Ancient Ethics and Modern Happiness: A Study of Three

Treatises in Enlightenment Britain

Brian Michael Norton

Eighteenth-Century Life, Volume 38, Number 2, Spring 2014, pp. 47-74 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/544071

[ Access provided at 29 Jul 2022 15:44 GMT from University of Florida Libraries ]
 R

Ancient Ethics and Modern Happiness:

A Study of  Three Treatises in
Enlightenment Britain

Brian Michael Norton

California State University, Fullerton

Hundreds of pages into Tom Jones, Henry Fielding breezily dismisses an

ancient ethical problem with what appears to be the stone-­k icking certi-
tude of Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley. “There are a Set of Religious, or
rather Moral Writers,” Fielding explains, “who teach that Virtue is the cer-
tain Road to Happiness, and Vice to Misery, in this World. A very whole-
some and comfortable Doctrine, and to which we have but one Objection,
namely, That it is not true.” 1 It is easy to smile here with Fielding, aligning
ourselves with the narrator’s commonsense assertion and against what may
look to twenty-­first-­century readers like a well-­intentioned but hopelessly
naïve vision of ethical life. However, it is important to recall that a wide
range of late seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century philosophers, moralists,
and theologians proclaimed precisely what Fielding denies in this passage:
that upwards of one-­hundred treatises on happiness were published in Brit-
ain and France in the period arguing this very point. 2 In fact, Fielding’s
perhaps closest friend, James Harris, authored one such treatise in 1744, a
work Fielding read in manuscript, admired greatly, and that, Clive Probyn
has suggested, may have influenced Fielding’s own happily ending Tom
Jones. 3 As the historian Darrin McMahon remarks, “Being good meant

Eighteenth-Century Life
Volume 38, Number 2, Spring 2014  doi 10.1215/00982601-2645936
Copyright 2014 by Duke University Press
47
4 8   Eighteenth-Century Life

feeling good. Arguably, there was no more widespread Enlightenment

assumption.” 4 Indeed, what makes Fielding’s quip so cheekily provocative
is that it goes against the grain of the received wisdom on the subject: he is
saying exactly what no one else would say.
If feeling good was thought to have something to do with being good,
this is because eighteenth-­century “happiness” had roots in the eudae-
monistic ethics of classical Athens. A number of recent scholars have traced
this genealogy, offering varying explanations of the manner and extent to
which happiness remained an ethical concept in the period. Adam Potkay,
for example, posits that happiness emerged in the Renaissance as a transla-
tion of “philosophical eudaimonia,” and that it retained much of its objective
and specifically ethical character well into the nineteenth century.5 Vivas-
van Soni similarly holds that eighteenth-­century ideas of happiness “appear
to retain many features that are unmistakably classical in their provenance,”
among them the “relation of happiness to virtue.” 6 Ultimately, however,
Soni argues that by the end of the century, “Happiness has become a mere
feeling and been voided of all ethical or political content” (9). McMahon
can be seen as occupying a position somewhere between Potkay and Soni
on this issue. So while he notes the period’s ongoing identification of hap-
piness with virtue, he also regards the emphasis in modern happiness on
“pleasure and good feeling” as indicating something of a break with classi-
cal eudaimonia.7 This leads McMahon to wonder aloud how it was that so
few thinkers outside of Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Kant, and Sade ever
questioned this piece of ethical orthodoxy: “The question is why — ​why did
not more people think through the implications and the logic of one of the
century’s most dominant ethical impulses?” McMahon tentatively answers
that “they did not want to,” or more likely, they “were simply not able to” see
through these “self-­evident truths” (“From the Happiness of Virtue,” 15).
The countless treatises on happiness published in the period suggest a
slightly different view of this matter. Despite their contrasting methodolo-
gies and philosophical orientations, treatises invariably arrived at the same
conclusion: there could be no happiness without virtue. That eighteenth-­
century thinkers would devote so much time and intellectual energy dem-
onstrating this suggests that the point was far from being “self-­evident” or
taken for granted. To borrow Voltaire’s phrase, “One doesn’t write to prove
to men that they have faces.” 8 This period, I argue, saw the rise of a new,
more subjective understanding of happiness that seemed to threaten its
time-­honored ties with virtue, raising the possibility that happiness could
 A Study of Three Treatises in Enlightenment Britian  4 9

be pursued by amoral, or even immoral, means.9 (As we will see more

clearly below, the period’s treatises were haunted by the specter of Hobbes-
ian egoism.) This created a considerable amount of anxiety, giving the
ancient problem a new sense of urgency. Late seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­
century thinkers responded to the challenge by drawing on their eudae-
monistic inheritance to attempt to repair the damaged links between virtue
and happiness, to prove that however subjective personal well-­being may
be, virtue still offered the surest path to a happy life.10
In what follows, I will examine in detail three very different responses
to this challenge, focusing on John Norris’s An Idea of Happiness (1683),
Thomas Nettleton’s A Treatise on Virtue and Happiness (1742), and James
Harris’s “Concerning Happiness: A Dialogue” (1744). I have chosen these
three because they were among the most popular and highly regarded of
the countless treatises published in the period, and also because they are
the clearest modern examples of the key ancient traditions that dominated
eighteenth-­century thinking about happiness: Platonic, Epicurean, and
Stoic (Mauzi, 15). What we find here is not a single genealogy, but rather
three different genealogies, each with its own distinct methodology, and
its own way of understanding the nature of happiness and its precise rela-
tion to virtue. In attending to these particulars, I will aim to examine the
considerable philosophical resources each tradition still offered, the key
points of contention between them, and their sometimes surprising points
of convergence, on issues centering on such things as pleasure, determin-
ism, sociability, and the formal requirements of happiness. In the process,
I hope to provide a fuller view of the range and eclecticism of Enlight-
enment ideas of happiness and a more nuanced account of their ethical
significance.

I.  John Norris’s An Idea of Happiness (1683)

John Norris (1657 – ​1711) was a prolific and popular religious writer in his
day, with a posthumous influence extending well into the second half of
the eighteenth century.11 He is now best remembered in costarring roles,
opposite John Locke as the author of Cursory Reflections upon a Book called
An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), the first printed critique
of Lockean empiricism, and alongside Mary Astell, the early feminist,
whose correspondence with Norris was published under the title Letters
5 0   Eighteenth-Century Life

Concerning the Love of God, between the author of the Proposal to the Ladies
and Mr. John Norris (1695). But Norris was a prominent author in his own
right, with such works as The Theory and Regulation of Love (1688), Practi-
cal Discourses upon Several Divine Subjects (1690), and An Account of Reason
and Faith, in relation to the Mysteries of Christianity (1697), all going through
multiple editions. Norris’s An Idea of Happiness, in a Letter to a Friend:
Enquiring wherein the Greatest Happiness attainable by Man in this Life does
Consist was one of his earliest literary efforts, first published in 1683, fol-
lowed by a second edition in 1684. An Idea of Happiness was then repub-
lished as one of the principle works in the author’s Poems and Discourses
Occasionally Written, also in 1684, then published once again in his enor-
mously successful A Collection of Miscellanies: Consisting of Poems, Essays,
Discourses and Letters, which went through editions in Oxford in 1687 and
1692, and London in 1699, 1706, and 1710, reaching a ninth edition in 1730,
a full nineteen years after its author’s death. Norris’s influence, in fact, can
be detected well after this. E. Derek Taylor has documented the shaping
role Norris’s ideas played in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747 – ​48), a novel
that makes several explicit references to “Norris’s Miscellanies,” and a number
of Sterneans, following Melvyn New, have traced their impact two decades
later in the fiction and sermons of Laurence Sterne.12
Norris’s An Idea of Happiness serves as a reminder that modern happi-
ness was not the exclusive preserve of a secular or secularizing Enlighten-
ment. While scholars such as John Pocock, B. W. Young, David Sorkin,
Karen O’Brien, and Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor have emphasized the
religious dimensions of the British Enlightenment, Robert Louden is surely
right to claim “The myth of the antireligious Enlightenment is still alive
and well in many circles.” 13 This is especially problematic when it comes
to enlightened ideas of happiness. As McMahon and others have pointed
out, eighteenth-­century thinking about temporal felicity had roots deep
in seventeenth-­century religious thought.14 Particularly influential were
the writings and sermons of the Cambridge Platonists, a loose group of
Cambridge divines who, in reaction to their own Puritan upbringing, and
in opposition to Hobbes, defended an Arminian conception of free will,
argued for the primacy of morality and the compatibility of faith and rea-
son, and promoted what Michael Gill calls a “positive answer” to the ques-
tion of human nature.15 A vital component of the latter was their emphatic
embrace of sublunary happiness. The movement’s leader, Benjamin Which-
cote (1609 – ​83), for example, maintained that “to Enjoy a man’s self, is the
 A Study of Three Treatises in Enlightenment Britian  5 1

