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PITCAIRNEANA: AN ATHEIST TEXT BY ARCHIBALD PITCAIRNE*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2016

MICHAEL HUNTER*
Affiliation:
Birkbeck, University of London
*
Exmouth House, Exmouth Place, Hastings, tn34 3ja[email protected]

Abstract

This article presents an overtly atheistic text from the early eighteenth century that has hitherto been completely unknown. It survives in manuscript in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, to which it was presented in 1841, and is claimed to be the work of the Scottish medical theorist, satirist, and poet, Archibald Pitcairne (1652–1713). Here, its links with Pitcairne and his milieu are assessed and its content evaluated, in conjunction with the provision of an annotated edition of the text itself.

Type
Communication
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

The text is reproduced by courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. For help with my research on the manuscript and its donor, Henry Swasey McKean, I am grateful to Susan Halpert and to the Reference Staff at Harvard University Archives. The following have kindly read and commented on a draft of this article: Peter Anstey, Tristram Clarke, Roger Emerson, John Henry, Colin Kidd, Fred Lock, David Money, Alasdair Raffe, David Shuttleton, Reink Vermij, Paul Wood, Christopher Wright, and two anonymous referees. For help concerning n. 49, I am indebted to Jan Bloemendal and Sarah Knight; I am also grateful to Alasdair Raffe for showing me the paper referred to in n. 16 and for various discussions of Pitcairne and his heterodox ideas.

References

1 See Schaffer, Simon, ‘The Glorious Revolution and medicine in Britain and the Netherlands’, Notes & Records of the Royal Society, 43 (1989), pp. 167–90CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Friesen, John, ‘Archibald Pitcairne, David Gregory and the Scottish origins of English Tory Newtonianism’, History of Science, 41 (2003), pp. 163–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the text that Newton vouchsafed to Pitcairne, ‘De natura acidorum’, see H. W. Turnbull et al., eds., The correspondence of Isaac Newton (7 vols., Cambridge, 1959–77), iii, pp. 205–14.

2 See R. E. Schofield, Mechanism and materialism: British natural philosophy in an age of reason (Princeton, NJ, 1970), ch. 3; Arnold Thackray, Atoms and powers: an essay on Newtonian matter-theory and the development of chemistry (Cambridge, MA, 1970), ch. 3; Lester S. King, The philosophy of medicine: the early eighteenth century (Cambridge, MA, 1978), pp. 109ff; Brown, T. M., ‘Medicine in the shadow of the Principia’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 48 (1987), pp. 629–48CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Guerrini, Anita, ‘Archibald Pitcairne and Newtonian medicine’, Medical History, 31 (1987), pp. 7083CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; see also her account of Pitcairne in the Oxford dictionary of national biography (ODNB). On Pitcairne's Leiden period, see Lindeboom, G. A., ‘Pitcairne's Leyden interlude described from the documents’, Annals of Science, 19 (1963), pp. 273–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Vermij, Rienk, ‘The formation of the Newtonian philosophy: the case of the Amsterdam mathematical amateurs’, British Journal for the History of Science, 36 (2003), pp. 183200CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on pp. 185–7.

3 Andrew Cunningham, ‘Sydenham versus Newton: the Edinburgh fever dispute of the 1690s between Andrew Brown and Archibald Pitcairne’, in W. F. Bynum and V. Nutton, eds., Theories of fever from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Medical History, supplement no. 1, London, 1981), pp. 71–98; Stigler, Stephen M., ‘Apollo mathematicus: a story of resistance to quantification in the seventeenth century’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 136 (1992), pp. 93126Google ScholarPubMed; Anita Guerrini, ‘“A club of little villains”: rhetoric, professional identity and medical pamphlet wars’, in Marie Mulvey Roberts and Roy Porter, eds., Literature and medicine during the eighteenth century (London, 1993), pp. 226–44.

4 Guerrini, Anita, ‘James Keill, George Cheyne and Newtonian physiology, 1690–1740’, Journal of the History of Biology, 18 (1985), pp. 247–66CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; eadem, The Tory Newtonians: Gregory, Pitcairne and their circle’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), pp. 288311CrossRefGoogle Scholar; eadem, ‘Newtonianism, medicine and religion’, in O. P. Grell and Andrew Cunningham, eds., Religio medici: medicine and religion in seventeenth-century England (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 293–312; eadem, Obesity and depression in the Enlightenment: the life and times of George Cheyne (Norman, OK, 2000); Shuttleton, D. E., ‘“A modest examination”: John Arbuthnot and the Scottish Newtonians’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 18 (1995), pp. 4762Google Scholar.

