Bees_ when he rejected Mandeville's grim picture of human nature, and when he met Mandeville's eulogy of luxury by the argument that expenditures on luxuries were no better support of employment than equivalent spending on charity to the poor or than the more lasting life which would result from avoidance of luxury.[4]

[4] Francis Hutcheson, a fellow-townsman of Berkeley, had previously made these points against Mandeville's treatment of luxury in letters to the _Dublin Journal_ in 1726, (reprinted in Hutcheson, _Reflections upon Laughter, and Remarks upon the Fable of the Bees_, Glasgow, 1750, pp. 61-63, and in James Arbuckle, _Hibernicus' Letters_, London, 1729, Letter 46). In _The Fable of the Bees_, Mandeville concedes that gifts to charity would support employment as much as would equivalent expenditures on luxuries, but argues that in practice the gifts would not be made.

Of the few contemporary notices of the _Letter to Dion_, the most important was by John, Lord Hervey. Hervey charged both Berkeley and Mandeville with unfairness, but aimed most of his criticism at Berkeley. He claimed that _Alciphron_ displayed the weaknesses of argument in dialogue form, that it tended either to state the opponent's case so strongly that it became difficult afterwards to refute it or so weakly that it was not worth answering. He found fault with Berkeley for denying that Mandeville had told a great many disagreeable truths--presumably about human nature and its mode of operation in society--and with Mandeville for having told them in public. He held, I believe rightly, that Mandeville, in a.s.sociating vice with prosperity, deliberately blurred the distinction between vice as an incidental consequence of prosperity and vice as its cause: vice, said Hervey, "is the child of Prosperity, but not the Parent; and ...

the Vices which grow upon a flourishing People, are not the Means by which they become so."[5]

[5] [Lord Hervey], _Some Remarks on the Minute Philosopher_, London, 1732, pp. 22-23, 42-50.

T. E. Jessop, in his introduction to his edition of _Alciphron_, characterizes Berkeley's account of the argument of _The Fable of the Bees_ as "not unfair," and says: "I can see no reason for whitewashing Mandeville. The content and manner of his writing invite retort rather than argument. Berkeley gives both, in the most sparkling of his dialogues. Mandeville wrote a feeble reply, A _Letter to Dion_."[6] F.

B. Kaye, on the other hand, says of the exchange between Berkeley and Mandeville that "men like ... Berkeley, who may be termed the religious-minded ... in their anguish, threw logic to the winds, and criticized him [i.e., Mandeville] for the most inconsistent reasons."[7]

[6] _Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher_, T. E. Jessop, ed., in _The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne_. Edited by A. A.

Luce and T. E. Jessop. London, etc., III. (1950), 9-10.

[7] In his edition of _The Fable of the Bees_, Oxford, 1924, II.

415-416. All subsequent references to _The Fable of the Bees_ will be to this edition.

Objective appraisal of the outcome of the debate between Berkeley and Mandeville would presumably lead to a verdict somewhere between those rendered, with appropriate loyalty to their authors, by their respective editors. It is mainly for other reasons, however, that the _Letter to Dion_ is still of interest. There is first its literary merit. More important, the _Letter_ presents in more emphatic and sharper form than elsewhere two essential elements of Mandeville's system of thought, the advocacy, real or pretended, of unqualified rigorism in morals, and the stress on the role of the State, of the "skilful Politician," in evoking a flourishing society out of the operations of a community of selfish rogues and sinners. The remainder of this introduction will be confined to comments on these two aspects of Mandeville's doctrine. Since the publication in 1924 of F. B. Kaye's magnificent edition of _The Fable of the Bees_, no one can deal seriously with Mandeville's thought without heavy reliance on it, even when, as is the case here, there is disagreement with Kaye's interpretation of Mandeville's position.

