Contending for the Mantle of Enlightenment The Philosophical Exchanges

1 Contending for the Mantle of Enlightenment: The Philosophical Exchanges of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams Between 1812 and 1826, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson renewed one of the most remarkable epistolary exchanges in early American letters. The range of topics they discussed was dizzying. From science and theology to history and literatures, with plenty of politics thrown in, the two aging legends covered almost every major issue of their day. One of the most common topics they engaged was philosophy. In fact, over one third of their retirement correspondence touched on some philosophic issue or author. 1 These philosophical debates ultimately served to vindicate each interlocutors claim to the mantle of Enlightenment. What made these debates so pointed and compelling was the fact that these statesmen represented wildly divergent philosophical positions and traditions each of which claimed to speak for the Enlightened republic of letters. As such they shed some light on how we understand that movement and its politics. In many ways, these philosophic exchanges are deeply revealing. If nothing else, they remind us of the remarkable breadth of learning shared by these two great founders. Both ex-presidents displayed a keen knowledge of ancient speculation, debating the metaphysics and politics of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, contrasting the ethical strictures of Stoicism and Epicureanism, and examining the doctrines of Philo, Pythagoras, Euclid, Xenophon and Cicero. Their familiarity with modern philosophy was even more impressive; with the notable exceptions of Spinoza, Vico, and Kant, Adams and Jefferson discussed every major philosopher of the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as a frightening proportion of the minor ones. 2 Far more significant are what these exchanges reveal about the basic philosophical convictions of the interlocutors. Nowhere is Adams’ persistent prudential skepticism expressed more clearly and forcefully. And, of course, it is to these exchanges that we owe the most complete and thoughtful articulation of Jefferson’s monistic materialism. Two remarkable letters penned in 1820 2 lay out his metaphysical convictions in a detail and cogency found nowhere else in his writings. From sense alone, Jefferson claimed, “we may erect all the certainties we can have or need,” including the reductive belief that thought was the residue of “a material organ of peculiar structure,” namely the brain. By contrast, Jefferson insisted, “once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind.” Particularly vacuous were such “hyperphysical and anti-physical” notions as immaterial mind or spirit “of which we can have neither evidence nor idea.” 3 Far more than merely academic, these philosophic discussions are critical to understanding the political thought of Adams and Jefferson. For both founders, the articulation of their theories of government and politics were profoundly colored by their larger philosophic postures. A careful examination of their philosophical debates thus offers us a deeper insight into their political theories as well as their respective relations to the larger politics of Enlightenment. The decision to turn to philosophy was decidedly Adams’s. This is hardly surprising given his overall dominance of their correspondence. Where Jefferson had written the majority of letters they exchanged before their retirement, Adams produced over two thirds of their subsequent correspondence. 4 Adams’s missives were not only more frequent, they were also longer and more pointed. Predictably, Jefferson played his cards close to the vest while Adams practically thrust his in his friend’s face. Adams dominated their correspondence – he was the one, after all, who initiated their rapproachment – because he was the more “needy” interlocutor. Convinced that he had been bested by Jefferson in public opinion, he suspected the Virginian would similarly eclipse him in the eyes of posterity. What Adams needed, then, was to know how his great and dear friend had become his political rival and nemesis. Their famed collaboration in the Continental Congress in the cause of independence – Benjamin Rush later described them as “the North and South Poles of the American Revolution” – deepened into intimate friendship during their shared diplomatic duties in the 1780s. 5 A portrait of Jefferson hung in the Adams home, and Abigail described the lanky Virginian as “the only person with whom my companion could associate with perfect freedom, and unreserve.” 6 For his part, Jefferson confessed to a clearly hostile James Madison that Adams was vain and irascible but extolled his honesty, profundity, and judgment, pointedly insisting “I pronounce that you will love him if ever you become acquainted 3 with him.” 7 Despite growing political differences which would see them representing opposing parties, their mutual esteem and affection survived. Indeed, when Jefferson was assured of his old friend’s victory in their first presidential contest, he drafted a congratulatory letter whose purpose was, as he told Madison, to recruit him to the cause of Republicanism as “the only sure barrier against Hamilton” and “come to a good understanding with him as to his future elections.” 8 Yet within a few short years they were no longer speaking and Jefferson had hired the notorious grub street “assassin” James Thompson Callender to heap calumny on his old comrade. 