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Shaftesbury and the Test of Truth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Alfred Owen Aldridge
Alfred Owen Aldridge*
Affiliation:
University of Buffalo
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Extract

The phrase “ridicule, the test of truth,” which has long been associated with Lord Shaftesbury, was originally fathered upon him by both his disciples and his adversaries in controversies to determine whether ridicule be test or jest. Both groups expended quantities of forensic ammunition on the assumption that Shaftesbury had advocated the use of ridicule as a test of truth even though the phrase does not appear anywhere in the Characteristics. That Shaftesbury does not propose ridicule as a test of truth has been acknowledged for many years, but not widely enough, for many contemporary authorities repeat this erroneous assumption. Shaftesbury merely began the debate over ridicule by discussing its social utility, and the discussion was continued by Anthony Collins, Berkeley, Warburton, Akenside, John Brown, Allan Ramsay and Lord Karnes. The first of the group to refer to ridicule as a test of truth was Berkeley, and after his use of the phrase, nearly every eighteenth-century writer on ridicule took it up. Collins, who preceded him in discussing the ridiculous, had not even mentioned the relation of ridicule to truth. Brown was the first to state that Shaftesbury had advocated the doctrine, in fact, going even further in misrepresenting Shaftesbury by falsely charging that the latter had maintained that ridicule “may be successfully applied to the investigation of unknown truth.” A thorough analysis of Shaftesbury's real position on ridicule is necessary to show the manner in which he has been variously interpreted and misinterpreted. Furious as the controversy may have been in the eighteeenth century, it did not extend itself into the nineteenth, and today we may even apply to it Shaftesbury's own derogatory question directed against pedantic treatises: “What is already become of those mighty controversies with which some of the most eminent authors amused the world?” The present paper is not intended to perpetuate this mighty controversy, but merely to clarify Shaftesbury's meaning and show how the controversy developed. A subject which occupied famous philosophers, poets, physicians, divines and artists of the eighteenth century is a subject of both historic and esthetic importance.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 60 , Issue 1: Number 1 Part 1 , March 1945 , pp. 129 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1945

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References

1 Other phrases concerning ridicule such as “touchstone of truth” and “abide the touch” have also been incorrectly attributed to Shaftesbury. The only passage in the Characteristics which resembles these phrases refers not to ridicule but to ancient comedy, and concerns demeanor, not truth: “Everything which might be imposing, by a false gravity or solemnity, was forced to endure the trial of this touchstone.” Shaftesbury's Characteristics, ed. J. M. Robertson (London, 1900), i, 161.

2 “We have offener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that ‘ridicule is the test of truth’.” Thomas Carlyle, “Voltaire,” Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (Boston, 1838), ii, 22.

3 Essays on the Characteristics (London, 1751) p. 6.

4 Op. cit., ii, 164.

5 Op cit., p. 9.

6 Ibid., p. 71.

7 Op. cit., i, 10.

8 Ibid., i, 44.

9 Ibid., i, 52.

10 Ibid., i, 52.

11 This interpretation is supported by Anthony Collins' use of the phrase “test of ridicule” in this same sense of demeanor rather than opinion. Collins argues that the best cure for the use of irony, drollery, ridicule and satire, if they be evil, is the use of ridicule against them in turn, “that being the true method to bring things to a standard, to fix the decency and propriety of writing, to teach men how to write to the satisfaction of the ingenious, polite, and sensible part of mankind: for decency and propriety will stand the test of ridicule, and triumph over all the false pretences to wit; and indecency and impropriety will sink under the trial of ridicule, as being capable of being baffled by reason, and justly ridicul'd.” A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (London, 1729), pp. 21–22. Obviously, decency and propriety refer to decorum rather than to veracity. It may be objected to this interpretation that Shaftesbury, fearing the consequences of falling foul of the Blasphemy Law of 1679, really meant to say that ridicule is a test of truth, but protected himself by using equivocal language. In answer to this, one may point out that even if Shaftesbury had unequivocally asserted that ridicule is the test of truth, such an assertion would have nothing to do with blasphemy. Furthermore, his “Miscellaneous Reflections” is filled with unmistakable ridicule of priestcraft, the authenticity of the Scriptures and the credibility of miracles. Compared to this frank skepticism, holding ridicule to be a test of truth would be innocuous indeed.

