While numerous sources have been found for the ideas expressed by Cleanthes and Demea in the Dialogues, Philo's thoughts have commonly been taken to originate with Hume. It is clear, however, both from internal and external evidence, that Hume drew for his (sometimes wayward) spokesman on that mid-century ferment in the life sciences that Denis Diderot described as a "revolution." The restoration of this context—obscured by the late publication of the Dialogues —suggests that Philo's celebrated critique of theism is merely (...) one face of a discourse that centres in new ideas about generation and evolution. On this reading the Dialogues emerges as a conjectural as well as analytic work, one that offers in addition to its demolition of the argument from design an argument about design, built on the premise that natural order can be independent of a creator. The philosophical definition that Hume brings to ideas that first surfaced in the works of Maupertuis and Buffon makes the Dialogues the most potent pre-Darwinian work of its period. (shrink)

Some years before the Scriblerians brought a comic realism to bear on the themes of prophecy and apocalypse, Mandeville gave millenarians a taste of their own medicine by showing – in the conclusion to The Grumbling Hive – that a land free of the offences decried by the pious would indeed prove to be ruinous. In so doing he inaugurated a tradition of secularised apocalypse that finds one of its most famous expressions in the Dunciad. Both Pope and Mandeville make (...) use of the millenarian motifs of Elkanah Settle’s pageants for Lord Mayor’s day, and though the Williamite politics of The Fable of the Bees was deeply inimical to the Tory wits (as appears in the satires of the Scriblerians), time has exposed a paradoxical congruence between Pope and Mandeville that underlies their official enmity. (shrink)