9 More than anything, Adams needed to know how this had happened, how his old friend had turned on him so abruptly and with such ferocity. This need is palpable in his pathetic plea; “You and I ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.” 10 Adams sought his explanation in the realm of philosophy in part because there was nowhere else to look. In terms of practical politics, there was very little distance between them. Both responded to America’s newly declared independence by drafting constitutions structurally similar to that subsequently adopted by the federal republic with a bicameral legislature balanced by a separate executive and independent judiciary. Both, in principle at least, shared Washington’s foreign policy of strict neutrality toward the warring parties in Europe. Adams was of one mind with Jefferson’s agrarian-tinged liberal political economy as well as his mistrust of corporations and banks. Not surprisingly, neither was particularly enamored with Hamilton’s financial plan although both acceded to its practical utility. And when it came to Hamilton, both shared a deep seated loathing of the crafty New Yorker and his fellow High Federalists: Jefferson characterized his whole career as “a tissue of machination against the liberty of the country” while Adams dismissed him curtly as “the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar.” 11 Their one great disagreement had been about the likely course of the French Revolution, “the first time” Adams reminded his old friend, “that you and I differed in Opinion in any material Question.” From the outset Jefferson had been sanguine in his expectations while Adams was equally certain that “it was all madness.” 12 Yet even here Jefferson forthrightly confessed that “your prophecies” had “proved truer than mine.” 13 Given their like-mindedness in matters of practical political judgment, Adams could only hope to plumb their differences in the realm of speculative theory. 4 Adams, however, had other reasons to pursue his dialogue with Jefferson on the philosophical plane. He was, in fact, convinced that their real disagreement was ultimately philosophical. Of all the criticisms that Jefferson leveled against his old friend, the most painful was contained in a published letter to Joseph Priestly where the Virginian claimed that Adams had rejected the belief in scientific progress in favor of a reactionary “Bigotry in politics and religion.” The obvious implication was that by rejecting belief in science and progress Adams and his partisans had abandoned the Enlightenment and its politics. Adams utterly rejected this charge as “totally incongruous to every principle” he had held “for Threescore Years at least.” 14 True, he had averred and continued to believe that some truths, like the general principles of Christianity and liberty, were “eternal and immutable,” but such a claim was hardly inconsistent with an enlightened politics. “I could fill Sheets of quotations from Frederick of Prussia, from Hume, Gibbon, Bolingbroke, Rousseau and Voltaire, as well as Newton and Locke” Adams insisted, “in favour of the general Principles in Phylosophy, Religion, and Government.” 15 With all its “Errors and Vices,” Adams wholeheartedly embraced the age of Enlightenment as “the most honourable to human Nature. Knowledge and Virtues were increased and diffused, Arts, Sciences useful to Men, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more than in any former equal Period.” 16 To then charge him, as Jefferson had, with abandoning that embrace in his mature political thought and action struck Adams as bordering on calumny. “I might have flattered myself that my Sentiments were sufficiently known” he complained to his friend, “to have protected me against Suspicions of narrow thoughts, contrasted Sentiments, biggotted, enthusiastic or superstitious Principles civil political, philosophical, or ecclesiastical.” 17 Jefferson sought to mollify Adams. He never considered the views his old friend expressed as “your deliberate opinion.” Adams had “too much science” himself to have rejected the Enlightenment tout court. But he did not back down or allow Adams to claim the Enlightenment as a cultural resource. One of the questions you know on which our parties took different sides, was on the improvability of the human mind, in science, in ethics, in government etc. Those who advocated reformation of institutions, pari passy, with the progress of science, maintained that no definite limits could be assigned to that progress. The enemies of reform, on the other hand, denied improvement, and advocated steady 5 adherence to the principles, practices and institutions of our fathers, which they represented as the consummation of wisdom, and akme of excellence, beyond which the human mind could never advance. 18 Adams and his fellow Federalists, in rejecting the faith in progress, had become “enemies of reform” and turned their back on the politics of Enlightenment. It was this charge that drove Adams to pursue Jefferson in the realm of philosophy. At issue for the aging Yankee was his intellectual identity as a champion of a modern, Enlightened science of politics. Given the stakes involved, nothing less than the mantle of the Enlightenment, the wonder is that it took Adams so long to engage Jefferson. After all, it was fully eight years into their renewed correspondence that the Virginian finally expressed his deepest philosophical convictions. Undoubtedly part of the difficulty lay in establishing meaningful differences of opinion. Both had read largely the same canon and, not surprisingly, shared many views. Jefferson’s adulation of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke as the three great champions of the Enlightenment was shared wholeheartedly by Adams. When the Virginian expressed his belief in the Scottish moral sense philosophy and its utilitarian thrust, Adams promptly reported his perfect agreement with “all that You say, upon this subject.” 