12 Brown's accusation that Shaftesbury perverted the sense of the passage quoted is discussed later, but regardless of Aristotle's original meaning, Shaftesbury is merely defending raillery as a means of exposing unfounded gravity. Warburton erroneously interpreted the passage as an affirmative answer or “something like it” to Akenside's rhetorical query “whether that which is ridiculous can be morally true, can be just and becoming; or whether that which is just and becoming can be ridiculous.” The Works of the Right Reverend William Warburton, DD., ed. Richard Hurd (London, 1811), i, 183.

13 “A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests.” “Preface to the Fables,” Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford, 1926), ii, 260.

14 Robertson, ed., op. cit., i, 89.

15 Ibid., i, 53.

16 Ibid., i, 85.

17 Ibid., ii, 84.

18 Ibid., i, 44.

19 Ibid., i, 22.

20 Ibid., i, 51.

21 Ibid., i, 52.

22 Ibid., i, 86.

23 Ibid., i, 98.

24 Ibid., ii, 217.

25 Collins' independence was denied by Brown, who charged that his essay had been influenced by Shaftesbury's comment on modern zealots: “whatever they think grave and solemn, they suppose must never be treated out of a grave and solemn way. Though what another thinks so, they can be contented to treat otherwise: And are forward to try the edge of ridicule against any opinions besides their own.” If influenced by Shaftesbury at all however, Collins more likely had in mind the passage from “The Moralists”:“ ‘Tis notorious that the chief opposers of atheism write upon contrary principles to one another, so as in a manner to confute themselves.” Robertson, ed., op. cit., ii, 47. According to Brown, Collins “wrote an elaborate and most tedious dissertation to prove that the way of raillery hath been successfully applied by every sect of religionists and infidels, to the destruction of each other's tenets and the establishment of their own. How he gains his conclusion, that an engine which tends to fix mankind in their preconceived opinions, and establish so many species of error, is of importance and efficacy in the search of truth, may not be so easy to determine.” Essays on the Characteristics, 72. Here Brown is apparently misinterpreting Collins deliberately, for the latter comes to no such conclusion in his essay, and does not even touch upon ridicule as an instrument for the discovery of truth. His ostensible purpose is to show that ridicule has been used as widely by the clergy as by any other group, and his real purpose is probably to discredit the beliefs which the clergy had used it to defend. Although Brown is not justified in applying this criticism to Collins or attributing Collins’ essay to the influence of Shaftesbury, Brown's argument may be legitimately brought to bear upon Shaftesbury. “It seems … that his Lordship's observation (which contains the quintessence of his associate's work, and which probably was the leaven that leavened the whole lump of malice and dulness) instead of being favourable to ridicule as a test of truth, can only tend to disgrace it. For since every religious and unbelieving sect hath alike successfully employed it in supporting their respective tenets, and in rendering those of their adversaries contemptible; it follows inasmuch as doctrines which are mutually repugnant cannot all be true, that ridicule is one of the most powerful engines, by which error can be maintained and established.” Ibid., 74. Shaftesbury's probable defense to this would be that the phrase “alike successfully” is incorrect; the ridicule hits only those beliefs which are actually in error, even though those engaged in raillery may consider all to be true shafts of wit. Allan Ramsay, however, would not even admit that Shaftesbury's words contain “anything concerning the support of different opinions by the means of ridicule.” He accused Brown of further misrepresentation in calling Collins “his associate.” “As he has not quoted any passage, or so much as mentioned the name of the work where it is to be found; we have reason to doubt, whether he has not mistaken Mr. Collins, as much as he has my Lord Shaftesbury. But supposing Lord Shaftesbury and his associates to be as dull and malicious as he has been pleased to represent them, what is it to the merits of ridicule?” An Essay on Ridicule (London, 1753), in The Investigator, 48.

26 Op. cit., p. 19.

27 Works of George Berkeley, ed. A. C. Fraser (Oxford, 1901), ii, 149. Yet Shaftesbury uses almost the same reasoning to show the false judgments of “critics by fashion.” Robertson, ed., op. cit., i, 172 .