It was Mandeville's central thesis, expressed by the motto, "Private Vices, Publick Benefits," of _The Fable of the Bees_, that the attainment of temporal prosperity has both as prerequisite and as inevitable consequence types of human behavior which fail to meet the requirements of Christian morality and therefore are "vices." He confined "the Name of Virtue to every Performance, by which Man, contrary to the impulse of Nature, should endeavour the Benefit of others, or the Conquest of his own Pa.s.sions out of a Rational Ambition of being good."[8] If "out of a Rational Ambition of being good" be understood to mean out of "charity" in its theological sense of conscious love of G.o.d, this definition of virtue is in strict conformity to Augustinian rigorism as expounded from the sixteenth century on by Calvinists and, in the Catholic Church, by Baius, Jansenius, the Jansenists, and others. Mandeville professes also the extreme rigorist doctrine that whatever is not virtue is vice: in Augustinian terms, _aut caritas aut cupiditas_. Man must therefore choose between temporal prosperity and virtue, and Mandeville insists, especially in the _Letter to Dion_, that on his part the choice is always of virtue:

... the Kingdom of Christ is not of this World, and ... the last-named is the very Thing a true Christian ought to renounce.

(p. 18)[9]

[8] _Fable of the Bees_, I. 48-49.

[9] All page references placed in the main text of this introduction are to the _Letter to Dion_.

"Tho' I have shewn the Way to Worldly Greatness, I have, without Hesitation, preferr'd the Road that leads to Virtue." (p. 31)

Kaye concedes: that Mandeville's rigorism "was merely verbal and superficial, and that he would much regret it if the world were run according to rigoristic morality;" that "emotionally" and "practically, if not always theoretically," Mandeville chooses the "utilitarian" side of the dilemma between virtue and prosperity; and that "Mandeville's philosophy, indeed, forms a complete whole without the extraneous rigorism."[10] Kaye nevertheless insists that Mandeville's rigorism was sincere, and that it is necessary so to accept it to understand him. It seems to me, on the contrary, that if Mandeville's rigorism were sincere, the whole satirical structure of his argument, its provocative tone, its obvious fun-making gusto, would be incomprehensible, and there would be manifest inconsistency between his satirical purposes and his procedures as a writer.

[10] _Fable of the Bees_, II. 411. I, lxi, I, lvi.

Kaye argues that rigorism was not so unusual as of itself to justify doubt as to its genuineness in the case of Mandeville; rigorism was "a contemporary point of view both popular and respected, a view-point not yet extinct." To show that rigorism was "the respectable orthodox position for both Catholics and Protestants," Kaya cites as rigorists, in addition to Bayle, St. Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Daniel d.y.k.e (the author of _Mystery of Selfe-Deceiving_, 1642), Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), William Law, and three Continental moralists, Esprit and Pascal, Jansenists, and J. F. Bernard, a French Calvinist.[11]

[11] _Ibid._, I. li, I. lv, I. cxxi.

Christian rigorism by Mandeville's time had had a long history. From and including St. Augustine on, it had undergone many types of doctrinal dilution and moderation even on the part of some of its most ardent exponents. In Mandeville, and in Kaye, it is presented only in its barest and starkest form. Kaye, however, required by his thesis to show that Mandeville's doctrine was "in accord with a great body of contemporary theory,"[12] while accepting it as "the code of rigorism" treats it as if it were identical with any moral system calling for any measure of self-discipline or a.s.sociated with any type of religious-mindedness.[13]

He also identifies it with rationalism in ethics as such, as if any rationalistic ethics, merely because it calls for some measure of discipline of the pa.s.sions by "reason," is _ipso facto_ "rigorist."[14]

[12] _Ibid._ I. cxxiv, note.

[13] For example, Kaye cites from Blewitt, a critic of Mandeville, this pa.s.sage: "nothing can make a Man honest or virtuous but a Regard to _some_ religious or moral Principles"

and characterizes it as "precisely the rigorist position from which Mandeville was arguing when he a.s.serted that our so-called virtues were really vices, because not based _only_ on this regard to principle." (_Ibid._ II. 411. The italics in both cases are mine). The pa.s.sage from Blewitt is not, of itself, manifestly rigoristic, while the position attributed to Mandeville is rigorism at its most extreme.

As further evidence of the prevalence of rigorism, Kaye cites from Thomas Fuller the following pa.s.sage: "corrupt nature (which without thy restraining grace will have a Vent.)" _Ibid._ I.

cxxi, note. But in Calvinist theology "restraining grace," which was not a "purifying" grace, operated to make some men who were not purged of sin lead a serviceable social life. (See John Calvin, _Inst.i.tutes of the Christian Religion_, Bk. II, Ch. III, () 3, pp. I. 315-316 of the "Seventh American Edition,"

Philadelphia, n.d.) As I understand it, the role of "restraining grace" in Calvinist doctrine is similar to that of "honnetete" in Jansenist doctrine, referred to _infra_. The rascals whom Mandeville finds useful to society are not to be identified either with those endowed with the "restraining grace" of the Calvinists or with the "honnetes hommes" of the Jansenists.