19 Nor did they differ in their critiques of received Christian dogma. Jefferson’s Unitarian contempt for the doctrine of the trinity – “It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticism that three are one” – found a hearty echo in Adams. 20 Not only did he reject the divinity of Christ, he also (a la Charles Chauncy) denied the dogma of eternal damnation as incompatible with “the infinite Benevolence, Wisdom and Power” of God. 21 Jefferson’s violent aversion to Plato and his ‘idealism’ as a source of ‘priestcraft’ was a source of great pleasure to his old friend precisely because “your reflections on him so perfectly harmonize with mine.” 22 Even on the topic where they did disagree, namely the phenomenon of natural aristocracy, their differences were surprisingly small. Both agreed that there was in fact such an elite of “virtue and talents” and that it was, theoretically at least, “the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society.” 23 Their only disagreement was that Adams rejected the distinction between this natural artistocracy and the artificial or “pseudo” one 6 Jefferson denounced on the grounds that both emerged from the natural process of social stratification and both represented a potential danger to popular political liberty. If Adams had a hard time airing his philosophical differences with Jefferson, then, it was in some part due to the fact that, on the surface at least, their opinions were just not that different. Adams, of course, was only marginally interested in such surface opinions. It was the depth of Jefferson’s core convictions that he sought to plumb, and his failures had less to do with shared postures than with his unfortunate choice of means. Simply put, Adams sought to engage Jefferson by provoking him into a philosophical fight. Knowing Jefferson’s distaste for Plato’s metaphysics, Adams tweaked his correspondent by comparing “the Logos of Plato” to “the Progress of the Mind of Concorcet” as well as “the Age of Reason of Tom Payne.” 24 When the Virginian contrasted the ‘noble savagery’ of Amerindians with the corruptions of England and France, Adams fired back with an anti-Rousseauian post script: “I would rather be the poorest man in France or England with sound health of Body and Mind, than the proudest King, Sachem or Warriour of any Tribe of Savages in America.” 25 A year later he tried to get a rise out of him by comparing “the subtle labours of Helvetius and Rousseau to demonstrate the natural Equality of Mankind” with the scholastic “sophistry” offered as demonstrations “of the Athanasian Creed, or Transubstantiation.” 26 Similarly, knowing that Jefferson reputedly shared the materialism of their mutual friend the late Unitarian Joseph Priestly, Adams pined that he could no longer ask the famed scientist “what matter is? and what Spirit is?” 27 Predictably, all of Adams’ efforts to prod and poke his interlocutor into philosophical dust-up failed. Ever conflict averse, Jefferson simply ignored these provocations and changed the subject. If not for a fortuitous inquiry, the two aged statesmen might never have aired their theoretical differences. That fortuitous inquiry occurred in the second half of 1816. Adams’ study of Priestly had brought him across the work of Charles Francois Dupuis, whose twelve volume Origine de tous les Cultes, ou la Religion Universelle (1795) he promptly purchased and began reading. When he asked Jefferson if he knew anything about the author and his work he received a spirited reply. 28 Jefferson had not actually read Du Puis’ massive magnus opus, but he had read a synopsis or “Analysis of his work by 7 Destutt-Tracy in 200 pages.” Antione Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, the famed founder of the philosophical school of ideology, was, in Jefferson’s estimation, “the ablest writer living on intellectual subjects” by which he meant “the operation of the understanding.” 29 His three volume Elemens de Ideologie, although admittedly “abstract” and abstruse, nonetheless “occupies exactly the ground of Locke’s work on the understanding” and Jefferson publicly heralded it as “a production of the first order in the science of our thinking faculty.” 30 Jefferson was equally enamored with Tracy’s two subsequent attempts to apply the doctrine of ideology to political matters, A Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1811) and A Treatise on Political Economy (1817). The former was “the most precious gift the present age has received” and “the most correct analysis of the principal of political associated which has yet been offered.” 31 The latter was “the best work on political economy which has ever appeared,” one whose “principles are so profound, so logically demonstrated and so briefly expressed that it must become the elementary book of the world for the science of political economy, as the other will be that of government.” 32 Indeed, so impressed was he with these works that he personally saw to their translation and publication in the United States and had them installed as “the elementary book of the political department” at the University of Virginia as well as William and Mary. 33 In fact, Jefferson’s curricular design for that university did not include a department of philosophy but rather one in “ideology” described as “the doctrine of thought.” 