“1.  Natural religion itself seems to decay [in England] very much.  Many will have human souls to be material; others make God Himself a corporeal Being.

“2.  Mr. Locke and his followers are uncertain, at least, whether the soul be not material and naturally perishable.

“3.  Sir Isaac Newton says that space is an organ which God makes use of to perceive things by.  But if God stands in need of any organ to perceive things by, it will follow that they do not depend altogether upon Him, nor were produced by Him.

“4.  Sir Isaac Newton and his followers have also a very odd opinion concerning the work of God.  According to their doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up His watch from time to time; otherwise it would cease to move.[1] He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion.  Nay, the machine of God’s making is so imperfect, according to these gentlemen, that He is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it as a clockmaker mends his work.”

[Footnote 1:  Goethe seems to have had this saying of Leibnitz in his mind when he wrote his famous lines—­

“Was waer’ ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse.”]

It is beside the mark, at present, to inquire how far Leibnitz paints a true picture, and how far he is guilty of a spiteful caricature of Newton’s views in these passages; and whether the beliefs which Locke is known to have entertained are consistent with the conclusions which may logically be drawn from some parts of his works.  It is undeniable that English philosophy in Leibnitz’s time had the general character which he ascribes to it.  The phenomena of nature were held to be resolvable into the attractions and the repulsions of particles of matter; all knowledge was attained through the senses; the mind antecedent to experience was a tabula rasa.  In other words, at the commencement of the eighteenth century, the character of speculative thought in England was essentially sceptical, critical, and materialistic.  Why “materialism” should be more inconsistent with the existence of a Deity, the freedom of the will, or the immortality of the soul, or with any actual or possible system of theology, than “idealism,” I must declare myself at a loss to divine.  But in the year 1700 all the world appears to have been agreed, Tertullian notwithstanding, that materialism necessarily leads to very dreadful consequences.  And it was thought that it conduced to the interests of religion and morality to attack the materialists with all the weapons that came to hand.  Perhaps the most interesting controversy which arose out of these questions is the wonderful triangular duel between Dodwell, Clarke, and Anthony Collins, concerning the materiality of the soul, and—­what all the disputants considered to be the necessary consequence of its materiality—­its natural mortality.  I do not think that anyone can read the letters which passed between Clarke and Collins, without admitting that Collins, who writes with wonderful power and closeness of reasoning, has by far the best of the argument, so far as the possible materiality of the soul goes; and that, in this battle, the Goliath of Freethinking overcame the champion of what was considered Orthodoxy.