greatest Good in the world,” suggesting that even “omnipotence” could not
make an innocent person miserable or an “unregenerate” person happy.16
Henry More (1614 – ​87), with whom John Norris corresponded early in his
own intellectual career, defined ethics as “the Art of Living Well and Hap-
pily,” claiming that “Ethics are divided into two parts, the knowledge of
happiness, and the acquisition of it.” 17 Joseph Glanvill (1638 – ​80), belong-
ing to a later generation though often grouped with the Cambridge Pla-
tonists, published a treatise entitled The Way of Happiness: Represented in
its Difficulties and Encouragements (1670), which argued that “all the pre-
cepts of our religion are in their own nature proper instruments to make
us happy.” 18 Norris — ​sometimes referred to as the “last of the Cambridge
Platonists” for his correspondence with More and his pronounced Neo-
platonism — ​was thus working within an established tradition of religious
reflections on temporal well-­being, a progressive Latitudinarianism that
was both distinct from and largely prior to the brand of Anglicanism that
would later absorb the physico-­theology of Newton and rationalized reli-
gion of Locke.19 Indeed, Norris’s thought had a much longer intellectual
pedigree, stretching back through the Cambridge Platonists to the idealism
of Hierocles, Plotinus, and Plato.20
Norris elaborates his views on happiness within the framework and
technical vocabulary of Christian Platonism. He draws a sharp distinc-
tion between mind and body, between a human’s “Intellectual ” and “Sensi-
tive” faculties, holding the former to be “more perfect.” 21 He characterizes
the search for happiness as a process of transcending one’s own finite and
material nature, of moving toward and ultimately merging with the divine,
approvingly quoting “that great Platonist Plotinus” that “the Soul will then be
Happy when it shall depart hence to God ” (24 – ​25). For Norris, the question
of the “greatest Happiness attainable by man in this Life” (1) is inextrica-
bly bound up with the larger question of ideal and eternal happiness, the
“perfect and compleat” (8) happiness he identifies with the “full and entire
Fruition of God” (20). Norris’s depiction of this state, in keeping with the
Neoplatonist tradition, is at once rarified and exquisitely, even passionately,
blissful, filled with what Norris calls the “Extasies of Seraphic Love” (32).22
A large measure of this happiness, according to Norris, can be found in this
world through the “Unitive way of Religion,” which allows us to work our
way up to this transcendent ideal. Employing the iconic image of the Sym-
posium, Norris concludes that “this is the last Stage of Humane Perfection,
the utmost round of the Ladder whereby we ascend to Heaven” (32 – ​33).
5 2   Eighteenth-Century Life

According to Norris’s metaphysics, it is this perfect happiness that

humans truly desire, not the imperfect happiness of this world. And this is
precisely why the “Objects of Secular Happiness” (18) will always fall short:
“It is impossible a finite Object should afford this Satisfaction, because all
the good that is in it (being finite) is at length run over, and then the enjoy-
ment is at an end, The flower is suck’d dry, and we necessarily desire a
Change” (14). Norris here clearly has in mind Hobbes, who defined “felic-
ity” as “a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another; the
attaining of the former, being still but the way to the latter.” 23 Norris, in
fact, addresses Hobbes by name a few pages later, deriding the philoso-
pher’s suggestion that happiness could be found “in this continued Suc-
cession of new Acquisitions” (18). From Norris’s idealist perspective, such a
pursuit is doomed from the start: the very reason we need to move on to
the next object is that no worldly object can give us the happiness we ulti-
mately desire. “The desire of perfect Happiness,” Norris states, “has no
Intervals, no Vicissitudes, it out-­lasts the Motion of the Pulse, and Sur-
vives the Ruins of the Grave” (17). Less a fact of biology than an “Appetite
in our Souls” (17), this yearning can never be satisfied by earthly things.
In his published correspondence with Mary Astell, Norris proposes that
“the intellectual Pulse commences its Movement with the first Inspiration
of Life as well as the natural, and the Desire of Happiness immediately
succeeds the Capacity of it.” 24 Combining the metaphysics of Platonism
with the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, Norris seeks to discredit the materialistic
account of happiness writers of the period associated with Hobbes.
Norris’s anti-­empiricist methodology, however, did not lead him to
reject the new subjective understanding of personal happiness. On the con-
trary, on this specific point he agreed with his great rival John Locke. Both
thinkers distinguished between the objective good itself and the subjec-
tive well-­being it produces, a distinction memorably captured in Locke’s
suggestion that arguing about the summum bonum made as much sense
as debating “whether the best Relish were to be found in Apples, Plumbs,
or Nuts.” 25 As Locke categorically asserts, “The same thing is not good to
every Man alike” (268).26 Given the subjective nature of happiness, Locke
even goes so far as to say that it is impossible to be wrong about present
happiness: “Things in their present enjoyment are what they seem; the
apparent and real good are, in this case, always the same” (272). While
Locke’s empiricist methodology may lend itself toward such a view, what
is more surprising is that Norris had advanced all the same arguments six
 A Study of Three Treatises in Enlightenment Britian  5 3

years earlier in his Neoplatonist An Idea of Happiness. According to Nor-

ris, the concept of happiness contains two interrelated ideas: a “Good,”
which, he states, may be either “real or apparent,” and the “Fruition” of that
“Good” or “Object.” Because it is the subjective side of the equation that is
decisive — ​what Norris calls the “Fruition” — ​any object at all could theo-
retically suffice for happiness:

From this Distinction of real and apparent Good, some have taken
occasion to distinguish of Happiness likewise into two sorts, real and
imaginary: But I believe, upon a more narrow Scrutiny into the matter,
’twill be found, that all Happiness, according to its Proportion, is equally
real. (4 – ​5)

Like Locke, Norris therefore states that it is impossible to be mistaken

about present happiness; as he puts it, “It matters not to the Reality of my
Happiness, whether the Object of it be really good, or only apprehended
so,” concluding that “the Fool has his Paradice as well as the Wise-­man,
and for the time is as happy in it” (5).
But for all his subjectivism, Norris was of course no moral relativ-
ist. Like countless other treatises on happiness from the period, An Idea
of Happiness ultimately argues that virtue is the surest path to personal
well-­being. Part of Norris’s argument, as is evident in his engagement with
Hobbes, has to do with the insufficiency of worldly goods. The sensory
pleasures of this world are “finite,” and can therefore never satisfy the soul’s
longing for “compleat” happiness. Moreover, in addition to being “finite in
their Nature,” Norris asserts that such goods are also “ few in number” (18)
and, still worse, given the “Labour of Getting, the Care of Keeping, and
the fear of Losing,” they “commonly prove Occasions of greater Sorrow to
us than ever they afforded us Content” (19). While worldly goods can at best
offer only fleeting moments of well-­being, the satisfactions of virtue prove
more durable. In contrast to those who seek happiness in “Riches,” or “the
Pleasures of Sence,” or “Honour,” or “Greatness,” Norris applauds the Sto-
ics and Peripatetics, “who both place the greatest Happiness of this Life in
the Actions of Vertue” (29). As Norris puts it, “I confess, the Practice of
Vertue is a very great instrument of Happiness, and that there is a great deal
more true satisfaction and solid content to be found in a constant course
of well living, than in all the soft Caresses of the most studied Luxury, or
the Voluptuousness of a Seraglio” (29 – ​30).27 But for Norris, virtue consists
of something more than a “habitude of the Will to good” — ​a definition he
5 4   Eighteenth-Century Life