34 Far more than most scholars have recognized, Jefferson was a philosophical devotee of Tracy and his entire “ideological” project. Adams had struck philosophical paydirt. Jefferson had first met Tracy during his ambassadorial sojourn in Paris at the salon of Madame Helvetius in the nearby village of Auteuil. It was there that he also became acquainted with such future ideologues as the physician/philosopher Pierre Jean George Cabanis and the Comte de Volney (Constatin-Francois Chasseboeuf) whose Les Ruines, ou Meditations sur les Revolutions des Empires (1791) Jefferson translated. 35 In fact, Madame Helvetius’s salon was the seedbed from which the “ideological” circle would emerge, a group which included Pierre-Louis Ginguene, Pierre-Claude-Francois Daunou, Pierre-Laromiguiere and such fellow travelers as Pierre Samuel Du Pont De Nemours, the Abbe Sieyes, and the Marquis de Condorcet. 36 At the center of this group, 8 however, were Tracy and Cabanis, both of whom Jefferson befriended and both of whose works he would champion as the epitome of philosophical achievement. In fact, Jefferson described Cabanis’s two volume On the Relation Between the Physical and Moral Aspects of Man as “the most profound of all human compositions.” 37 What made the ideologues distinctive was that they claimed to derive their revolutionary liberal republican politics from their philosophical system in a largely deductive fashion. The moderation of these politics led to their persecution by Robespierre and his fellow Jacobins (Tracy himself narrowly escaped the guillotine), but in the period after Thermidor they came into their political own. Under the Directory they “assumed a leading role in the reconstruction of cultural and educational institutions” in France and participated in each of the coups of the 1790s, including that of Brumaire which elevated Napoleon Bonaparte to supreme power. 38 Once in power, however, Napoleon distanced himself from his philosophical supporters and eventually blamed them for the Jacobin terror. In 1812 he famously claimed that it was ideology, “that shadowy metaphysics which subtly searches for first causes on which to base the legislation of peoples” which had led to political chaos, fanaticism, and “the rule of bloodthirsty men.” 39 Indeed, it was Napoleon who first popularized the neologism “ideology” and fixed it with many of the pejorative connotations it would subsequently bear. As a disciple of ideology, Jefferson rejected the charge as absurd, informing Adams in 1816 that Bonaparte’s subsequent fall and disgrace demonstrated “that true wisdom does not lie in mere practice without principle.” 40 Jefferson’s mature politics were saturated in principles, and those principles rested on the philosophical foundation of ideology. Adams was not entirely unacquainted with ideology. He had read Napoleon’s speech of 1812 and had been charmed by it. 41 He also seems to have known Tracy (perhaps they met at Auteuil?) for he correctly surmised that he was “of that Family of Tracys with which the Marquis La Fayette is connected by intermarriages.” 42 It was only now, though, that he connected the two and learned that ideology was a real philosophical system. Indeed, he learned that it was the very philosophical system that Jefferson ascribed to. Moreover, as he would learn, it was a philosophical system with profound implications for politics and political speculation. Adams immediately immersed himself 9 in the work of Tracy. In ideology he would find the philosophical font of his painful split with his old friend and comrade. Coming to terms with ideology would reveal the true depth of their differences, particularly concerning the politics of Enlightenment and the role of a nascent social science in the formulation of constitutional and programmatic initiatives. He was in for a wild philosophical ride. The ideology of Tracy and Cabanis was the culmination of a long tradition of French philosophic rumination that traced its origins to John Locke’s pathbreaking An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In this tradition, however, Locke was not the founder of modern empiricism so much as the inspiration for “sensationism.” According to sensationalism, Locke’s great breakthrough that, as Cabanis put it, “all ideas come through the senses or are the product of the senses,” was important for the establishment of metaphysical materialism rather than what would subsequently be known as epistemology. 43 Like Gassendi before him him, Locke had advanced the “corpuscularian hypothesis” in metaphysics as “that which is thought to go farthest in an intelligible Explication of the Qualities of Bodies.” 44 He had refuted Cartesian dualism by both rejecting the authoritarian appeal to innate ideas as well as putting us in more direct contact with the material world. Descartes had argued that the senses merely exhibited the illusory “secondary” qualities of matter, but its “primary” or essential qualities like extension and divisibility were unperceived, thus leaving our relationship to the physical world mediated by our extra-sensual, unextended minds. Locke, by contrast, traced all “simple ideas,” including those of the primary qualities of matter, to sense perception, a faculty of mind which was entirely passive. 45 “Extension, solidity and mobility,” the essential properties of material objects, were directly perceived as simple ideas “by our senses,” especially touch. 