“Bread crumbs”(perhaps how you got here)

December, 2009

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, was, in the Eighteenth Century, big news. His fame rested in large part on a single work (if it can be called “single” in any sense, for it is long and has many branches) - Characteristick of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times,  best known from its sixth and last edition, printed in London in 1737 - 1738.

There are many remarkable features in this work, not the least of which is (in Vol. 1) what is surely the most elaborate defense of common jests and wit ever composed. Shaftesbury’s style can only be characterized as - well, different from that of the approved authors of the Twentieth Century. Shaftesbury wrote elegant, graceful, leisurely English. To the modern reader, his work often seems prolix, rambling, and even entirely chaotic. It is none of those things.

One aspect of Shaftesbury’s work that undoubtedly contributed to its slide into obscurity is his spelling. Consider the following passage from the third volume:

An ingenious Physician among the Moderns, having in view the natural Dependency of the vegetable and animal Kinds on their common Mother-EARTH, and observing that both the one and the other draw from her their continual Sustenance, (some rooted and fix’d down to their first abodes, others unconfin’d, and wandring from place to place to suck their Nourishment): He accordingly, as I remember, styles this latter animal-Race, her releas’d Sons; Filios Terrae emancipatos. Now if this be our only way of reckoning for Mankind, we may call our-selves indeed, The Sons of EARTH, at large; but not of any particular SOIL or District. The Division of Climates and Regions is fantastick and artificial: much more the Limits of particular Countrys, Citys or Provinces. Our Natale Solum, or Mother-Earth, must by this account be the real GLOBE it-self which bears us, and in respect of which we must allow the common Animals, and even the Plants of all degrees, to claim an equal Brotherhood with us, under this common PARENT.

I rely here on the fine edition prepared by Douglas J. Den Uyl for the Liberty Fund. Obviously, I’ve never seen the original manuscript from which the edition was prepared, but the orthography and usage of type fonts look quite authentic to my eye - and I have seen quite a few Eighteenth-Century works.

Certainly the content here is remarkable - it seems to be a proclamation that all living things share, in some sense, a common parentage. The following paragraph makes an even more astonishing claim: that humans are not the children of a particular country or region, but rather are all the children of Earth. This was by no means the first time such a claim had ever been made, but Shaftesbury’s eloquence and the very remarkable philosophical content of the whole Characteristicks was to have a profound influence on subsequent thinking. In many ways he was the most influential philosopher of the Enlightenment, even greater than Voltaire, for example.

Perhaps Shaftesbury’s influence was still felt when Henry A. Smith wrote a version of Chief Seattle’s speech (apparently published first in the old Seattle Star newspaper, 1887). For that speech, attributed to Seattle in 1854, see Henry A. Smith - Wikipedia.and the links provided there.

But let’s leave aside the content. Look at the writing. Every feature of Shaftesbury’s orthography is carefully thought-out. Consider, for example “fantastick”, whose final k shows clearly that the letter c is not to be pronounced as in “cease”, but rather as a “stop” consonant. Consider the plural “Countrys”, which avoids the senseless “countries” of modern times. The capitalization of substantives is designed to provide emphasis on subjects and objects, while a few other substantives (“view”, “abodes”, etc.) are not so favored. the use of italics (itself remarkable, since italics were then only some two centuries old) is confined to words that are closely related to the topic of the paragraph. All four instances of a word’s being written entirely in capital letters are references to the same entity, the topic of the entire surrounding discourse. We could go on.

There are at present two significant printed editions that one can obtain. The first is the one sponsored by the Liberty Fund (see above); the other is a reprint by BiblioLife of an edition edited by John M. Robertson (originally published in 1900). Robertson’s edition normalized all the spelling and orthography. This edition is much easier for the modern reader to follow. It is also stripped of its index (remarkably, Shaftesbury provided an index, something still rarely done for philosophical works) and much other material, including the careful and intricate engravings that graced the original edition. Robertson’s edition is, in short, in the best modern tradition - pared down, streamlined, devoid of the charm of the original.

And such charm, or such a sense of elegance as Shaftesbury had, or such a devotion to “politeness”, is what the whole work is about. Shaftesbury did not compose Characteristicks to reveal some arcane doctrine about the nature of reality or the mathematical foundations of language. He composed his work to promote a certain tolerant, humorous, kindly manner that he thought served people well. To that end, he wrote carefully, omitting nothing significant, including nothing superfluous. But the modern reader, perhaps knowing Shaftesbury only through Robertson’s colorless edition, cannot see the nuances, the pleasantry, the magic of Shaftesbury’s own writing, for the philosophy was inseparable from the very orthography that Robertson so absurdly reformed.

 All text on this page is the work of J W Durham and is licensed only under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Other licensing terms may be available. E-mail me