28 Works, ed. Richard Hurd, i, 149.

29 Ibid., i, 153. Allan Ramsay in The Investigator, 1753, uses this as an example of false ridicule. Designed to ridicule the Whig principle “of the right in the people of resisting tyrants,” it is false ridicule, according to Ramsay, because it is based on the fallacious supposition that “a king stands in the same relation to the people he governs, that a husband does to his wife.” Pp, 34–37.

30 Works, ed. Richard Hurd, i, 155.

31 Ibid., i, 152.

32 Ibid., i, 156.

33 It is not correct to state that Warburton introduced the example of Aristophanes' Socrates. Shaftesbury had alluded to “the divinest man” of the heathen world who had been “most abdominably ridiculed” by “the wittiest of all poets.” This ridicule, according to Shaftesbury, had fostered rather than damaged, his reputation and philosophy. Thus Socrates “was not only contented to be ridiculed; but, that he might help the poet as much as possible, he presented himself openly in the theatre” that his real figure might be compared with his stage character. Robertson, ed., op. cit., i, 23. Berkeley had used “the ridicule of Socrates by the comic poet” to show that “men in a laughing fit may applaud a ridicule which shall appear contemptible when they come to themselves.” Fraser, ed., op. cit., ii, 149.

34 Works, ed. Richard Hurd, i, 156.

35 The subject of ridicule had not been completely neglected, for in the previous year, 1743, William Whitehead had written his poem “On Ridicule.” His verses probably met with Akenside's disapproval, however, for Whitehead is really ridiculing the use of ridicule, tracing the prevailing lust for laughter to Shaftesbury.

And whence this lust to laugh? what fond pretence,
Why Shaftb'ry tells us mirth's the test of sense:

Whitehead shows himself skeptical of Shaftesbury's claims that ridicule is powerless to harm truth.

Yet let me say, howe'er secure it rise,
Sly fraud may reach it, and close craft surprise.
Truth, drawn like truth, must blaze divinely bright;
But, drawn like error, truth may cheat the fight.

36 Hurd, ed., op. cit., i, 189.

37 Ibid., i, 185.

38 Robertson, ed.. op. cit., i, xxii.

39 In a note to the 1766 edition of “Dedication to the Free-Thinkers,” Hurd, ed., op. cit., i, 159.

40 Ibid., i, 187.

41 Ibid., i, 188.

42 Ibid., i, 188.

43 Ibid., i, 189.

44 Akenside's patron, Jeremiah Dyson, however, had a return bout with Warburton in 1744 with a 30 page pamphlet, An Epistle to the Rev. Mr. Warburton, occasioned by his Treatment of the Author of The Pleasures of Imagination. The main purpose of this work is to expose Warburton's conceit in assuming that he had been “called to account” by the references to clergymen in The Pleasures of Imagination, and thus it has less to do with the ridiculous than the malign. In the same year with The Pleasures of Imagination, Warburton's outburst and Dyson's reply, appeared An Essay towards fixing the true standards of Wit, Humour, Raillery, Satire and Ridicule by Corbyn Morris. The author did not appear to have Shaftesbury in mind, nor did he discuss ridicule as a test of truth. His main purpose, which is to show the distinction between the five forms of merriment, may, however, have been suggested by Shaftesbury's ambiguity in using these terms and others as loose equivalents of “the way of raillery.”

45 “I recommended to him a thing I once thought of myself. It had been recommended to me by Mr. Pope. An examination of all Lord Shaftesbury says against Religion.” Letter from Warburton to Hurd, January, 1750, quoted by A. W. Evans, Warburton and the Warburtonians (London, 1932), p. 200.