46 Nor was such knowledge of the basic ontological properties of the material universe subject to doubt as Descartes had insisted since the simple ideas of perception were always “clear and distinct.” 47 Perhaps Jefferson put this sensationalist reading of Locke most succinctly in his letters to Adams. “I feel bodies which are not myself” he reported, “I call them matter.” Their changes in location “gives me motion,” their absences “void” or space, and thus “on the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.” 48 Indeed, as Jefferson twice reminded Adams, Locke had even gone so far down the materialist path as to deny 10 the immateriality of the mind by reducing it to the brain: “Mr. Locke, you know, and other materialists have charged with blasphemy the Spiritualists who have denied the Creator the power of endowing certain forms of matter with the faculty of thought.” 49 It was on the basis of this hard-shell materialist reading of the Essay that Jefferson claimed that ideology “occupies exactly the ground of Locke’s work on the understanding.” 50 If it was Locke who found, as Condorcet claimed, “the proper clew” to sensationism, then it was Etienne Bonnot, the Abbe Condillac and younger brother of the Abbe Raynal, who had, in Cabanis’s words, “developed, extended, and perfected it.” 51 A good friend of the Helvetius’s, his sensationism “pervaded the salon” of Madame Helvetius and it was there that Tracy and his close friend and collaborator Cabanis “began to imbibe” the thought of the master. 52 Condillac had ‘perfected’ Lockean sensationism by pushing it in a more reductive and deterministic direction. Although Locke had traced the origin of all ideas to the faculty of perception, they were not reducible to that source. Many of our simple ideas were the result of the faculty of reflection, an “internal sense” which, like the faculty of memory, was active rather than passive. 53 Thus where Locke had denied free will in moral psychology an element of volition seeped back into his philosophy of mind through the faculty of reflection and its operations of calculation and judgment. 54 Condillac improved on Locke by reducing all mental faculties to perception. In his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746) he argued that consciousness was merely the awareness of perception, and that attention was simply consciousness of perception passively “drawn by external objects.” Attention then fixed perceptions into memories in their order of occurrence, thus producing reminiscence and imagination which in turn gave rise to “contemplation” or reflection. 55 Finally, contemplation produced comparison and judgment, thus completing the circle of mental operations. Condillac’s subsequent Treatise on the Sensations (1754) illustrated his philosophy through the image of a statue that gradually had all his senses illuminated and was able to execute all of our cognitive tasks, none of which depend on chimerical innate faculties. He also extended his sensationism by showing that the passive and phenomenal experience of pleasure and pain that accompanied each sensation automatically generated desires which, when intensified, became passions. These passions served as the basis of our interests, the animating force behind all mental 11 activity. 56 “The different degrees of pleasure and pain are the law by which the germ of all we are is developed” and these ineluctable sensation “have produced all our faculties.” 57 Condillac was thus able to reduce both “understanding” and moral psychology directly to perception; “Judgment, reflexion, desires, passions, &c. are only sensations differently transformed.” 58 Condillac’s sensationism was also deeply deterministic: Since sensation itself produced the higher faculties as well as our animating passions and interests, the mind was a kind of mechanism that responded automatically to external stimuli, like a statue brought to life by perception. Not only do “all our cognition come from the senses,” but they, as well as our faculties, “are the effect of the pleasures and pains which accompany the impressions of the senses.” 59 Condillac’s sensationism resulted in an automatic mind generated by its perceptual interaction with a material universe. The next critical figure in the development of sensationism was Claude Adrien Helvetius. A close friend of Condillac, Helvetius is perhaps best known for his argument that, since all minds automatically work in the same fashion and are identically prompted by sensation, all men are fundamentally equal. Indeed, he devoted the first section of his A Treatise on Man to demonstrating that existing inequalities in mental abilities were solely the result of social inequalities. 60 But his greatest contribution was to explore the social and moral implications of sensationism. Society itself originated from the physical weakness of man which forced him to unite “to avoid the fury of the tyger and the lion.” As these men “multiplied,” their physical need for more food forced them to take up farming which required laws to regulate ownership. These laws in turn “strengthened the bands of a union that, founded on their wants, was the immediate effect of corporeal sensibility.” 61 In Helvetius’s hands, sensationism also produced a profoundly egoistic and “worldly” moral psychology. As with Condillac, pleasure and pain were the basic datum of moral experience, but for Helvetius the desire for pleasure and happiness invariably took the form of a love of power, “the common object of all our desires.” 62 Like Rochefoucauld, Helvetius saw this love of power behind all the moral vices like envy, avarice and ambition. 