borrows from Descartes, but which, he observes, applies equally well to

Stoics, Aristotelians, and “the generality of other Moralists” (31). Accord-
ing to Norris, this is merely “Moral or Civil Vertue.” A “higher Sense of the
Word,” he says, occurs in the “Pythagorean and Platonic Writings,” which
he calls “Divine Vertue” (31 – ​32). The object of the former, Norris posits, is
the “Moral good,” while the object of the latter is “God himself ” (32). The
former aims at “mastering the Passions” and “regulating the actions of com-
mon Life,” while the latter consists of “Divine Meditation” (32) and “Mystic
Union” (41).
Norris’s Neoplatonist treatise offers an intriguing glimpse into early
Enlightenment debates about the nature and challenges of human hap-
piness. Like so many other progressive religious writers of the period, he
heartily approves of the individual’s search for sublunary happiness. More-
over, he articulates a remarkably subjectivist understanding of that happi-
ness, doing so, it is worth repeating, several years before Locke’s better-­
known arguments to the same effect. But it is also important to note the
ways in which Norris’s Christian Platonism stands apart from more famil-
iar currents of progressive Christian thought. Norris’s thinking is decid-
edly more mystical and otherworldly than the enlightened Anglicanism
described by Roy Porter or the “man of feeling” genealogy R. S. Crane
inf luentially located in Latitudinarianism. 28 Whereas these traditions
effectively blur the line between ethics and theology — ​maintaining that
being a morally good person in this world and preparing one’s soul for the
next are one and the same project — ​Norris makes a point of distinguish-
ing between “moral” and “divine” virtue. And while it would be going
too far to charge Norris with antinomianism, his “Seraphic Love” is strik-
ingly asocial in focus. As Clive Probyn observes, “The implied message that
ordinary social affection is a distraction and an obstacle to the higher love
of God seems inescapable” (Sociable Humanist, 28). On this score, Norris’s
Neoplatonist conception of the good life could not be further from that of
Nettleton and Harris.

II.  Thomas Nettleton’s Treatise on Virtue and Happiness (1742)

Little is known of the life of Thomas Nettleton (1683 – ​1742), a Yorkshire
physician educated in Edinburgh and Leyden. He is remembered by his-
torians of medicine for his pioneering use of statistical analysis to measure
 A Study of Three Treatises in Enlightenment Britian  5 5

the efficacy of smallpox inoculations, efforts preserved in his 1722 – ​23 cor-

respondence with James Jurin, then secretary of the Royal Society, and in a
1722 pamphlet entitled An Account of Inoculating the Small Pox; in a Letter to
Dr. William Whitaker. Nettleton, in fact, has been identified as being “one
of the first, possibly the first to use quantitative assessments of the effects
of medical interventions.” 29 Literary and intellectual historians, however,
make almost no mention of Nettleton at all, which is unfortunate, because
his Treatise on Virtue and Happiness provides a fascinating window onto
early eighteenth-­century efforts to construct a secular ethics in the wake of
Locke, and indeed to think of happiness itself within a naturalistic frame-
work. Nettleton’s tremendously popular treatise was first published in 1729
under the title Some Thoughts concerning Virtue and Happiness, In a Let-
ter to a Clergyman, an already lengthy work of 112 pages, that was greatly
expanded for a second edition in London in 1736 and Dublin in 1737. In
1742, the year of Nettleton’s death, the work appeared under the new title A
Treatise on Virtue and Happiness, with further editions coming out of Lon-
don in 1743, 1751, and 1757, Glasgow in 1751, 1759, and 1766, and Edinburgh
in 1774 and 1776. At least 14 separate editions appeared between 1729 and
1776, making this one of the best-­selling treatises on happiness published
in the period.
Nettleton’s Treatise on Virtue and Happiness belongs to a very different
intellectual tradition than Norris’s An Idea of Happiness. Norris’s think-
ing about happiness can be traced back through Descartes, Henry More,
and Aquinas to ancient Platonism and Christian Scripture. As an Angli-
can theologian and, indeed, as a Neoplatonist, Norris ultimately viewed
sublunary happiness as a component of the larger question of ideal and
eternal happiness. Nettleton, by contrast, a physician and man of science,
approached happiness through the ideas of Locke, Pierre Gassendi, and
the Epicurean tradition to which both belonged.30 As a scientist, Nettleton
kept his eyes trained resolutely on the phenomena of this world, limiting
his investigation to what Gassendi, the great seventeenth-­century popu-
larizer of Epicureanism, called “natural” happiness.31 In contrast to Nor-
ris’s transcendental bliss, Nettleton believes that “whoever entertains too
high and florid ideas of happiness, will find himself much mistaken.” 32
Indeed, the purpose of his own Treatise is conspicuously modest and down-­
to-­earth: “There are none but who would desire to pass through the world
as easily as they can, and to give themselves and others as little trouble as is
possible: and how we may learn to do this, and also obtain the most lasting
5 6   Eighteenth-Century Life

pleasure, is the subject of the following enquiry” (ii). Temperamentally and

methodologically, this is a far cry from Norris’s “Mystic Union.”
Nettleton’s Treatise, in fact, is rigorously Epicurean. He defends a
sense-­based epistemology and proceeds from a decidedly empirical point
of departure: “When we would enquire into the secret springs and causes
of human action, we have no other way to proceed but by observation and
experience” (1). Following Locke and the Epicureans, Nettleton defines
good and evil in terms of pleasure and pain (2), a key point of conten-
tion between Epicureans and Stoics in the Hellenistic era and a continu-
ing source of controversy in the Enlightenment. Nettleton even appears
to accept the central Epicurean tenet that pleasure is in fact the “greatest
good”: happiness, he states, “is commonly supposed to consist in being
delivered from all evil, so far as is possible, and in obtaining the best and
greatest good; or, which is the same thing, in ease and relief from pain,
and in the enjoyment of the greatest, and most lasting pleasure” (17). While
Nettleton is a bit equivocal here, the parallel equates “happiness,” the
“greatest good,” with the “greatest . . . pleasure,” an equation Locke him-
self was not quite willing to make. Nettleton also follows the Epicureans
in viewing the absence of pain as itself a form of pleasure (21), characteriz-
ing the search for happiness as a program of “guarding against unnecessary
pain and trouble” (256), his terms here neatly corresponding to the aponia
(freedom from pain) and ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) that are the
hallmarks of Epicurean eudaimonia. Like Epicurus, Nettleton advocates
that we learn to be content with simple, temperate, and easily acquired
pleasures (256), and, again like Epicurus, he argues that we can ultimately
find happiness only in virtue.
Nettleton’s concept of happiness relies upon a sophisticated psychologi-
cal framework that is clearly indebted to Locke. Like Locke, he associates
desire with “uneasiness,” and he sees the entire psychological apparatus
as governed by what modern philosophers call “psychological hedonism,”
the principle that every individual necessarily pursues his own pleasure or
happiness. As Locke puts it, “Every intelligent Being really seeks Happi-
ness, which consists in the enjoyment of Pleasure, without any considerable
mixture of uneasiness; ’tis impossible any one should willingly put into his
own draught any bitter ingredient, or leave out any thing in his power, that
would tend to his satisfaction” (274 – ​75).33 Here is Nettleton’s version of the
same argument:
 A Study of Three Treatises in Enlightenment Britian  5 7

As nature has furnished us with these powers of affection, and given us

strong desires, which determine us to pursue what has the appearance of
good; and also powerful aversions, which make us fly from what we feel, or
imagine to be evil; and as our aim in every particular action is to escape the
one and obtain the other, so the scope and end of all motions, the general
aim of our whole conduct is, or at least ought to be, Happiness. (17)

Both writers thus portray the human individual as a kind of hedonic

machine, hardwired to desire his own happiness, and this desire can deter-
mine his behavior in any given situation. This gives happiness far greater
normative power than can be found in Norris or Harris, and it also suggests
a more limited model of human agency. As Locke famously argued, the
will itself is determined by desire or uneasiness, and “If it be farther asked,
what ’tis moves desire ? I answer happiness and that alone” (258).
If we are programed to pursue happiness, how is it then that we
so rarely achieve it? And what, exactly, does Nettleton mean when he
announces that “the general aim of our whole conduct is,” and then inter-
rupts with an odd qualifying clause, “or at least ought to be, Happiness” (my
italics). Do we or do we not necessarily pursue our own happiness? Accord-
ing to Nettleton’s psychological model, “Motion is guided by affection,” but
affection itself, he is careful to point out, “is influenced by opinion,” and
we know “from too certain experience, that opinions are frequently wrong”
(32 – ​33). In other words, we do not pursue the good as such — ​we pursue
“what has the appearance of good,” just as we fly not from real evil but from
“what we feel, or imagine to be evil” (my italics). In practice, a host of factors
works to sway us away from our natural good, such as “prejudices” (37), and
“fashion” (38), and “received opinions” (36), conjuring up for us “innumer-
able phantoms and apparitions of good and evil” (34). Such false opinions,
moreover, “may by degrees vitiate our taste” (33) and become what Nettle-
ton calls “second nature” (39). To compound the problem, we have difficulty
weighing present goods and evils against distant goods and evils, often
miscalculating our long-­term interest. The trick of happiness, as Nettleton
describes it, is to overcome these errors, which brings us back to the thorny
question of determinism.
Nettleton and Locke put forward a soft determinism, or “compati-
bilism,” which has vital implications for the pursuit of happiness. While
both thinkers suggest that mental phenomena, like any other phenomena,
are subject to laws of causation, they argue that humans nevertheless do
5 8   Eighteenth-Century Life

possess some degree of agency.34 According to Locke’s characterization,

the individual is constantly solicited by “a great many uneasinesses” that are
“ready to determine the will” at every instant. They usually succeed, Locke
remarks, “but not always” (263). The individual also has a kind of second-­
order capacity to “suspend” these desires before acting on them, and in this
power, Locke claims, lies what is commonly called “free will.” The passage
is worth quoting at length:

For the mind having in most cases, as is evident in Experience, a power

to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires, and so all,
one after another, is at liberty to consider the objects of them; examine
them on all sides, and weigh them with others. In this lies the liberty Man
has; and from the not using of it right comes all that variety of mistakes,
errors, and faults which we run into, in the conduct of our lives, and our
endeavours after happiness; whilst we precipitate the determination of
our wills, and engage too soon before due Examination. To prevent this
we have a power to suspend the prosecution of this or that desire, as every
one daily may Experiment in himself. This seems to me the source of all
liberty; in this seems to consist that, which is (as I think improperly) call’d
Free will. (263)35

Nettleton takes over this crucial element of Lockean psychology and makes
it the cornerstone of his own philosophy of happiness. “We are not neces-
sarily determined,” Nettleton writes, “by every first impression, but may
have it in our power . . . [to] stop and suspend our motion, until we have
fairly examined whither it will tend” (253). Employing the same terms as
Norris, Nettleton explains that this enables us to pursue “real” rather than
“apparent” goods, for while the latter may grant us moments of satisfaction,
only the former can yield a solid and lasting happiness. As he puts it, “He
alone can be said to be Master of Himself, who can controul his inclina-
tion, and suspend his motion, until he has considered whither it will tend;
and can afterwards continue or alter its direction, as he shall find most
reasonable: it is this which denominates one a Rational and Free Agent;
and the more perfect we are in this practice, the nearer we shall approach
toward being compleatly happy” (91).
But if Nettleton is greatly indebted to Locke for his psychology, he
seeks to outdo him with his ethics. And he hopes to do this not by reject-
ing Locke’s methodology, as Shaftesbury had done, but by completing it,
as it were, with a strictly empirical and Epicurean case for virtue. Given the
subjective nature of happiness and the impossibility of finding a universal
 A Study of Three Treatises in Enlightenment Britian  5 9

summum bonum, Locke did not even attempt such an argument. If indi-
viduals consider only this life, Locke concedes,

’tis not strange, nor unreasonable, that they should seek their Happiness by
avoiding all things, that disease them here, and by pursuing all that delight
them; wherein it will be no wonder to find variety and difference. For if
there be no Prospect beyond the Grave, the inference is certainly right, Let
us eat and drink, let us enjoy what we delight in, for to morrow we shall die.
(269 – ​70)

It is not from any empirical consideration that Locke argues for virtue,
then, but rather from the prospect of the “Rewards and Punishments of
another Life, which the Almighty has established, as the Enforcements of
his Law” (281).36 For Locke, there seemed to be no empirical way of squar-
ing the subjective nature of happiness with the obligations of morality.
Nettleton, to be sure, was every bit the subjectivist Locke was on the ques-
tion of happiness: “All persons have some particular foible in their natu-
ral temper; and education and custom will establish various habits, which
will occasion great diversity of relishes and measures of life” (94). We have
already noted the significance Nettleton placed on such cultural factors as
“education and custom”; here it is worth observing his attention to psy-
chological or even physiological factors, which in some ways anticipates
the ground-­breaking work of La Mettrie.37 Every individual, he observes,
has “some particular foible” in his “natural temper.” He maintains else-
where that one’s passions depend upon the “temper and disposition of the
mind” (50), and he even suggests that certain people are just naturally more
inclined than others to be happy: “Some have naturally that happy consti-
tution, which gives them a certain chearfulness and gaiety of spirit, that
accompanies them in all circumstances of life” (51). In contrast to Locke,
however, this subjectivism did not stop Nettleton from venturing a natu-
ralistic case for virtue.
Nettleton ultimately argues that happiness can be found only in ­virtue.
Part of his argument, like Norris’s, has to do with the formal requirements
of happiness. So while Nettleton never directly forbids “sensual pleasures”
(256), he weighs these according to the eudaemonistic notion that the great-
est good “should be of a lasting, and durable nature” (21), and that, as much
as possible, it should be in our power. Worldly pleasures fail by these cri-
teria because their enjoyments tend to be “transient and momentary” (21),
“precarious and uncertain” (84). And like both Norris and the Epicure-
6 0   Eighteenth-Century Life

ans, Nettleton argues further that pleasures of the “mind” are superior to
the pleasures of “sense,” being more “exquisite and refined,” more “suitable
to the dignity of human nature” (101). But the crux of Nettleton’s argu-
ment — ​and here he diverges considerably form Norris — ​can be found in
his lengthy and momentous account of natural sociability, which he appears
to borrow from Hutcheson and Shaftesbury. 38 “The condition of human
nature is such,” Nettleton observes, “as renders us utterly unable to live
Single and Independent; but, on the contrary, we stand in absolute need
of Mutual Assistance and support” (108). Nettleton regards society to be
“the natural state of Man,” and posits, contra Hobbes, that by living in
society we are following — ​rather than suppressing — ​our natural appetites
and desires. As he remarks, “It is most evident that as man was made for
Society, out of which he could not long subsist, he has interwoven in his
constitution those dispositions which lead him to promote the publick wel-
fare, and the interest of society, as much as those that move him to take
care of his own life, health, and private good” (110). Sociability thus pro-
vides a countervailing force to self-­interest: just as individuals are naturally
concerned with their own good, they are also, via the mechanism of “sym-
pathy,” naturally invested in the good of others. “This sympathy,” Nettle-
ton writes, “will not suffer us to confine our views to a narrow self-­interest,
but will give full scope and exercise to the Social Passions” (111). Thus it
is through “virtue” — ​which Nettleton associates with “benevolence” and
that which is “beneficial to mankind in general” — ​that we can achieve “the
greatest pleasure” and “most substantial happiness” we are capable of (260).
Nettleton’s long forgotten Treatise offers a fascinating example of Epi-
curean ethics in the Enlightenment. It is empirical in methodology, scien-
tific in spirit, and informed by the most significant philosophical develop-
ments of the day. Most notably, the Treatise brings Lockean psychology
to bear on the classical problem of happiness. Drawing on a sophisticated
understanding of human cognition, Nettleton proposes a way of squaring
virtue and subjective well-­being without appealing, as Norris and Locke
himself had done, to the divine. Unlike Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, who
were dedicated to this same task, Nettleton does not insist that moral
behavior be driven by a lofty disinterestedness; as an Epicurean, he thinks
it is morally acceptable — ​and psychologically inevitable — ​that individuals
pursue their own pleasure. In its moderation and emphasis on self-­restraint,
however, Nettleton’s Treatise also suggests a slightly different version of
Enlightenment Epicureanism than the one we may be more familiar with.
 A Study of Three Treatises in Enlightenment Britian  6 1

It has none of the unsettling egoism of Hobbes and Mandeville, or the

sensualism of the French Epicureans, or any of the usual implications of
atheism — ​and in these respects, Nettleton is actually more faithful than the
period’s better-­known Epicureans to Epicurus’s original thought. Nettleton
does, however, stray somewhat from Epicurus with his strong arguments
about natural sociability, a concept more Stoic than Epicurean in deriva-
tion, aligning him at least on this point with the ethics of James Harris.