5 Bruce Lenman, The Jacobite risings in Britain, 1689–1746 (London, 1980), pp. 223–5; idem, ‘Physicians and politics in the Jacobite era’, in Jeremy Black and Evelyn Cruikshanks , eds., The Jacobite challenge (Edinburgh, 1988), pp. 74–91, on pp. 77–9; Colin Kidd, ‘Enlightenment and ecclesiastical satire before Burns’, in Ralph McLean and Ronnie Young, eds., Literature and Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Scotland (Lewisburg, PA, forthcoming). For Babell, see G. R. Kinloch, ed., Babell; a satirical poem, on the proceedings of the General Assembly in the year MDCXCII (Edinburgh, 1830). For the play, see Terence Tobin's edition of it as The assembly (Lafayette, IN, 1972) and more recently John MacQueen's Scottish Text Society edition of an early MS of it under the title, The phanaticks (Woodbridge, 2012), though it might be felt that this is a rather arbitrary choice of title and that The committee (or The comitie) would have been equally appropriate: see ibid., pp. xiii, lvii. On Pitcairne's further dramatic sketch, published in Kinloch, ed., Babell, pp. 70–8, see MacQueen, John, ‘Tollerators and con-tollerators (1703) and Archibald Pitcairne: text, background and authorship’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 40 (2014), pp. 76104Google Scholar.

6 See David Money's account of Pitcairne in his The English Horace: Anthony Alsop and the tradition of British Latin verse (Oxford, 1998), pp. 142ff; more recently, see John and Winifred MacQueen's invaluable edition of his Latin poems (Assen and Tempe, AZ, 2009). For the publication of Pitcairne's verse, see D. F. Foxon, English verse, 1701–1750: a catalogue of separately printed poems with notes on contemporary collected editions (2 vols., Cambridge, 1975), i, p. 577 and entries P294–409. For one of Pitcairne's disciples who was involved in this, Thomas Ruddiman, see Douglas Duncan, Thomas Ruddiman: a study in Scottish scholarship of the early eighteenth century (Edinburgh, 1965), especially ch. 2, and idem, ‘Scholarship and politeness in the early eighteenth century’, in Andrew Hook, ed., The history of Scottish literature, ii:1660–1800 (Aberdeen, 1987), pp. 51–63, on pp. 55–7 (Pitcairne's Assembly is briefly discussed on pp. 194–5 of the same volume). See also Colin Kidd, ‘The ideological significance of Scottish Jacobite Latinity’, in Jeremy Black and Jeremy Gregory, eds., Culture, politics and society in Britain, 1600–1800 (Manchester, 1991), pp. 110–30.

7 David E. Shuttleton, ‘Bantering with scripture: Dr Archibald Pitcairne and articulate irreligion in late seventeenth-century Edinburgh’, in Claire Jowitt and Diane Watt, eds., The arts of seventeenth-century science (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 58–73. On the Aikenhead case, see Michael Hunter, ‘“Aikenhead the Atheist”: the context and consequences of articulate irreligion in the late seventeenth century’, in idem, Science and the shape of orthodoxy: intellectual change in late seventeenth-century Britain (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 308–32 (revised version of essay originally published in Michael Hunter and David Wootton, eds., Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1992), pp. 221–54); Michael F. Graham, The blasphemies of Thomas Aikenhead: boundaries of belief on the eve of the Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 2008). Both studies deal briefly with Pitcairne by way of background. For engagement with free-thinking ideas among savants of the following generation, see George Turnbull, Education for life: correspondence and writings on religion and practical philosophy, ed. M. A. Stewart and Paul Wood (Indianapolis, IN, 2014), pp. 3ff; James Erskine, Lord Grange, Extracts from the diary of a senator of the College of Justice (Edinburgh, 1843), pp. 79ff.

8 Robert Wodrow, Analecta (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1842–3), ii, p. 255; cf. i, pp. 322–3, iii, p. 307; Shuttleton, ‘Bantering with scripture’, pp. 63, 68–9 and passim. For a further commentary on the 1712 episode, see Grange, Extracts, pp. 13–14 and 101ff.

9 For the printed catalogue, see Edinburgh University Library (EUL) MS La.iii.629. For a transcript of the manuscript catalogue in St Petersburg, see National Library of Scotland MS Acc 8042. See also Appleby, John H. and Cunningham, Andrew, ‘Robert Erskine and Archibald Pitcairne – two Scottish physicians' outstanding libraries’, Bibliotheck, 11 (1982), pp. 316Google Scholar, and John H. Appleby, ‘Archibald Pitcairne re-encountered – a note on his manuscript poems and printed library catalogue’, ibid., 12 (1986), pp. 137–9.