63 But the love of power was also the source of virtue. In an argument quite similar to that of Mandeville, Helvetius insisted that men pursued such socially useful traits as “prudence, courage, and charity” solely because they were 12 publicly rewarded with influence and esteem: “Now it is the love of consideration that man takes to be in him the love of virtue.” 64 Clearly no fan of Shaftesbury’s optimism – he is specifically described as “the greatest knave” – Helvetius rendered all apparent “benevolence to others” as the misinterpreted “effect of love for ourselves.” 65 Even the instinct of sympathy was the result of amour propre. The suffering of others triggers “the remembrance of pains to which men are subject” and consequently “it was for myself I was affected” by sympathy. 66 A wise moral legislator, Helvetius insisted, takes into account the moral selfishness of men which was the unavoidable consequence of our “corporeal sensibility” and, in proper Mandevillean fashion, affixes “esteem and riches, in a word, power” to “the practice of virtue” or socially useful behavior. 67 Through the efforts of Helvetius, sensationism had blossomed into a full blown account of moral and social philosophy. It was this sensationist tradition that Cabanis and Tracy drew on to erect the science of ideas they named “ideology.” Cabanis’s great contribution was to offer a physiological basis for the reductive and automatic model of the human mind that Condillac had proffered. A Montepellier trained physician, Cabanis inject the vitalism associated with that school of medicine into his account of human sensibility. The human nervous system reacted to the sense datum it received by a power of motion and motility that was in inherent in all matter as well as the human corporeal frame. Cabanis thus infused a dynamic activism into the metaphysical materialism of Condillac and Helvetius, producing a deterministic account that was organic rather than merely mechanical. 68 Thought was not merely the passive effect of sensation but rather the result of the organic, albeit unconscious, activity of the brain. Just as eating stimulated the stomach to release gastric juices to produce digestion, so sensation triggered the cerebrum to produce thought; “we conclude, with the same certainty” Cabanis insisted, “that the brain digests, as it were, the impression, i.e. that organically it makes the secretion of thought.” 69 Cabanis’s vitalism also entailed the rehabilitation of the doctrine of instinct as an internal source of ideation and motivation, one that allowed him to extend the reach of sensationist reductionism. 70 Pace Helvetius, moral sympathy was not simply amour propre (thought it was a considerable part of it) but was also the result of instinctual feeling triggered by “looks, physiognomic traits, the external movements” of 13 others that were part of “a cluster of direct organic influence that seems to occur independently of reflection.” 71 Moral sympathy was thus an unconscious and organic response to affective stimuli. Indeed, the great failing of Adam Smith’s treatment of moral sympathy was, according to Cabanis, “his lack of success in relating it to physical laws.” 72 Vitalism and organicism thus allowed Cabanis to offer a far richer and scientifically satisfying account of human sensibility and cognition while still retaining the reductionism of his sensationist forebears. Sensation was still “the source of all the ideas and all the habits that constitute man’s moral existence,” but now sensation included active instincts or internal senses as well as the passive external ones. 73 Cabanis’s works had a profound impact on his close friend and fellow ideologue Tracy. Tracy had learned from Cabanis that “ideology is only a part of zoology,” a claim which Jefferson repeated in 1824, adding for emphasis that “certainly the faculty of thought belongs to animal history.” 74 In fact, Jefferson insisted that the study of Tracy’s work “should be preceded by a mature study” of Cabanis two volume Reports. 75 Tracy combined the vitalism of Cabanis with Condillac’s focus on touch as the primary sense to argue that our experience of the material world was directly experienced with any conceptual mediation. As humans literally reached out and touched the material world they were imbued with immediate, primary sense datum of its reality, and these datum were, in keeping with Locke and his sensationist reading, “initially infallible.” 76 Beyond vouchsafing a materialistic monism, Tracy’s great achievement was to systematize the work of Cabanis and the sensationists into what Jefferson called a rigorous enchainment of ideas” that was imbued with “a cogency of logic which has never been exceeded in any work.” 77 Tracy reduced all intellectual activity to one of “four primordial faculties,” namely sensibility, recollection, judgment and will. 78 These faculties were not so much cognitive as sensitive and each drew on its more basic predecessor: “Sensibility is the faculty of sensing sensations; memory, that of sensing recollection; judging, that of sensing relationships; will that of sensing desires.” 79 The vital energy of the brain sensed that some experiences were “agreeable, and certain others disagreeable,” and it was this basic perception “which constitutes the faculty of willing.” 