III.  James Harris’s Three Treatises (1744)

James Harris (1709 – ​80), a deeply learned classicist, was a respected and
well-­connected literary figure in the middle decades of the eighteenth cen-
tury. Boswell refers to him in his Life of Johnson as an “amiable philoso-
pher,” and Goldsmith called him a “worthy humane man.” 39 Unfortunately,
it is likely that Harris is better remembered for Johnson’s gibe that Harris
is “a prig, and a bad prig” (Life of Johnson, 911), an odd charge that Boswell
and Harris’s modern biographer Clive Probyn have found easier to refute
than explain. Harris was the nephew of the third Earl of Shaftesbury (on
his mother’s side), a very close friend of Henry Fielding, and the benefactor
of a number of aspiring classicists, most notably Sarah Fielding and Eliza-
beth Carter.40 Writing on a wide range of subjects, including music, art,
philosophy, and philology, Harris is best known for Hermes: or, A Philosoph-
ical Inquiry concerning Language and Universal Grammar (1751), a challenging
work reprinted well into the nineteenth century that anticipates some of the
twentieth-­century positions of Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky
(Probyn, Sociable Humanist, 169). Harris’s inquiry after happiness formed
the third part of his Three Treatises. The First concerning Art. The Second con-
cerning Music, Painting and Poetry. The Third concerning Happiness (1744).
Though not quite as successful as Hermes, Three Treatises was reprinted five
separate times in the eighteenth century, and it was included in the posthu-
mous Works of James Harris, with an Account of his Life and Character (1801),
edited by Harris’s son, the Earl of Malmsesbury. Boswell records person-
ally rereading Harris’s “very sensible and accurate” treatise on happiness
in 1763, after which he “rose,” he claimed, “happier and more disposed to
follow virtue” (Probyn, Sociable Humanist, 3). And John Adams, in an 1820
letter to Thomas Jefferson, described the treatise as “the best discussion of
the subject he had ever read.” 41
6 2   Eighteenth-Century Life

Harris’s “Concerning Happiness: A Dialogue” belongs to a differ-

ent intellectual tradition than Norris’s Idea or Nettleton’s Treatise, one
that shares elements of these other traditions, but that has characteristics
uniquely its own. Like Norris, Harris had an aversion to the scientific spirit
of the new age. In Hermes, he writes disparagingly of the sense-­based epis-
temology of Locke, which, he says, cannot help but get “lost in a labyrinth
of infinite particulars” and proceeds “as if the criterion of all truth were an
alembic or an air-­pump.” 42 Harris’s treatise on happiness recommends a
very different approach: “Hence the Mind truly wise, quitting the Study of
Particulars, as knowing their Multitude to be infinite and incomprehensible,
turns its intellectual Eye to what is general and comprehensive, and thro’
Generals learns to see, and recognize what ever exists.” 43 This is at the same
time a decidedly secular treatise, and in it, Harris, like Nettleton, takes up
the post-­Lockean challenge of defining happiness and its relation to vir-
tue without making any direct appeals to a system of rewards and punish-
ments after death. Neither the Neoplatonic Latitudinarianism of Norris,
nor the Epicurean empiricism of Nettleton, Harris’s approach to happiness
is decidedly Stoic in nature, and it is influenced by the modern exemplar of
British Stoicism, Harris’s uncle, the third Earl of Shaftesbury.44
Following the Stoics, Harris holds that the best life for man is a “Life
According to Nature” (Three Treatises, 174), which is, by extension, a “Life
According to Virtue” (175). He characterizes the universe as a providen-
tially ordered system in which “externals” are divided into things “Agree-
able,” “Disagreeable,” or “Indifferent” (142), and he regards human reason to
be a “Particle” or “Spark” of “Divine” reason (229). Borrowing Epictetus’s
celebrated image, he urges the reader to “consider Life as one great impor-
tant Drama” (210), and in keeping with Stoic cosmopolitanism, he holds
that the “whole Universe is but one City or Commonwealth” (225). Like
Shaftesbury and the Stoics, and in direct opposition to Locke and the Epi-
cureans, Harris refuses to identify good and evil with pleasure and pain,
maintaining the Stoic view that there is “nothing really Good, but Virtue,
nothing really Evil, but Vice” (208).45 Finally, Harris defends the uncom-
promising Stoic position that virtue is not just necessary for happiness, but
sufficient as well: the good man, in other words, is a happy man, regardless
of his circumstances.46
Harris begins his inquiry, in the manner of the classical philosophers,
by seeking to define the “Sovereign Good,” or summum bonum, which
he then uses to evaluate various forms of life as candidates for happiness.
 A Study of Three Treatises in Enlightenment Britian  6 3

He proceeds by adumbrating the “Pre-­conceptions” — ​Stoic prolepses — ​he

claims we all have about the Sovereign Good, which he summarizes as
follows: “That it should not be transient, nor derived from the Will of oth-
ers, nor in their Power to take away; but be durable, self-­derived, and (if I
may use the Expression) indeprivable” (121).47 With these criteria in mind,
Harris then goes on to examine a variety of forms of life that he organizes
into two basic kinds, “Business” and “Leisure,” each with two subdivi-
sions, business centering either on “Power” or “Wealth,” and leisure on
“Pleasure” or “Contemplation.” Harris demonstrates one by one how each
form of life falls short of what is required of the Sovereign Good, and
therefore should not be considered as a real contender for happiness. His
methodology here is significant and warrants special attention. On its face,
his appeal to “pre-­conceptions” stands as a clear rejection of the inductive
methods of Locke and Nettleton, for whom the examination of happiness
proceeds from observations about human nature, pleasure, and the psychol-
ogy of desire. But on another level, Harris’s articulation of the requirements
of happiness can be seen as formalizing what was implicit and ad hoc in
Norris and Nettleton, and indeed, it helps us better understand the period’s
ubiquitous arguments against worldly goods: they are too fleeting, uncer-
tain, or precarious ever to produce the lasting and durable kind of satisfac-
tion that eighteenth-­century thinkers associated with happiness.48 These
eudaemonistic assumptions shaped all eighteenth-­century thinking about
happiness. Norris’s Neoplatonist Idea and Nettleton’s Epicurean Treatise,
as we have seen, both assume that happiness must be “durable” and “last-
ing.” Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), to cite another well-­known example,
has Imlac propose that happiness “must be something solid and perma-
nent, without fear and without uncertainty.” 49 Adam Ferguson, to cite just
one more example, similarly remarks that a person can be said to be happy
“in proportion as his enjoyments are habitual, lasting, and conceived to
be secure.” 50 Such examples could be enumerated at great length. What
distinguishes Harris’s position from that of his contemporaries — ​just as it
distinguished the Stoics from their philosophical rivals — ​is the notion that
happiness is not only secure, but, in Harris’s neologism, “indeprivable.”
Like Nettleton, Harris also makes a strong argument for man’s natu-
ral sociability. He writes that every individual is “indebted” to “Society, . . .
not only for the Beginning of Being, but for the Continuance” (Three Trea-
tises, 148). He posits, again contra Hobbes, that “Pity, Benevolence, Friend-
ship, Love; the General Dislike of Solitude, and Desire of Company” are
6 4   Eighteenth-Century Life

not “taught us by Art,” but are, in fact, “Natural Affections” (155 – ​56), con-
cluding that “Man by Nature is truly a Social Animal” (157). This view of
human nature is based on classical Stoicism, and it reemerged in modern
Britain via the Cambridge Platonists, Shaftesbury, and the writers of the
Scottish Enlightenment, suggesting a notable crisscrossing of ethical tradi-
tions. When Nettleton, for example, appeals to natural sociability, he can
find little justification for it in Epicurean ethics; rather, as an empiricist, he
takes it as an observable fact that humans need and depend on each other
for their survival, and that “sympathy” and “social passions” are integral
to our psychological makeup. Harris’s arguments, meanwhile, typically a
priori, turn here toward the a posteriori, and are bolstered by observations
on the behavior of humans and “all other herding Species” (155). Further
bridging the thought of the two thinkers is the notion that natural socia-
bility can potentially reconcile personal happiness with the demands of
virtue. For all Harris’s emphasis on reason and the importance of rising
above nature, his account of the “Natural Affections” seems to imply that
a good deal of moral life entails merely following one’s natural sentiments
toward fellow-­feeling, benevolence, and pity. And while Nettleton allows
the direct pursuit of pleasure, he also praises the long-­term advantages of
“self-­denial, . . . temperance, moderation, patience, government, [and] self
command” (75). If natural sociability brings together Harris and Nettle-
ton, it simultaneously marks their considerable distance from Norris, who,
it should be remembered, had before him the very argument of the Cam-
bridge Platonists that would so influence Shaftesbury’s ideas of sociability.51
Norris, as we have seen, played down the role of sociability in living a good
life, arguing that the “Contemplation and Love” of God is the highest hap-
piness attainable on earth. When Harris, by contrast, evaluates the life of
“contemplation,” it does not fare too badly in the scholar’s eyes, but because
such a life suppresses our “Social Affections,” he finds it to be inconsistent
with our nature and therefore with our happiness. For Harris, as well as for
Nettleton, there is nothing higher than what Norris somewhat dismissively
calls “Moral or Civil Vertue.” 52
Harris ultimately identifies happiness with virtue, or what he calls
“Rectitude of Conduct.” Like Norris and Nettleton, he bases his argument
in part on the formal requirements of happiness, concluding that recti-
tude of conduct is the good that best “correspond[s] to all our Pre-­conceptions”
(Three Treatises, 191). But as a Stoic, Harris needs to make an even stronger
 A Study of Three Treatises in Enlightenment Britian  6 5

case: virtue is not just the good that best fulfills the formal requirements
of happiness — ​it is the only good, period. In Harris’s words, “Either there is
no Good except this of our own; or . . . if there be any other, ’tis not worthy our
Regard ” (214). This defining principle of Stoic ethics places the good wholly
within our own power — ​making it “up to us,” as Epictetus put it — ​which
means that true happiness is impervious to external chance and fortune.
Indeed, Harris’s happy man resembles the Stoic sage:

Behold the True and Perfect Man: that Ornament of Humanity; that
Godlike Being; who, without regard either to Pleasure or Pain, uninfluenced
equally by either Prosperity or Adversity, superior to the World and its best and
worst Events, can fairly rest his All upon the Rectitude of his own Conduct; can
constantly, and uniformly, and manfully maintain it; thinking that, and that
alone, wholly sufficient to make him happy. (214)

In his grandiloquence here, and in his metaphysics, Harris is closer to Nor-

ris’s self-­transcending idealism than he is to Nettleton’s prosaic Epicurean-
ism. Despite the materialism and delicate balancing of freedom and deter-
minism in classical Stoicism, Harris grants the individual a remarkable
amount of agency: “Nature is . . . the Cause of every thing, except those Things
alone, which are the immediate Effects of Reason” (164). Through reason, Har-
ris observes, individuals are able to overcome their animal nature: “In the
Brute, Nature does all; in Man, but Part only” (160 – ​61). Austere and uncom-
promising, Harris nevertheless has no illusions about the difficulty of his
ethical project. Quoting a line from John Sheffield, which Frances Burney
would use later in her preface to Evelina, Harris asks if his “True and Per-
fect Man” is not “A faultless Monster, which the World ne’er saw?” (215). As he
goes on to explain, the point of this paragon, again like that of the Stoic
sage, is not to define what humans already are, but rather what they could
become through Stoic training or askesis; he proposes it, in other words, as
“an Exemplar of Imitation, which tho’ None we think can equal, yet All
at least may follow” (220 – ​21). Pursuing this ethical ideal, Harris assures us
further, renders “life, even in the most vulgar Acceptation, as chearful, joy-
ous, and easy as possible” (209).
Harris’s “Concerning Happiness: A Dialogue” is an extraordinarily
learned treatise, defiantly classical in methodology, and vaguely deistic in
sensibility. Harris, like his uncle Shaftesbury, did not go out of his way
to reassure his reader of his religious orthodoxy. In this respect, Harris’s
6 6   Eighteenth-Century Life

Stoicism is quite unlike the “Christian Stoicism” Richard Sher sees as a

defining feature of the Scottish Enlightenment.53 At the same time, Harris
also stands apart from the “Epicurean Stoicism” Thomas Kavanagh finds
in the French Enlightenment, a coming together of rival schools against
the common enemies of dualism and Platonism.54 For starters, as we saw,
Harris’s happy man is indifferent to “pleasure or pain,” the primary sources
of motivation in Epicureanism, ancient and modern. Moreover, he grants
the individual much greater agency than can be found in the mechanistic
psychology of Locke or Nettleton. Harris’s brand of Stoicism is both anti-­
empiricist and not overtly Christianized, distinguishing it from these more
familiar strains of Enlightenment Stoicism. But what is most striking about
Harris’s thought is its unapologetically rigorous conception of the good life.
The only good is virtue, he insists in true Stoic fashion, and the only evil
is vice. So where Norris and Nettleton believe that virtue is necessary for
happiness, Harris argues further that it actually guarantees happiness.55

G
Together, these treatises suggest the vitality and diversity of eudaemonis-
tic thinking about happiness in Enlightenment Britain. What we find in
the treatises of Norris, Nettleton, and Harris is not a unified idea of hap-
piness, but competing theories deriving from distinct traditions, each with
its own understanding of happiness and its relation to virtue. According to
the Neoplatonist Norris, God endowed every individual with a desire for a
“perfect and compleat” happiness; though this can be satisfied fully only in
heaven, we can have a taste of it in this world through the love and contem-
plation of God, what Norris calls “Divine Vertue.” The Epicurean Nettle-
ton, by contrast, rejects such a “florid” idea of happiness, instead seeing the
desire for happiness as a simple and inescapable fact of human psychology;
Nettleton recommends we “suspend” our particular desires long enough
to determine if our pleasures are consistent with our long-­term happiness,
which, given our natural sociability (a concept he borrows from the Sto-
ics), is most fully realized in the “exercise of Benevolence and Humanity.”
The Stoic Harris approaches the problem of happiness, as the classical phi-
losophers did, through the idea of the summum bonum, and while he too
draws on natural sociability to make the case for virtue, he defends the
stronger thesis that “Rectitude of Conduct” is not only necessary for hap-
 A Study of Three Treatises in Enlightenment Britian  6 7

piness, but sufficient as well. Ultimately, happiness itself has a distinct tenor
or character in each of these treatises. For Norris, happiness refers to a kind
of ecstasy or rapturous bliss; for Nettleton, it is a condition of calm and
ease, a freedom from pain, fear, and longing; for Harris, it is something
like the security of a clear and self-­approving conscience.
Underlying this diversity is a shared commitment to the cause of vir-
tue and some core assumptions about the formal requirements of happi-
ness. The Enlightenment inherited from ancient ethics the conviction that
happiness was something durable, lasting, and within one’s own power, as
much as this is possible. Harris marks an extreme position on this scale with
his insistence that true happiness is in fact “indeprivable.” But Norris and
Nettleton, as we have seen, also believed that happiness was largely — ​if not
completely — ​in one’s own control. Indeed, these assumptions were almost
universally shared in the period. And if we consider these formal require-
ments, the case for virtue appears a bit less naïve and farfetched. The amoral
enjoyments of this world, each of these thinkers argued, provide pleasures
that are too fleeting, precarious, easily exhausted, too subject to contin-
gency and feelings of remorse ever to produce a solid and lasting happiness.
According to Norris, Nettleton, and Harris — ​and countless other writers of
the period — ​only virtue could completely fulfill these requirements.
And yet there can be little doubt that these arguments were always
a bit suspect. Darrin McMahon and Jacques Domenech have both pro-
posed that La Mettrie was perhaps the only thinker before Kant and Sade
to question fully the period’s equation of virtue and happiness.56 But Fiel­
ding’s gibe suggests a rather more complicated picture. Though a personal
friend of James Harris and an illustrious member of the genealogy traced
by Crane, Fielding had little trouble questioning this ethical truism. Fur-
thermore, he did so in a way that suggests, in the manner of the emperor’s
new clothes, that this is what people were thinking, whether they would
say so or not. With the rise of subjective models of well-­being, the close and
time-­honored bonds between virtue and happiness appeared to be coming
undone. Eighteenth-­century thinkers responded to this challenge by draw-
ing on the formal requirements of happiness to make a kind of last-­ditch
argument in defense of virtue. Neither the certitude of treatise writers nor
the nonchalance of Fielding can fully hide the period’s anxieties over what
would happen if these bonds completely gave way.
6 8   Eighteenth-Century Life