10 See W. T. Johnston, The best of our owne: letters of Archibald Pitcairne, 1652–1713 (Edinburgh, 1979), pp. 18, 19, 22, 43, though note that the ‘Relligio mathematici’ is specifically described as an anti-Catholic work. See also below, n. 27. For the claim that mathematics led to infidelity in Pitcairne's play, see MacQueen, Phanaticks, pp. 59 and 189ff.

11 MacQueen, Latin poems, pp. 134–7 and 354–7. For Prior's version, see also H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears, eds., The literary works of Matthew Prior (2 vols., Oxford, 1959), i, pp. 396–7, and ii, pp. 923–4. See also MacQueen, Latin poems, pp. 30, 254–7, and 436, for a reference to Arian/Socinian views.

12 Epistola Archimedis ad regem Gelonem (n.p., n.d.). The British Library (BL) has two versions, both in 8o, one of 48 pp. followed by an unpaginated errata leaf (BL 531.b.1(1)), the other of 15 pp. (BL 531.b.1(2)). Both are from the library of Sir Hans Sloane and Pitcairne is identified as author in a MS note on the title page of both; the latter also has the inscription ‘ex dono Auctore’ (a presentation copy of the 48 pp. version to Dr Richard Mead is now BL G16831). The 15 pp. version lacks various passages that appear in the 48 pp. one and it ends differently; it also contains various misprints which are emended in MS in the BL copy and are corrected in the 48 pp. version. From a MS at EUL which may well be a draft preface to a further planned edition (MS Dc.4.101), it appears that at least one of these was published in Amsterdam in 1706 while the other may date from 1710: see Simpson, S. M., ‘An anonymous and undated Edinburgh tract’, The Book Collector, 15 (1966), p. 67Google Scholar. There is also a MS copy of the shorter version in BL MS Sloane 2623, fos. 61–73, though it is not linked with Pitcairne in extant catalogues. For an edition of this, see G. Henning, ed., Ein unächter brief des Archimedes (Darmstadt, 1872) (though deducing that it is a composition of post-classical date, Henning completely misses the Pitcairne connection). A further MS copy of this version in the hand of David Gregory is in EUL MS La.ii.36. It is perhaps worth noting that Newton owned a copy of the book, now Trinity College, Cambridge, NQ.16.991: see John Harrison, The library of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1978), p. 138 (no. 566). See further below, n. 16.

13 Epistola Archimedis (BL 531.b.1(1) version), pp. 18ff, 35ff, and passim.

14 On the obscurity of his verse, see the remarks in the article on Pitcairne in Pierre Bayle, A general dictionary, historical and critical, ed. J. P. Bernard, Thomas Birch, John Lockman, etc. (10 vols., London, 1734–41), viii, pp. 419–22, on p. 421. The article, there attributed to ‘a very intimate and learned friend of our Author’, is in fact by Sir John Clerk of Penicuik: see the MS version in BL Add MS 4223, fos. 146–7 (with covering letter dated 7 Sept. 1738, ibid., fos. 144–5).

15 George MacKenzie, 1st earl of Cromarty, Synopsis apocalyptica (Edinburgh, 1708), pp. iv–v [sigs. a2v–3]; Thomas Halyburton, Oratio inauguralis (1710), in his Natural religion insufficient; and reveal'd necessary to man's happiness in his present state (Edinburgh, 1714), pp. 1–24.

16 For the 1706 and c. 1710 editions, see above, n. 12. For the further edition, see Vermij, ‘Formation of the Newtonian philosophy’, pp. 192ff, and Alasdair Raffe, ‘Archibald Pitcairne and Scottish heterodoxy, c. 1688–1713’ (unpublished paper), which refines Vermij's conclusions, giving a definitive account of the various editions of the work, including variant copies at the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, and elsewhere, and the reprint in Leiden University Library with Marchand's annotations. It is perhaps worth noting that Pitcairne's library (see above, n. 9) contained a copy of Toland's Adeïsidaemon, published at The Hague in 1709. For the milieu, see Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: philosophy and the making of modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001), ch. 36; Silvia Berti, Françoise Charles-Daubert, and Richard H. Popkin, eds., Heterodoxy, Spinozism and free thought in early eighteenth-century Europe: studies on theTraité des trois imposteurs’ (Dordrecht, 1996); Françoise Charles-Daubert, ed., Le ‘Traité des trois imposteurs’ et ‘L'esprit de Spinosa’: philosophie clandestine entre 1678 et 1768 (Oxford, 1999); and Georges Minois, The atheist's bible: the most dangerous book that never existed (English trans., Chicago, IL, 2012).