80 Far from free, this will was ineluctably determined by the strongest motive prompted by our various perceptions for, as Tracy insisted, “we cannot will to will.” 81 Lacking both free will and a power of 14 reflection, man was a mindless organic machine whose cognitive and moral life was triggered by sense datum and physiological instinct. Tracy’s ideology pushed metaphysical materialism to its ultimate reductive limits. Adams studied ideology with a combination of fascination and distaste. He found much to agree with and even admire in Tracy’s political economy, but he was left cold by its metaphysical underpinnings. Like his disciple Dupuis, Tracy followed the path of reductive materialism – “the eternity, infinity, and mechanism of the universe” – one which Adams was convinced “disembogues itself into the unfathomable gulph of liberty and necessity.” 82 More than anything, Adams was put off by the overwhelmingly metaphysical orientation of ideology. “I have a prejudice against what they call Metaphysicks” he confessed, “because they pretend to fathom deeper than the human line extends.” 83 But this prejudice was a matter of philosophic conviction rather than personal or religious pique, conviction rooted in his own Lockean tradition. For Adams, Locke was the founder of British empiricism rather than French sensationism, and as such had focused on essaying the limits of human understanding instead of limning the properties of being. And those limits were substantial. The only grounds of certainty lay in intuitively self-evident propositions or those which could be logically demonstrated from them. “Whatever comes short of one of these” Locke insisted, “is but Faith, or Opinion, but not Knowledge.” 84 Such knowledge clearly included axiomatic systems like mathematics, but it decidedly did not include metaphysics. Although Locke did grant that we could be certain of our phenomenal states or “simple ideas,” such knowledge “comes not only short of the reality of Things, but even of the extent of our Ideas” insofar as we have no way of knowing how those ideas are caused by external objects much less whether they are adequate representations of them. 85 Even science itself afforded no more than probable judgment which was sufficient for practical purposes but fell far short of certainty. 86 For Locke and his fellow empiricists, these epistemic doubts were a critical bulwark against the dangers of dogmatism and intolerance found in both the confessional politics of the previous centuries and its rationalist critics. Given our “mutual ignorance” Locke argued, there was no excuse to “treat others ill, as obstinate and perverse” for rejected our opinions 15 “when ‘tis more than probable, that we are no less obstinate in not embracing some of theirs.” 87 For Adams then, Locke was an empiricist whose central project, like that of the great Sextus Empiricus himself, was the establishment of a mitigated or academic skepticism. Whatever residual materialism he had proffered – he had, after all, advanced the corpuscular hypothesis – was purged from the tradition by Bishop George Berkeley. Adams had read Berkeley at college and was struck by the force of his critique of materialism. Berkeley had gone further than Locke in denying any correspondence between our impression and ideas on the one hand and the physical objects they were supposed to represent on the other. If all our ideas are derived from our sense impressions which are themselves phenomenal rather than material, then the “supposed originals” or material objects which gave rise to those ideas “are in themselves unknown,” making it thus “impossible to know how far our ideas resemble them, or whether they resemble them at all.” 88 In fact, the idea of matter itself was neither the result of direct experience or reducible to sense datum. Instead it was a posit, an imaginary substratum containing the various properties and qualities found in objects. Good nominalist that he was, Berkeley simply lopped off this unnecessary posit with Occam’s razor. 89 Berkeley had not disproved the existence of matter per se as Adams rightly insisted, but he had shown in contradiction to the sensationists “that we cannot prove that there is anything in the Universe but Spirit and Idea.” 90 He had also shown the utter futility of trying to reduce the experience of “sound or color in the mind” to a “motion in the nerves” or brain. 91 Berkeley’s purpose in advancing his immaterialism was to defend revealed religion against the perceived skeptical and materialist tendencies with Lockean empiricism. But the effect of his writing was simply to deepen that skepticism. The critical figure here was David Hume. Hume accepted Berkeley’s critique of materialism as conclusive and then turned it against its idealist antagonist. 92 “I desire those philosophers, who pretend that we have an idea of the substance of our minds to point out the impressions that produces it” Hume pointedly demanded, “and tell distinctly after what manner that impression operates, and from what object it is derived.” 93 The lesson Hume drew from Berkeley’s critique was exactly the same as Adams’s; the pursuit of 16 metaphysical knowledge was chimerical and “serves only to discover larger portions” of “our ignorance.” 94 In fact, Hume pushed the skepticism inherent in empiricism to its logical limits. All our reasoning “concerning cause and effect” were based on the belief in the uniformity of nature and the faith that the future will resemble the past. Yet there was no rational basis for these beliefs beyond mere custom and instinct. 