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The First Freethinkers

Dr Elad Carmel is the author of Anticlerical Legacies: The Deistic Reception of Thomas Hobbes, c. 1670–1740 (Manchester University Press) and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Jyväskylä.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) by James Barry, c. 1774 © National Gallery of Ireland

In 1790, Edmund Burke took a strange decision. In the middle of his urgent Reflections on the Revolution in France, he launched an attack on old adversaries which, he admitted himself, nobody had remembered. He compared the French infidel philosophers, whose political and social ideas he dreaded, to their English counterparts, ‘who made some noise in their day’ but now ‘repose in lasting oblivion’. Who were these forgotten figures?

Burke named his targets mockingly: ‘Who, born within the last forty years, has read one word of [Anthony] Collins, and [John] Toland, and [Matthew] Tindal, and [Thomas] Chubb, and [Thomas] Morgan, and that whole race who called themselves Freethinkers?’ Here was a group of writers—often known as the English deists or indeed freethinkers—who pretended to be the precursors of an Enlightenment that Burke wanted to deny: ‘Ask the booksellers of London what is become of all these lights of the world’, he added sarcastically. Not only were they forgotten, he explained further, but even in their prime—late 17th and early 18th century England—they were not connected to one another nor influential in political affairs. Why, then, would he remind the audience of these negligible footnotes in English history? Surely, that could only have reintroduced their controversial ideas to the public.

Part of the title page of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan by Abraham Bosse (1651) © The Trustees of the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Interestingly, this was not the first nor the last time that these names were grouped together, even though they did not always think of themselves as a unified clique. Yet, in their different ways, they promoted a set of common goals and ideas that could certainly be associated with an Enlightenment—even if the nature of this Enlightenment, and precisely how radical it was, is still subject to academic debate. They were, first and foremost, anticlerical thinkers, who believed that the clergy aspired to gain and maintain independent political power and that this posed the utmost urgent threat to social stability (an anxiety fuelled by the wars of religion from which Europe was still recovering). Many contemporary theorists in and outside of England were alarmed by this danger to different degrees. One of them, Thomas Hobbes, warned the readers of his Leviathan (1651) precisely of that: social chaos, he argued, happens when the people feel split between so-called ‘Temporall and Spirituall Government’, which in fact ‘are but two words brought into the world, to make men see double, and mistake their Lawfull Soveraign’.

Title page of Anthony Collins’ A Discourse of Free-Thinking (1713)

To combat this threat to civil peace, then, action on multiple levels was necessary: political, cultural, philosophical, theological, even scientific. Most fundamentally, the freethinkers attempted to expose what they perceived as ‘priestcraft’: the tactics used by the clergy to keep the laity ignorant and thus obedient (similar to what Hobbes called the ‘kingdom of darkness’). In order to achieve that, rational and natural thinking was to replace blind and superstitious belief. The result of this anticlerical campaign was therefore twofold. First, the unquestionable was questioned: the authorship and authenticity of parts of the scriptures, the validity of miracles, even the very necessity of revelation. In this sense, these writers certainly went further than most and paved the way for more explicit forms of heterodoxy and even atheism. Second, these authors wanted their readers to acquire the same method that they were following, and it is at this point that they formulated a philosophy of freethinking.

In 1713, Anthony Collins published the first manifesto of ‘a Sect call’d Free-Thinkers’, namely, A Discourse of Free-Thinking. There, he defined freethinking as the use of our understanding to judge the strength of evidence of any given proposition to determine whether it is true. Freethinking, then, is a methodical process of rational inquiry based on concrete evidence, which prioritises one’s private judgment over others’ authority. Freethinking, Collins argued, is a basic right and duty, necessary to reach the truth in science as well as in theology, to advance philosophy and the arts, and thus to achieve individual and social progress.

George Jacob Holyoake, who in 1851 coined ‘secularism’ to describe a humanist philosophy of action on earth.

Collins and his fellow freethinkers anticipated many of the ideas that are often identified in Britain with 19th century figures, whether philosophers of liberty such as John Stuart Mill or popular secularists such as Charles Bradlaugh and George Holyoake. Freethinkers were of course not a new invention even in the 17th century: Collins was the first to admit that biblical king Solomon was a freethinker too. But the works of Collins, Toland, and their like were much more nuanced, ground-breaking, and indeed influential than is often assumed. Not only were they much more read than Burke was willing to admit; their ideas and works moved to continental Europe and colonial America and featured in libraries such as Thomas Jefferson’s. Their contribution to the concept of freethought is invaluable. In embracing and promoting ‘freethinking’ both as an idea and an identity openly, when it was not only derogatory but still somewhat dangerous, Collins and his milieu were, in fact, the first freethinkers.

See also

Sources 

Burke, E., Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Collins, A., A Discourse of Free-Thinking (1713)

Hobbes, T., Leviathan (1651)

Read more

Carmel, E., ‘Anthony Collins on Toleration, Liberty, and Authority’, History of European Ideas 48:7 (2022), 892–908

Carmel, E., ‘The History and Philosophy of English Freethinking’, in A. Tomaszewska and H. Hämäläinen (eds), The Sources of Secularism: Enlightenment and Beyond (Cham, 2017), 121–37

Champion, J., Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester, 2003)

Hudson, W., The English Deists: Studies in Early Enlightenment (London, 2009)

Israel, J., Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001)

Lucci, D., ‘Deism, Freethinking and Toleration in Enlightenment England’, History of European Ideas 43:4 (2017), 345–58

O’Higgins, J., Anthony Collins: The Man and His Works (The Hague, 1970)

Wigelsworth, J., Deism in Enlightenment England: Theology, Politics, and Newtonian Public Science (Manchester, 2009)

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