46 Op. cit., p. 6.

47 Ibid., p. 41.

48 This division is found in Akenside, but he denies that ridicule is concerned with speculative truth or falsehood.

49 Op. cit., p. 47.

50 Ibid., p. 48.

51 The effectiveness of Brown's general attack on ridicule would have been greater had he further developed this third proposition. In a later section of his essay, he subjects Shaftesbury's theories of an instinctive perception of beauty and truth to the test of relativity. A parallel treatment of the ridiculous, showing that like beauty and virtue it depends upon customs and traditions, would have disposed of Akenside's “faculty of ridicule.” Brown does, however, take care of Shaftesbury's statement that “it must be a finer and truer wit that takes with the men of sense and breeding” by replying that it may be a finer wit, but not truer. “It is only in the modes, not the objects of ridicule, with regard to which the courtier differs from the clown. The peasant and his lord are equally susceptible of false impressions; equally liable to have falsehood obtruded on them for truth, folly for wisdom, vice for virtue.” Op. cit., 67. Later in the essay Brown seems to lose sight of this principle of the relativity and subjectivity of beauty, virtue and ridicule. To Shaftesbury's point that subjects “may be very grave and weighty in our imagination, but very ridiculous and impertinent in their own nature,” Brown objects that “on the other hand, things may appear ridiculous and impertinent in our own imagination, which are very grave and weighty in their own nature.” Ibid., 68. Thus, “imagination, and therefore ridicule which depends upon it, can never be a test of truth.” Brown's earlier reasoning would have brought him to the conclusion that nothing in its own nature is either ridiculous or grave and that these values depend upon both reason and imagination. “In their own nature” really means in the opinion of the social group in which they appear. Ridicule is, therefore, a measure of estimation or valuation, not of truth! Shaftesbury himself wavers between the absolute nature of virtue and its variable nature as presented by “common sense.” See: Robertson, ed., op. cit., i, 56, 177, 227.

52 Essays on the Characteristics, p. 54.

53 Ibid., p. 58.

54 Dyson had argued in his epistle to Warburton that the purpose of the ridiculing of Socrates was not to mislead public opinion concerning Socrates' character, but to sound out public opinion to see whether the time was ripe to bring an accusation against him. Since the people saw the character of Socrates in its true light, they were displeased with the ridicule, and the enemies of Socrates did not dare accuse him until twenty years after the publication of the play. “It appears not to have been (as you represent it) the ridicule employ'd against him, that exposed him to such unworthy treatment. No 'twas the freedom he himself took in ridiculing the ignorance and vanity of the pretended teachers of wisdom, the Sophists of those days.” An Epistle to the Rev. Mr. Warburton, p. 26.

55 Essays on the Characteristics, p. 94.

56 Op. cit., p. 66. Aristophanes' Socrates cropped up again in 1785 in The Lounger (No. 49). Here Socrates illustrates the nature of ridicule in presenting the opposite of truth. Ridicule in the audience is raised by making a stage character “commit some action absurd, droll, out of place, or inconsistent.” Mirth is aroused by the contrast between his usual decorum and his absurd conduct on the stage. Thus “Socrates is not made ridiculous by doing what is like, but what is unlike himself.

57 Op. cit., p. 76.

58 Yet, as Allan Ramsay suggests, it is probably quite unreasonable to expect ridicule to support any sect when its professed use is to pull down. “Was there ever any author so weak as to fancy, that where two men of war are pelting one another, either of them proposes to mend his own rigging by the shot, which he pours into his adversary?” The Investigator (London, 1753), p. 49.

59 Op. cit., p. 78.

60 Ibid., p. 98.

61 Ibid., p. 95.

62 Ibid., p. 96.

63 Ibid., p. 96.

64 Ibid., p. 99.

65 Ibid., p. 103.

66 Ibid., p. 103.

67 In his verse treatment of the same subject, An Essay on Satire Occasioned by the Death of Mr. Pope, 1751, Brown assumes that Shaftesbury had regarded ridicule as a rational faculty.

Lo Shaftesbury rears her high on reason's throne,
And loads the slave with honours not her own.

68 This subject is touched on by Shaftesbury's philosophic disciple, Francis Hutcheson, in his famous essay Reflections upon Laughter and Remarks upon The Fable of the Bees (Glasgow, 1750). Admitting that ridicule may be abused, he remarks that there is no reason that ridicule any more than the passions or senses should be condemned or regarded as useless because of its abuse. “Ridicule, like other edged tools, may do good in a wise man's hands, though fools may cut their fingers with it, or be injurious to an unwary by-stander” (p. 34). Hutcheson also supports Shaftesbury's contention that ridicule may not be used against fundamental truth and honesty. When in any object there is a mixture of the sublime and mean, only the weak minds will allow the mean to bring the whole into disesteem or make it appear contemptible. Men of just discernment and reflection will “separate what is great from what is not so” (p. 29). Hutcheson does not enter, however, into the discussion of whether ridicule is a test of truth. Arthur Murphy in Gray's Inn Journal, No. 96, (1754) calls the dispute “idle and frivolous,” but says that Akenside's definition of ridicule is “the best and most accurate” he has ever met with.

