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Sir William Temple, Political Scientist?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

C. B. Macpherson
C. B. Macpherson*
Affiliation:
The University of New Brunswick
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Extract

Less than justice has been done to Sir William Temple as a political scientist. It is true that his reputation now stands higher than it did in the nineteenth century when Courtenay, his biographer, observed, “Neither in science nor in politics, were his opinions founded upon an accurate combination of facts and principles,” and added, “Of Political Economy Temple knew nothing” and when Macaulay dismissed the essay on government as “exceedingly childish.” Three modern studies have done much to revise this unflattering estimate, but some aspects of Temple's political thought have remained unconsidered or confused. Professor Herriott in his analysis of Temple's ideas on government has pointed out the novelty of those ideas but has given little attention to the significance of Temple's approach and method. Dr. Marburg's excellent book, though it does not deal primarily with Temple's political ideas, has made a valuable contribution towards their understanding. But her views on Temple's attitude to science and his use of its method are open to question. Professor Woodbridge, in his recent very full study of Temple, praises “the astonishing originality” of the essay On the Original and Nature of Government, and remarks as its great merit that its argument is based “upon historical probability, observation and experience,” but he does not emphasize the inductive aspect of Temple's work nor discuss the relation of his political thought to the scientific movement. Apart from Professor G. N. Clark's explicit but passing references to Temple's significance as one of the first of the inductive political thinkers, the extent to which Temple participated in the prevailing scientific climate of opinion and was influenced by it has been generally overlooked or greatly underestimated.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , February 1943 , pp. 39 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1943

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References

1 Courtenay, T. P., Memoirs of the Life, Works, and Correspondence of Sir William Temple, Bart. (London, 1836), vol. II, p. 271.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., vol. II, p. 253.

3 Macaulay, Lord, Critical and Historical Essays (London, 1895), vol. II, p. 467.Google Scholar

4 Herriott, F. I., “Sir William Temple on the Origin and Nature of Government” (Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. III, 1893, pp. 150–79).Google Scholar

5 Marburg, Clara, Sir William Temple, a Seventeenth Century “liberlin” (New Haven, 1932).Google Scholar

6 Woodbridge, Homer E., Sir William Temple, the Man and His Work (New York, 1940).Google Scholar

7 See his introduction to his edition of Temple's Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (Cambridge, 1932).Google Scholar Cf. his Science and Social Welfare in the Age of Newton (Oxford, 1937), p. 130 Google Scholar, and his The Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1929), p. 215.Google Scholar

8 Jones, Richard F., “Science and Criticism in the Neo-Classical Age of English Literature” (Journal of the Historyof Ideas, vol. I, 1940, p. 389).Google Scholar

9 Marburg, , Sir William Temple, p. xvii, and p. 42.Google Scholar

10 Temple, , An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning (Works, vol. I, p. 162).Google Scholar Quotations from Temple are from the 1751 edition of his Works (London, 2 vols, folio.).Google Scholar Subsequent references to Temple's writings give the title (or a short title) of the essay referred to, followed by the volume and page of this edition.

11 Ibid., p. 165. There is a similar reference to Harvey, in Of Health and Long Life (Works, vol. I, p. 280).Google Scholar

12 He admits some useful discoveries elsewhere (see infra, p. 42).

13 Some Thoughts upon Reviewing the Essay of Ancient and Modern Learning (Works, vol. I, p. 303).Google Scholar

14 Upon the Gardens of Epicurus )Works, vol. I, p. 172).Google Scholar

15 Ibid., p. 173.

16 Of Health and Long Life (Works, vol. I, p. 281).Google Scholar

17 Cf. Bourne, H. R. Fox, Life of John Locke (New York, 1876), vol. I, pp. 221–35.Google Scholar

18 Some Thoughts upon Reviewing the Essay of Ancient and Modern Learning (Works, vol. I, p. 298).Google Scholar

19 An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning (Works, vol. I, p. 163).Google Scholar

20 The statement that the inductive method was the essence of the new science is open to misunderstanding because of the different senses in which the term “inductive” has been used in the history of science. The sense in which the term “inductive method” is used in this essay is defined on page 46; it includes deductive reasoning as well as induction in the narrower sense. It is thus broader than the “induction” of Mill (Logic, Book 3, chap, III, para. 1; distinguished from deductive method, Book 3, chap, XI, para. 1; and from “the hypothetical method,” Book 3, chap, XIV, para. 5), and no artificial distinction, such as Whewell made (History of the Inductive Sciences, 1837) between “inductive epochs” and “periods of verification and deduction,” is implied in asserting that the inductive method was typical of the new science of the seventeenth century. An inductive method, as defined in this essay, may be said to have been used not only by such seventeenth-century empirical scientists as Gilbert, Harvey, and Boyle, but also by those scientists in whose work mathematical deductions played a large part such as Kepler, Galileo, and Newton.

