Peter Marshall - Demanding the Impossible

On leaving Newton’s intellectual and emotional hothouse, at the age of seventeen Godwin entered the Dissenting Academy at Hoxton – one of the best centres of higher education in eighteenth-century England. Here he received a thorough grounding in Locke’s psychology, which presented the mind as a blank sheet; in Newtonian science, which pictured the world as a machine governed by natural laws; and in Hutcheson’s ethics, which upheld benevolence and utility as the cornerstones of virtue. At the same time, Godwin formed a belief in ‘necessity’, that is to say, that all actions are determined by previous causes, and in ‘immaterialism’, that is, that the external world is created by the mind. These twin pillars of his thought underwent little subsequent change.

Although the tutors were extremely liberal in religion and politics and encouraged free enquiry, Godwin left Hoxton as he entered: a Sandemanian and a Tory. He tried to become a minister, but three times he was rejected by rural congregations in south England. It proved a period of reassessment and self-examination. His intellectual development was rapid. The political debate raging over the American War of Independence at the time soon led him to support the Whig opposition to the war, and a reading of the Latin historians and Jonathan Swift made him a republican overnight.

The most important influence was to come from a reading of the French philosophes . In Rousseau, he read that man is naturally good but corrupted by institutions, that private property was the downfall of mankind, and that man was born free, but everywhere was in chains. From Helvétius and d’Holbach, he learned that all men are equal and society should be formed for human happiness. When he closed the covers of their books, his whole world-view had changed. They immediately undermined his Calvinist view of man, although for the time being he became a follower of Socinus (who denied the divinity of Christ and original sin) rather than an atheist. Realizing that he was not cut out to be a minister, Godwin decided to go to London and try to earn his living by teaching and writing.

In quick succession, Godwin wrote a life of William Pitt, two pamphlets supporting the Whig cause, a collection of literary imitations, and three shorts novels. Eager to get rid of his sermons, he published a selections as Sketches of History (1784), but not without the observation that God in the Bible acts like a ‘political legislator’ in a ‘theocratic state’, despite the fact that he has ‘not a right to be a tyrant’. Godwin in this respect was deeply impressed by Milton’s depiction of the Devil in Paradise Lost —‘a being of considerable virtue’, as he later wrote, who rebelled against his maker because he saw no sufficient reason for the extreme inequality of rank and power which had been created. He continued to rebel after his fall because ‘a sense of reason and justice was stronger in his mind than a sense of brute force’. 5

The most important political work of this period was undoubtedly An Account of the Seminary (1783) which Godwin intended to open in Epsom for the instruction of twelve pupils in the Greek, Latin, French and English languages. Although no pupils turned up, the prospectus remains one of the most incisive and eloquent accounts of libertarian and progressive education. It shows Godwin believing that children are not only born innocent and benevolent, but that the tutor should foster their particular talents and treat them gently and kindly. The ex-Tory student and Calvinist minister had come to recognize that:

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