69 Op. cit., p. 3.

70 Ibid., p. 4.

71 Ibid., p. 5.

72 Ibid., p. 69.

73 Ibid., p. 6.

74 Ibid., p. 7.

75 Ibid., p. 79.

76 Ibid., p. 41.

77 Ibid., p. 53.

78 Ibid., p. 53.

79 Ibid., p. 7.

80 Ibid., p. 7.

81 Ibid., p. 17.

82 Ibid., p. 23.

83 Ibid., p. 24.

84 Robertson, ed., op. cit., i, 52. Brown had accused Shaftesbury of perverting the sense of this passage, charging 1) that by leaving out the expression “adversariorum” Shaftesbury “converted it from a particular rule of rhetoric into a general maxim of philosophy”; 2) that the observation in Shaftesbury's “maimed translation” is false, if not unmeaning; 3) that the concluding sentence is Shaftesbury's and not Gorgias's. Aristotle's real meaning, according to Brown, is: since the purpose of oratory is to persuade, if the orator has truth on his side he will “confound his advsersary's raillery by serious argument,” but if truth be against him, he will confound his adversary's serious argument by raillery, op. cit., 83. Ramsay, however, offers his own “verbatim” translation to support Shaftesbury. He charges that Brown is in error in translating δια φθ∊íρ∊ιν to confound, and states that it means anything from to separate thoroughly to to discuss: thus Ramsay's translation: “But with regard to those things that excite laughter, since they seem to have their use in debate, we ought, says Gorgias, to discuss the adversary's serious argument by ridicule, and his ridicule by serious argument, rightly speaking.” op. cit., p. 26. Robertson in his edition of the Characteristics points out Brown's criticism of Shaftesbury, but does not mention Ramsay's vindication, I, 52.

85 Op. cit., p. 30.

86 Ibid., p. 32.

87 Ibid., p. 33.

88 Ibid., p. 47.

89 Ibid., p. 82.

90 Elements of Criticism, ed. Abraham Mills (New York, 1860), p. 183.

91 Ibid., p. 184.

92 Loc. cit. Although Lord Kames does not mention Warburton, the latter assumes, in a note to the 1766 edition of The Divine Legation, that Kames had been proceeding against his own remarks on ridicule. Thus he takes upon himself to answer the eminent critic, accusing him of changing the question twice. Karnes's statement that the taste of ridicule is “the test of what is ridiculous,” he says, is not the same as “the test of truth.” Hurd, ed., op. cit., i, 157–159. “His second change of the question is a new substitution, viz. ‘Whether ridicule be a talent to be used or employed at all?‘ Of which he supposes me to hold the negative.” Warburton himself constructs this question out of Karnes's denials that a talent for ridicule any more than a talent for reason should be condemned because it may be abused. Warburton then proceeds to deny that he had condemned a talent for ridicule because it may be abused or for any other reason, and disparages Karnes's “absurd inference” that reason and ridicule are of equal importance for the conduct of human life.

93 An Inquiry into the Causes of the Infidelity of the Times (London, 1783), p. 445. In the previous year, 1782, Vicesimus Knox had devoted an essay to the subject, “Of the Ill Effects of Ridicule When Employed as a Test of Truth in Private and Common Life.” See Essays Moral and Literary (London, 1827), p. 74. Knox tries to prove the adverse moral effect of a taste for ridicule by tracing, in a Hogarthian progress, its influence upon a hypothetical “ingenuous youth, emerging from an uncorrupted seminary to his station in the active world.”

94 Ibid., p. 285.

95 “Essay on Ridicule, Wit and Humour” Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy (Dublin, 1788), p. 88.

96 Ibid., p. 89.

97 Ibid., p. 89.

98 Ibid., p. 90.

99 Op. cit., p. 79.