17 ODNB; MacQueen, Latin poems, p. 29 and passim. For a somewhat different assessment, see Roger Emerson, ‘The religious, the secular and the worldly: Scotland, 1680–1800’, in J. E. Crimmins, ed., Religion, secularization and political thought: Thomas Hobbes to J. S. Mill (London, 1989), pp. 68–89, on p. 73: ‘Pitcairne's beliefs are difficult to unravel, but he was hardly an ordinary or orthodox Episcopalian.’ On the nature of Episcopalianism in the period, see Alasdair Raffe, The culture of controversy: religious arguments in Scotland, 1660–1714 (Woodbridge, 2012). It is perhaps worth noting that Guerrini's view of the Epistola Archimedis in ODNB is that it is ‘a satire ostensibly of medical sects but in reality of presbyterianism’ (in Guerrini, ‘Archibald Pitcairne’, p. 73, it is described as ‘a savage satire of the Scots Presbyterians and medical methodists’); for the MacQueens’ evaluation, see Latin poems, pp. 30–1.

18 I am grateful to Susan Halpert for this point.

19 See Joseph Palmer, Necrology of alumni of Harvard College, 1851/1852–1862/1863 (Boston, MA, 1864), pp. 141–3. There are various other manuscripts by McKean or associated with him at the Houghton or in the Harvard archives, including an annotated copy of George Ticknor's lectures on Spanish literature which includes a photograph of McKean and a biographical note on him based on that in Palmer's Necrology (HUC 8831.382.53).

20 See Levi Hedge, Eulogy on the Rev. Joseph McKean DD LlD, Boylston professor of rhetorick and oratory (Cambridge, MA, 1818); William B. Sprague, Annals of the American pulpit (2 vols., New York, NY, 1857), ii, pp. 414ff. For a modern study that includes information on Joseph McKean's lectures see Ried, Paul E., ‘Joseph McKean: the second Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 46 (1960), pp. 419–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On William McKean, see also Joseph T. Buckingham, Annals of the Massachusetts charitable mechanic association, 1795–1892 (Boston, MA, 1853), p. 173n.

21 See Catalogue of the select library of the late Rev. Joseph McKean DD, LlD (Boston, MA, 1818): not surprisingly, Pitcairneana does not appear in this.

22 See Foxon, English verse, entries D55, E214–15, K24, K40–2, O18, R78, R329, W521.

23 See Archibald Pitcairne, Dissertationes medicæ (Edinburgh, 1713). There are two issues of this edition, one containing the ‘Dissertatio de legibus historiæ naturalis’ and ‘Poemata selecta’, the other without them. For the significance of the date, see MacQueen, Latin poems, pp. 248–9.

24 See The works of Dr Archibald Pitcairne (London, 1715), and his Opera omnia (The Hague, 1722, and subsequent editions). The latter also includes his Elementa medicinæ physico-mathematica (1717; Eng. trans., 1718), which represents his Leiden lectures of 1692–3, and the Epistola Archimedis, though not the ‘Dissertatio’.

25 See Korshin, Paul, ‘The development of intellectual biography in the eighteenth century’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 73 (1974), pp. 513–23Google Scholar, on pp. 519–22.

26 For instance, on the identifiable authors of the eulogies listed in n. 22, John Ker, Thomas Kincaid, Allan Ramsay, and Thomas Ruddiman, as also Robert Hepburn, author of the rather deferential Dissertatio de scriptis Pitcarnianis (London, [1715]), see ODNB, MacQueen, Latin poems, pp. 32, 41, 294–9, 371–2, and 454, and Duncan, Thomas Ruddiman, passim. George Davidson (another poem by whom was published in 1717: Foxon, English verse, entry D54) has not been identified, while John Wilson was perhaps the figure referred to in Charles Withers, ‘Situating practical reason’, in Charles Withers and Paul Wood, eds., Science and medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment (East Linton, 2002), pp. 54–78, on p. 64. Another unlikely candidate is David Gregory, who had died in 1708: for his religious views, see especially Friesen, ‘Archibald Pitcairne’, pp. 173–5.