Notes
1. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones [1749], ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. 1 of The
Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding (Middleton: Wesleyan Univ., 1975), 783.
2. For French treatises on happiness, see Robert Mauzi, L’Idée du Bonheur
dans la littérature et la pensée françaises au XVIIIe siècle, 2nd ed. (Paris: Librairie
Armand, 1965). For a discussion of works on happiness written in English, see Brian
Michael Norton, Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness: Ethical Inquiries in the Age of
Enlightenment (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ., 2012).
3. Clive T. Probyn, The Sociable Humanist: The Life and Works of James Harris,
1709   –  ​1780 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).
4. Darrin McMahon, “From the Happiness of Virtue to the Virtue of
Happiness: 400 BC – ​AD 1780,” Daedalus 133.2 (2004): 14.
5. Adam Potkay, “Narrative Possibilities of Happiness, Unhappiness, and
Joy,” Social Research 77 (2010): 524 – ​25. See also Potkay, “Joy and Happiness,” in
A Companion to the Eighteenth-­Century English Novel and Culture, ed. Paula R.
Backsheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Potkay, The Passion
for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume (Ithaca: Cornell Univ., 2000); and
Potkay, The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ., 2006).
6. Vivasvan Soni, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity
(Ithaca: Cornell Univ., 2010), 184.
7. Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History (New York: Atlantic Monthly,
2006), 209.
8. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, ed. Raymond Naves (Paris: Garnier
Frères, 1967), 22. The translation is mine.
9. For a fuller version of this argument, see Norton, Fiction and the Philosophy of
Happiness.
10. Thus, while I agree with Potkay that happiness remains an ethical problem
throughout the period, I see happiness as being understood in more subjectivist
terms than Potkay suggests. And while I agree with Soni that happiness becomes
associated with “feeling,” it does not thereby lose all ethical significance. The
challenge of reconciling this subjectivism with the ethical good is at the heart of
eighteenth-­century thinking about happiness.
11. For more on Norris, see W. J. Mander, The Philosophy of John Norris (Oxford:
Oxford Univ., 2008); Richard Acworth, The Philosophy of John Norris of Bemerton:
1657   –  ​1712 (New York: Olms, 1979); and John Hoyles, The Waning of the Renaissance,
1640   –  ​1740: Studies in the Thought and Poetry of Henry More, John Norris, and Isaac
Watts (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1971).
12. E. Derek Taylor, Reason and Religion in Clarissa: Samuel Richardson and “the
Famous Mr. Norris, of Bemerton” (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 14 – ​18. For Norris’s influence
on Laurence Sterne, see Melvyn New, “The Odd Couple: Laurence Sterne and John
Norris of Bemerton,” Philological Quarterly 75 (1996): 361 – ​85. While a growing number
 A Study of Three Treatises in Enlightenment Britian  6 9

of Sterneans explore Sterne’s connection to Norris, Geoff Newton pays particular

attention to strains of mysticism and Neoplatonism in their Latitudinarianism.
See Geoff Newton, “Laurence Sterne and his Church,” Shandean 19 (2008): 71 – ​
89; “The Sermons of Laurence Sterne, Neoplatonism, and Two Short Works,” in
Divine Rhetoric: Essays on the Sermons of Laurence Sterne, ed. W. B. Gerard (Newark:
Univ. of Delaware, 2010), 149 – ​63; and “Divine and Human Love: Letters between
John Norris and Mary Astell, Laurence Sterne and Eliza Draper,” in Theology and
Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism, ed. Melvyn New and Gerard
Reedy, S. J. (Newark: Univ. of Delaware, 2012), 183 – ​201. For Norris’s influence on
James Thomson, see Herbert Drennon, “James Thomson and John Norris,” PMLA
53 (1938): 1,094 – ​2,001. For a reading of Norris’s own poetry, see Maren Sofie Røstvig,
The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical Ideal, 2nd ed. (1958; Oslo:
Norwegian Univ., 1962), 271 – ​75.
13. Robert B. Louden, The World We Want: How and Why the Ideals of the
Enlightenment Still Elude Us (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 2007), 15. For work on the
religious dimensions of the Enlightenment, see John Pocock, Barbarism and
Religion: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737   –  ​1764, 4 vols. (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ., 1999); B. W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-­
Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford: Clarendon,
1998); David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics
from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton Univ., 2008); Karen O’Brien, Women
and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.,
2009); and Women, Gender, and Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
14. McMahon, in “From the Happiness of Virtue,” and Roy Porter, in
The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), both observe that the Enlightenment’s embrace
of sublunary happiness occurred partly within Christianity (McMahon, 15; Porter,
260). For more on the centrality of happiness in Latitudinarian thought, see Isabel
Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in
England, 1660   –  ​1780, vol. 1: Whichcote to Wesley (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1991),
77 – ​88. For a longer account of Christianity’s contribution to the history of happiness,
see McMahon, Happiness, especially 82 – ​139. Soni, in Mourning Happiness, makes
the more theoretical argument that eighteenth-­century happiness, far from being
secularized, “remains theological in form” (7). What Soni means by this is that
modern happiness, like the bliss of heaven, is the promised reward for a good life, a
reward we endlessly work toward during this “time of trial.”
15. For his illuminating study of the Cambridge Platonists in the development
of modern ethics, see Michael B. Gill, The British Moralists on Human Nature and
the Birth of Secular Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 2006). See also the editor’s
introduction to The Cambridge Platonists, ed. Gerald R. Cragg, (New York: Oxford
Univ., 1968).
16. Quoted in Gill, British Moralists, 13, 26.
7 0   Eighteenth-Century Life

17. Henry More, Enchiridion Ethicum, in Cambridge Platonists, ed. Cragg, 263.

18. Joseph Glanvill, The Way to Happiness: Represented in its Difficulties and
Incouragements; and Cleared from Many Popular and Dangerous Mistakes (London:
James Collins, 1670), 134. Outside of Cambridge, we might also cite in this
context Norris’s Oxford colleague Richard Lucas, whose frequently reprinted An
Enquiry after Happiness in Several Parts [1685], 3rd ed., 2 vols. (London: S. Smith
and B. Walford, 1697), claimed that “to inform Man what is his true and proper
happiness . . . hath been, and ever must be the aim of all philosophy, and all
Religion” (1:xv).
19. Unlike this later form of Latitudinarianism, Norris’s thought is
insistently opposed to the new science. Mander, in Philosophy of Norris, observes
Norris’s “steadfast resistance” to “Baconian scientific empiricism” (200). Clive
Probyn, in Sociable Humanist, also suggests that “Norris’s philosophical position
might be described as a God-­centered idealism in reaction against Hobbes’s
materialism” (27). For the varieties of religious thought during the Enlightenment,
see Helena Rosenblatt, “The Christian Enlightenment,” in The Cambridge History
of Christianity, vol. 7: Enlightenment, Reawakening, and Revolution, 1660   –  ​1815, ed.
Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 2006);
Sorkin, Religious Enlightenment; and Young, Religion and Enlightenment.
20. For a historical treatment of Platonism’s role in English thought, see
Platonism and the English Imagination, ed. Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1994). In his introduction to this volume’s very
brief section on the eighteenth century, Pat Rogers accounts for this neglect by
proposing that “the Enlightenment had canonized the worldly, and made the
pursuit of happiness a civic right instead of a metaphysical quest” (185), a situation
that would only be reversed with Romanticism. Norris’s lasting popularity suggests
that metaphysical quests may have retained greater appeal in the period than we
commonly recognize. For more on the “Platonic revival,” see Michael Prince,
Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment: Theology, Aesthetics, and the Novel
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1996), 163 – ​89.
21. John Norris, An Idea of Happiness, in a Letter to a Friend Enquiring Wherein
the Greatest Happiness Attainable by Man in the Life Does Consist, 2nd ed. (1683;
London: James Norris, 1684), 22. Subsequent references to this text will be made
parenthetically.
22. See also the lines in Norris’s poem “Seraphick Love”: “To thee, thou
only fair, my soul aspires, / With holy breathings, languishing desires. / To thee
m’inamour’d, panting heart does move, / By efforts of Ecstatick love.” John Norris,
A Collection of Miscellanies, 9th ed. (1683; London: Edmund Parker, 1730), 19. This
is also, of course, part of Norris’s Christian heritage. As McMahon, in Happiness,
reminds us, “Christian happiness was unabashedly sensual in its imagined
ecstasies” (95). For an illuminating overview of “religious joy,” from the Hebrew
Bible to Aquinas, see Potkay, Story of Joy, 30 – ​49.
 A Study of Three Treatises in Enlightenment Britian  7 1

23. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [1651], ed. A. P. Martinich (Peterborough:

Broadview, 2002), 75.
24. Mary Astell and John Norris: Letters Concerning the Love of God, ed. E. Derek
Taylor and Melvyn New (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 97. The logic of Browning’s
memorable line — ​“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a
heaven for?” — ​is taken quite literally here. That we desire perfect happiness proves
that it must exist somewhere. As Norris, in Idea of Happiness, puts it: “And now
certainly God would never have planted such an Ardent, such an importunate
Appetite in our Souls, and as it were interwoven it without our very Natures, had he
not been able to satisfie it” (17). For a discussion of how this “Argument from Desire”
gains acceptance over the eighteenth century, see Robert G. Walker, Eighteenth-­
Century Arguments for Immortality and Johnson’s “Rasselas,” ELS Monograph Series 9
(Victoria: Univ. of Victoria, 1977), 20 – ​34.
25. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding [1689] (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1975), 269.
26. For more on Lockean subjectivism, see McMahon, Happiness, 183 – ​86.
27. It is worth noting that Norris conceives of happiness specifically in terms of
pleasure. See Mander, Philosophy of Norris, 146 – ​59.
28. See Porter, Creation of the Modern World, 96 – ​129, and the seminal essay,
R. S. Crane, “Suggestions Toward a Genealogy of the Man of Feeling,” ELH 1
(1934): 205 – ​30.
29. Arthur Boylston, “Thomas Nettleton and the Dawn of Quantitative
Assessments of the Effects of Medical Interventions,” Journal of the Royal Society of
Medicine 103 (2010): 335. Roy Porter, in The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical
History of Humanity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), briefly discusses Nettleton’s
correspondence with Jurin (275).
30. Much recent work has been done on the Epicurean tradition in modern
thought. See Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of
Modernity (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 2008); Thomas Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures:
Eighteenth-­Century France and the New Epicureanism (New Haven: Yale Univ., 2010);
and Epicurus in the Enlightenment, ed. Neven Leddy and Avi S. Lifschitz (Oxford:
The Voltaire Foundation, 2009).
31. For a study of Gassendi’s ethical thought, see Lisa T. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s
Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe (Ithaca: Cornell Univ., 1996).
32. Thomas Nettleton, A Treatise on Virtue and Happiness [1742], 3rd ed.
(London: J. Payne and J. Bouquet, 1751), 27, <http://www.archive.org/details/
treatiseonvirtue00nettiala/>. All references to Nettleton’s treatise will rely on
this edition.
33. For more on Locke’s hedonism, see Wilson, Epicureanism, 207 – ​16.
34. Hobbes was a key figure in introducing the concept that would later
be known as compatibilism. Jonathan Kramnick provides a terrific discussion of
this concept, and the period’s action theory in general, in Actions and Objects:
7 2   Eighteenth-Century Life

From Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford: Stanford Univ., 2010). As Kramnick puts it,
“Freedom turns out to be a particular kind of causal relation, one in which reasons
are able to become actions” (35).
35. For a careful analysis of Locke’s evolving views on determinism, see
Kramnick, Actions and Objects, 147 – ​62.
36. As Wilson, in Epicureanism, points out, “Unlike the Epicurean, . . . Locke
maintained that the pains and pleasures of a future life were assured (even if only
by faith)” (210). For an illuminating account of Locke’s “failures” here, see J. B.
Schneewind, “Locke’s Moral Philosophy,” The Cambridge Companion to Locke, ed.
Vere Chappell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1994). For studies of how subsequent
moral philosophers took up the challenges of Lockean ethics, see Gill, British
Moralists, and Daniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity
in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 2006). For a classic
account of this history, see J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of
Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1998).
37. See Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Anti-­Seneca or the Sovereign Good, in
Machine Man and Other Writings [1748], trans. and ed. Ann Thomson (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ., 1996). Charles T. Wolfe, in “A Happiness Fit for Organic Bodies:
La Mettrie’s Medical Epicureanism,” in Epicurus, ed. Leddy and Lifschitz, has
described La Mettrie’s position as a “medical Epicureanism,” a label that would
also apply to Nettleton’s Treatise. For more on embodiment in the age of reason, see
Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), and Daniel
Cottom, Cannibals and Philosophers: Bodies of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ., 2001).
38. Nettleton, like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, also speaks of a “Moral Sense”
(121).
39. James Boswell, The Life of Johnson [1791] (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1993), 911, 519.
40. Ronald Paulson, in The Life of Henry Fielding (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000),
describes Harris as “perhaps [Fielding’s] closest friend” (13). Harris’s generosity and
“sociability” are themes running throughout Probyn’s intellectual biography, Sociable
Humanist.
41. Howard Mumford Jones, The Pursuit of Happiness (Ithaca: Cornell Univ.,
1966), 77.
42. James Harris, Hermes: or, A Philosophical Inquiry concerning Language
and Universal Grammar [1751], in The Works of James Harris, Esq., ed. first Earl of
Malmesbury (Oxford: J. Vincent, 1841), 218.
43. James Harris, Three Treatises. The First Concerning Art. The Second Concerning
Music, Painting and Poetry. The Third Concerning Happiness [1744], 2nd ed. (London:
John Nourse and Paul Vaillant, 1765), 227.
44. Probyn, in Sociable Humanist, has described Shaftesbury’s influence on
Harris as “pervasive, overt, and continuous” (32). For Stoic themes and influences
in eighteenth-­century literature and thought, see Potkay, Passion for Happiness;
Geoffrey Sill, The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel (Cambridge:
 A Study of Three Treatises in Enlightenment Britian  7 3

Cambridge Univ., 2001); Margaret Anderson, “Stoic Constructions of Virtue in

The Vicar of Wakefield,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69 (2008): 419 – ​39; and Brian
Michael Norton, “The Moral in Phutatorius’s Breeches: Tristram Shandy and the
Limits of Stoic Ethics,” Eighteenth-­Century Fiction 18 (2006): 405 – ​23.
45. Shaftesbury, of course, saw in this a form of egoism he found inconsistent
with moral life. See Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury,
Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times [1711, 1713] (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ., 1999), 138, 250. For an excellent discussion of Shaftesbury’s ethics, see Gill,
British Moralists, chapters 6 – ​9.
46. For more on classical Stoic thought, see A. A. Long, Epictetus: A Stoic and
Socratic Guide to Life (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), and Long, Stoic Studies (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ., 1996).
47. For the place of Stoic prolepsis in Shaftesbury’s thought, see Carey, Locke,
Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson, 110 – ​19.
48. I borrow the concept of the “formal requirements” of happiness most
directly from Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1993),
but a wide range of classicists employ the term. Because the eighteenth century
inherited these eudaemonistic assumptions, the concept can be equally useful for
understanding Enlightenment reflections on the good life.
49. Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia [1759] (Oxford:
Oxford Univ., 1999), 45. For a side-­by-­side reading of Rasselas and Harris’s Three
Treatises, see Clive T. Probyn, “Johnson, James Harris, and the Logic of Happiness,”
Modern Language Review 72 (1978): 256 – ​66.
50. Adam Ferguson, Principles of Moral and Political Science, 2 vols. (New York:
AMS, 1973), 2:63.
51. While noting Shaftesbury’s “attachment to Stoicism,” Gil, in British
Moralists, proposes that the Cambridge Platonists’ influence on Shaftesbury,
particularly on the question of human nature, is so strong that “it is fitting to think
of his philosophy as a continuous outgrowth of Cambridge Platonism itself  ” (78).
52. The enormous gap in sensibilities between Norris and Harris is evident in
the latter’s rhetorical dismissal of what he describes as the “Mockery of Monkery;
the Farce of Friars; the ridiculous Mummery of being sequestered in a Cloister”
(Three Treatises, 139). Such rhetoric places Harris closer to Voltaire and Hume than to
Norris.
53. See Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment:
The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton Univ., 1985), especially 175 – ​86.
54. See Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures, especially 4 – ​5.
55. Apparently not every reader was convinced. Harris’s classical methodology
led him to collapse the distinction between the objective good and the subjective
well-­being that results from it, a distinction that is foregrounded in most modern
theories of happiness. As John Bethune points out, in Essays and Dissertations on
various Subjects Relating to Human Life and Happiness, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Kincaid
and Bell, 1771), “There are many reasons for considering this [rectitude of conduct]
7 4   Eighteenth-Century Life

rather as a mean or qualification necessary to happiness, than as happiness itself  ”

(1:13). Harris, nevertheless, was highly respected. Adam Ferguson, in Principles,
singled him out, along with Shaftesbury, Montesquieu, and Hutcheson, as a thinker
who understood the “real spirit” of Stoicism (1:8).
56. Darrin McMahon, “From the Happiness of Virtue,” and Jacques
Domenech, L’Éthique des lumières: les fondements de la morale dans la philosohie
française du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: J. Vrin, 1989), 15 – ​16.