For other instances of disregard by Kaye of the variations in substance and degree of the rigorism of genuine rigorists, see _ibid._ II. 403-406, II. 415-416.

[14] See especially F. B. Kaye, "The Influence of Bernard Mandeville," _Studies in Philology_, XIX (1922), 90-102.

Mandeville was presumably directing his satire primarily at contemporary Englishmen, not at men who had been dead for generations nor at partic.i.p.ants in Continental theological controversies without real counterpart in England, at least since the Restoration. If this is accepted, then of the men cited by Kaye to show the orthodoxy and the contemporaneity of rigorism only William Law has any relevance. But Law was an avowed "enthusiast," and in the England of Mandeville's time this was almost as heretical as to be an avowed sceptic. Calvinism in its origins had been unquestionably--though not unqualifiedly--rigoristic. By Mandeville's time, however, avowed Calvinism was almost extinct in England; even in Geneva, in Scotland, in Holland, its rigorism had been much softened by the spread of Arminianism and by a variety of procedures of theological accommodation or mediation between the life of grace and the life of this sinful world. On the Continent, Jansenists were still expounding a severe rigorism. But Jansenist rigorism was not "orthodox."

Though not as extreme as Mandeville's rigorism, it had repeatedly been condemned by Catholic authorities as "_rigorisme outre_."[15]

[15] Cf. Denziger-Bannwart, _Enchiridion Symbolorum_. (See index of any edition under "Baius," "Fenelon," "Iansen," "Iansenistae,"

"Quesnell.")

To take seriously Mandeville's rigorism, the narrowness with which he defines "virtue," the broadness with which he defines "vice," his failure to recognize any intermediate ground between "virtue" and outright "vice," or any shades or degrees of either, the positiveness with which he a.s.signs to eternal d.a.m.nation all who depart in any degree from "virtue" as he defines it, is therefore to accept Mandeville as a genuine exponent of a rigorism too austere and too grim not only for the ordinary run of orthodox Anglicans or Catholics of his time but even for St. Augustine (at times), for the Calvinists, and for the Jansenists.

Kaye justifiably puts great stress on the extent of Mandeville's indebtedness to Pierre Bayle. There is not the s.p.a.ce here to elaborate, but it could be shown, I believe, that Mandeville was also indebted greatly, both indirectly through Bayle and directly, to the Jansenist, Pierre Nicole, and that Mandeville's rigorism was a gross distortion of, while Bayle's was essentially faithful to, Nicole's system.[16]

Nicole insisted that "true virtue" in the rigorist sense was necessary for salvation, but at the same time expounded the usefulness for society of behavior which theologically was "sinful." But it was the "sinful" behavior of _honnetes hommes_, of citizens conforming to the prevalent moral standards of their cla.s.s, not of rogues and rascals, which Nicole conceded to be socially useful.[17] Mandeville, on the other hand, not only lumped the respectable citizens with the rogues and rascals, but it was the usefulness for society of the vices of the rogues and rascals more than--and rather than--those of honest and respectable citizens which he emphasized. In the flourishing hive, prior to its reform, there were:

... Sharpers, Parasites, Pimps, Players, Pick-pockets, Coiners, Quacks, South-sayers,

These were call'd Knaves, but bar the Name, The grave Industrious were the same.[18]

[16] The most pertinent writings of Nicole for present purposes were his essays, "De la charite & de l'amour-propre," "De la grandeur," and "Sur l'evangile du Jeudi-Saint," which in the edition of his works published by Guillaume Desprez, Paris, 1755-1768, under the t.i.tle _Essais de morale_, are to be found in volumes III, VI, and XI.

[17] For a similar distinction by Bayle between _honnetes hommes_ who are not of the elect and the outright rascals, see Pierre Bayle, _Dictionaire historique et critique_. 5th ed., Amsterdam, 1740, "eclairciss.e.m.e.nt sur les obscenites," IV. () iv, p. 649.

[18] _Fable of the Bees_, I. 19.

The moral reform which brought disaster to the "Grumbling Hive"

consisted merely in abandonment of roguery and adoption of the standards of the _honnete homme_.[19]