27 It is perhaps worth noting that Pitcairneana might be seen to echo Pitcairne's statement in a letter to David Gregory of 25 Feb. 1706 that ‘I am clear that metaphysics can never prove a Deity, and therefor think our churchmen here have no ground not to be Atheists’ (Johnston, Best of our owne, p. 43). See also his letter to Adriaan Verwer of June 1706 (copy by David Gregory in Royal Society MS 247, fol. 73(1)v), in which he attributed comparable views to Newton (‘præter alia demonstrat Atheos esse eos omnes qui Metaphysicis argùmentis ostendere conantur esse Deum…Sed jam quid dicemus de Sacerdotibus (non dico cujus Religionis aut Sectæ) et hominibus qui Mathematica nesciunt? An non Neutono multi sunt Athei? Atheos ut puta vocat eos qui non afferunt indoneam rationem’).

28 Since the text is quite brief, references for quotations from it will not be given in this commentary.

29 David Berman, George Berkeley: idealism and the man (Oxford, 1994), pp. 164–5. Cf. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, eds., The works of George Berkeley, bishop of Cloyne (9 vols., London, 1948–57), iii, pp. 23–4, 32–3, and passim.

30 The theme of a returning traveller is also to be found at the start of Pitcairne's play: MacQueen, Phanaticks, pp. 6ff.

31 Insofar as works referred to in the text are documented in footnotes there, this will not be repeated here. However, it is perhaps worth noting that none of the works by Clarke, Hooke, More, or Toland that are cited are to be found in Pitcairne's library (though other works by all four authors are; for other surprising lacunae, see Appleby and Cunningham, ‘Robert Erskine and Archibald Pitcairne’, p. 11); it may or may not be significant that a copy of Hooke's Posthumous works was bought by the University of Edinburgh in 1712: see EUL MS Da.1.34, fo. 36.

32 For a discussion of Clarke and others as ‘immaterialists’, see Wayne Hudson, Enlightenment and modernity: the English Deists and reform (London, 2009), ch. 5.

33 For a concern about eternalism on the part of more orthodox spokesmen, see George MacKenzie, earl of Cromarty, A bundle of positions (London, 1705), especially the section comprising sig. D; George Cheyne, Philosophical principles of natural religion (London, 1705), ch. 2 and passim.

34 For the issues involved, see Rhoda Rappaport, When geologists were historians, 1665–1750 (Ithaca, NY, 1997), esp. pp. 189ff. On China, see also Paolo Rossi, The great abyss of time: the history of the earth and the history of nations from Hooke to Vico (English trans., Chicago, IL, 1984), part 2. For Pitcairne's view on contemporary geological debates, see Johnston, Best of our owne, pp. 56–7.

35 There is a possible parallel with the disdain for the Hottentots shown at this point in a manuscript by Pitcairne in EUL MS Dc.4.101, in which he attributed the greater proneness to disease of ‘barbarous’ countries, where ‘the people are not polite’, compared with northern nations, to their inferior personal hygiene.

36 On the last topic, which is not discussed in Pitcairneana, see specifically John W. Yolton, Thinking matter: materialism in eighteenth-century Britain (Oxford, 1984). The other matters referred to were commonplaces of contemporary apologetic.

37 J. R. Wigelsworth, Deism in Enlightenment England: theology, politics and Newtonian public science (Manchester, 2009), pp. 78–81 and ch. 3 passim. Wigelsworth thus rejects the view of Toland as anti-Newtonian espoused by Margaret Jacob and others. See also Reink Vermij, ‘Matter and motion: Toland and Spinoza’, in Wiep van Bunge and Wim Klever, eds., Disguised and overt Spinozism around 1700 (Leiden, 1996), pp. 275–88.

38 See especially R. S. Crane, ‘Anglican apologetics and the idea of progress, 1699–1745’, in his The idea of the humanities and other essays critical and historical (2 vols., Chicago, IL, 1967), i, pp. 214–87 (originally published in Modern Philology, 31 (1933–4)).

39 For a recent account of Pitcairne which places him in the context of the dated conceptual structure of R. F. Jones's Ancients and moderns (2nd edn, St Louis, MS, 1961), see MacQueen, Latin poems, p. 363 (where Jones is cited) and passim. It is unfortunate that, for all their erudition concerning the Latin culture of the period, the MacQueens seem unaware of recent critiques of Jones's views, e.g. in Michael Hunter, Science and society in Restoration England (Cambridge, 1981), especially ch. 6, and above all in Levine, J. M., ‘Ancients and moderns reconsidered’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15 (1981), pp. 7289CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and The battle of the books: history and literature in the Augustan age (Ithaca, NY, 1991).