21 Cf. his praise of mathematics because it “is of all other [sciences] the most valuable to the Use and Benefit of Mankind” ( Some Thoughts upon Reviewing the Essay of Ancient and Modern Learning, Works, vol. I, p. 295).Google Scholar Temple's inclusion of mathematics among the inductive sciences may be explained by the fact that, in Sabine's words, “in the seventeenth century no sharp line was drawn, as would be done now, between mathematics and the physical sciences of experiment and observation, probably because the experimental data required in mechanics were not very great, while the mathematical apparatus was considerable” ( Sabine, G. H., A History of Political Theory, New York, 1937, p. 427).Google Scholar

22 Dr. Marburg has pointed out that Temple was one of the first to use a comparative historical approach in literary criticism ( Marburg, , Sir William Temple, pp. 78–80).Google Scholar

23 Of Poetry (Works, vol. I, pp. 247–8).Google Scholar

24 An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning (Works, vol. I, p. 157).Google Scholar Cf. Some Thoughts upon Reviewing the Essay of Ancient and Modern Learning (Works, vol. I, p. 303).Google Scholar

25 Cf. Hume's, essay That Politics may be Reduced to a Science, first published in 1741.Google Scholar

26 Of Heroick Virtue (Works, vol. I, pp. 210–11).Google Scholar Cf. Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands, Preface (Works, vol. I, p. 5).Google Scholar

27 Observations … chap. III, p. 46.

28 Ibid., chap. i, p. 7.

29 Ibid., chap. ii, p. 30. Cf. the Preface, p. 6.

30 Of Health and Long Life (Works, vol. I, p. 272).Google Scholar He was aware of the danger of this declaration, for he wrote on another occasion that “the Pretence of publick Good is a Cheat that will ever pass in the World, though so often abused by ill Men, that I wonder the Good do not grow ashamed to use it any longer” ( Essay on the Cure of the Gout by Moxa, in Works, vol. I, p. 135).Google Scholar

31 Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands, Preface (Works, vol. I, p. 5).Google Scholar Cf. Woodbridge, , Sir William Temple, pages 128–31, 246, and 259–60Google Scholar, where Temple's motives in publishing the Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands, the Memoirs, and the Introduction to the History of England are discussed.

32 Of Popular Discontents (Works, vol. I, p. 261).Google Scholar

33 The essay Of Heroick Virtue, does set forth the material fully. Sections 1 to 5 are descriptions of the institutions of four countries not hitherto used by political writers (China, Peru, Tartary and the Gothic conquests, Arabia and the Mohammedan Empire), and section 6 is an inductive study of the causes of conquests, based on this material.

34 An Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government (Works, vol. I, p. 99).Google Scholar

35 Ibid., pp. 99-100.

36 Ibid., pp. 105-6.

37 Ibid., pp. 106.

38 Marburg, , Sir William Temple, p. xvii.Google Scholar Cf. ibid., pp. 54, 60, 70-1.

39 ProfessorHerriott, (“Sir William Temple,” p. 178)Google Scholar has drawn attention to Temple's originality, but, overlooking the substantial similarity of Hume's theory, has overstated the length of time during which Temple's generalization remained unique. Cf. J. D. Rogers's reference to Temple's ideas on government as “almost uncanny” anticipations of Maine and Savigny ( Palgrave's, Dictionary of Political Economy, London, 1892–1899, s.v. Temple).Google Scholar

40 Hume refers to Temple several times in his History and his Essays, but only to comment on Temple's character and literary style or to cite Temple's Memoirs, or to notice some of the incidental generalizations in Temple's Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands.

41 Herriott, , “Sir William Temple,” p. 179.Google Scholar

42 Cf. Smith, H. F. R., Harrington and his Oceana (Cambridge, 1914), pp. 146–8.Google Scholar Smith's evidence is mainly drawn from Hume's Essays of 1741-2. We may add that as early as 1690 Temple referred to “the common Supposition of Power following Land” ( Of Heroick Virtue, Works, vol. I, p. 224).Google Scholar

43 An Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government (Works, vol. I, pp. 104–5).Google Scholar

44 Ibid., p. 105.

45 Survey of the Constitutions and Interests of the Empire, etc. (Works, vol. I, p. 87).Google Scholar

46 Of Heroick Virtue (Works, vol. I, p. 220).Google Scholar

47 Ibid., p. 224.

48 Of Popular Discontents (Works, vol. I, p 269).Google Scholar

49 Memoirs, The Third Part (Works, vol. I, p. 333).Google Scholar

50 Of Popular Discontents (Works, vol. I, pp. 258–9).Google Scholar

51 Cf. the present writer's remarks on long-range or universal propositions in politics in “The Ruling Class” ( Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, vol. VII, 02, 1941, p. 99).Google Scholar

52 Popular Discontents (Works, vol. I, p. 258).Google Scholar

53 An Introduction to the History of England (Works, vol. II, p. 582).Google Scholar

54 Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (Works, vol. I, pp. 60–2, 96–7).Google Scholar

55 ProfessorHerriott's, remark (“Sir William Temple,” p. 166)Google Scholar that Temple “fully perceives the important part played by trade and commerce in giving shape to political societies and institutions” is thus not sustained.