40 See, for instance, his letter to Verwer, cited in n. 27 above, where the sentences there quoted are interspersed by the statement: ‘Id ego jam dudum credo, Deumque igitur esse demonstravi Circulatione Sanguinis intellectâ.’ See also Raffe, ‘Archibald Pitcairne’, and, for the views on related subjects of a one-time associate of Pitcairne's, Cheyne, Philosophical principles, passim.

41 For a digital version, see http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL.HOUGH:12939560. The MS comprises a formerly stitched paper book, like an exercise book, with coarse paper wrappers. The stitching now only survives at the inside of the central gathering, having come loose so that the folded leaves that make up the book are separate from one another. On the outside front cover, it is inscribed: ‘Rec[eived] January 18 1841 / Gift of / H. S. McKean Esq.’ This is repeated at the top of the first page of the text. It is preserved in a slipcase, inside which is the bookplate: ‘Harvard College Library the gift of H. S. McKean’. The MS is in a neat italic hand of mid- to late eighteenth-century date. It has a modern foliation at the bottom of the inner margin. Catchwords illustrate the continuity of the text. Each page has a pencil margin, within which ‘C’ or ‘I’ is written to denote the contributions to the dialogue. Before fo. 1, there is a leaf that is blank except for the old classmarks, ‘MS Amer 721’ (this also appears to be deleted on the cover) and ‘Cal. E. Dr. 4’, on its verso. At the end, one page has been marked up with pencil margins after ‘Finis’; there are then five wholly blank pages (i.e., verso of leaf with marked-up recto and two completely blank leaves, one conjugate with opening blank leaf), the other with the preface leaf. In the transcription that follows, page breaks have been denoted within soliduses; insertions above the line are denoted ‹thus› (these all appear to be trivial copying errors); and editorial interventions are enclosed in square brackets. Occasional flourishes at the end of words, especially at line-ends, have been ignored; the usage of inverted commas on fo. 6 has been modernized. Throughout the text, the word ‘tis’ has apostrophes at both the start and the end; here, the opening one has been silently ignored.

42 For Henry More's definition of spirit, see his Enchiridion metaphysicum (London, 1671), partially translated in Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus triumphatus (London, 1681), pp. 97ff. For a modern edition and translation, see Alexander Jacob, ed., Henry More's manual of metaphysics: a translation of the Enchiridion metaphysicum (1679) with an introduction and notes (Hildesheim, 1995).

43 A reference to Samuel Clarke's A demonstration of the being and attributes of God (London, 1705), especially pp. 27ff. A modern edition of this and other writings by Clarke with a commentary by Ezio Vailati was published in the Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy in 1998.

44 In fact, this is a quotation from Pierre Charron, Les trois veritez (1594). See R. H. Popkin, The history of scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1979), p. 58.

45 For a discussion of eternity using the same commonplace tag, see John Locke, Essay concerning human understanding, ii.xvii.10.

46 This is a quotation from Clarke's Demonstration, p. 22.

47 Ibid, pp. 23–6.

48 On the title page of his book, Clarke states that it is written ‘More Particularly in Answer to Mr Hobbs, Spinoza, And their Followers’.

49 The reference is obscure, though it could be to Georgius Macropedius's Adamus (1552), which Pitcairne might have encountered when at Leiden in the early 1690s.

50 The reference is to Cicero's De natura deorum, and perhaps particularly the arguments of Cotta: see Cicero, The nature of the Gods, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford, 1997).

51 At this point an asterisk in the text keys to a footnote at the bottom of the page:

The ingenious Mr Toland, in his “Letters to Serena” has indeavoured to prove that Motion is an essential Property of all Matter; and if it be allowed that Matter exists necessarily, it will follow that Motion must have been eternal.

The reference is to Toland's Letters to Serena (London, 1704), which Clarke had attacked in his Demonstration, pp. 46–7 (incorrectly citing his target as Letter 3 when it is fact Letter 5).

52 The reference is to Robert Hooke's Posthumous works, ed. Richard Waller (London, 1705), especially pp. 279ff.

53 At the point an asterisk in the text keys to a footnote at the bottom of the page:

Soldania is in the Hottentot's Country.

This refers to a passage in Locke's Essay, i.iv.8, in which the inhabitants of ‘Soldania’ (Saldanha Bay in South Africa) were seen as exemplifying the state of nature.

54 The meaning of the text is slightly obscure at this point, but it evidently alludes back to matters already dealt with.