95 The fact of constant conjunction between purported causes and effects afforded ample psychological impetus to attribute a causal connection, but this conviction was extra-rational. “When two Billiard Balls meet and repell each other” Adams explained to Jefferson, “we know nothing of the Cause, Contact or repulsion than we do of Spirit. We see nothing but motion in the Case, and what motion is, we know not.” 96 As with Locke, Hume’s thoroughgoing skepticism was intended to combat dogmatism within the republic of letters by imposing the need for greater intellectual modesty, caution, and diffidence. “The greater part of mankind are apt to be affirmative and dogmatical in their opinions” Hume observed, But could such dogmatical reasoners become sensible of the strange infirmities of human understanding, even in its most perfect state, and when most accurate and cautious in its determinations; such a reflection would naturally inspire them with more modesty and reserve, and diminish their fond opinion of themselves, and their prejudice against antagonists. … In general, there is a degree of doubt, and caution, and modesty, which, in all kinds of scrutiny and decision, out for ever to accompany a just reasoner. 97 Indeed, as Hume insisted, this modesty was every bit as necessary for the empiricist as others, for a “true skeptic will be diffident of his philosophical doubt as well as his philosophical convictions” 98 Given these doubts, Adams understandably saw metaphysical treatises like those of Tracy and Cabanis in the same light as “Romances and Novels.” 99 Faced with such imponderable speculations concerning that nature of reality Adams could only “drop into myself, and acknowledge myself to be a Fool,” unable to “see through, the immeasurable System” of the universe and unwilling “to dogmatize, on such subjects.” 100 Adams’s empiricist tradition did not culminate with Hume, however, but with his fellow Scot Dugald Stewart. Little known today, Stewart was a critical figure in what Henry May identified as America’s “didactic Enlightenment.” 101 Stewart had restrained 17 the excesses of Hume’s skepticism – excesses that were thought to lead to agnosticism if not downright atheism – by deploying Thomas Reid’s doctrine of common sense as a reliable, if not strictly logical, basis for everyday belief in causality as well as the existence of mind and matter. 102 Yet common sense afforded practical belief, not philosophic certainty. Like Hume, Stewart acknowledged that both mind and body were posited rather than directly experienced or demonstrated, and each had about the same philosophical evidence to support its existence. 103 Jefferson knew Stewart (they had met in London) and read him, as he had read Locke, as a sensationist and materialist. 104 When Adams praised Stewart, Jefferson replied that he considered him and Tracy “as the ablest Metaphysicians living,” men who like Cabanis had dared to ask “why may not the mode of action called thought, have been given to a material organ of peculiar structure” like the brain. 105 Adams fired back with a powerful retort. Stewart was no sanguine materialist but rather a dreary empiricist whose skeptical writings were both “melancholy” and “humiliating” because “they show us our ignorance, and the utmost limits to which the human understanding may hope to gain in this Inferior world.” 106 In fact, not only was Stewart skeptical about metaphysics, he was also a pointed critic of sensationism and ideology. Cabanis’s attempts to reduce perception to the transmission of impressions from nerve endings to the brain foundered on the lack of any credible account of how this actually happens, “nor does there seem to be any probability that we shall ever obtain satisfactory information” on this question. 107 Such facile materialisms ignored the vast gulf between the human condition and “that of any other inhabitants of this globe” that lacked consciousness and perceptual self-awareness. 108 Stewart devoted considerable space to refuting the sensationism of Condillac and his ideological disciples, but he offered “no apology” for so doing given “the present state of philosophy on the Continent” as well as “the growing popularity in this island, of some of his weakest and most exceptionable theories.” 109 The lesson to be drawn from modern Enlightenment philosophy for both Adams and Stewart was the cautious counsel of doubt and skepticism rather than the pugnacious and dogmatic cry of materialism. At first glance, the political implications of these two divergent philosophical traditions seem slight. Jefferson’s ideologues favored representative constitutional arrangements as well as a broadly liberal program of political economy. Closer 18 inspection, however, reveals a vast chasm between these traditions of political science and speculation. The metaphysical materialism of the ideologues, like that of their sensationist forebears, served as the foundation upon which they erected their theories of science and government. These theories were deduced from the unquestionable ontological truths of ideology in a rigorous, almost mathematical fashion. Empiricism offered no such foundation for political and social science. Instead, it pushed the inductive model of the natural sciences, drawing on comparative history to fashion probabilistic accounts of social and political reality. An even greater difference lay in the stakes involved. Because ideological political science was deduced from indubitable metaphysical premises, its truth was certain. That meant that its projected constitutional and economic strictures were perfect which in turn opened the prospect of the imminent secular chiliad of human perfectibility. Empirical social science, by contrast, could only lay claim to probability. While such practical wisdom might give rise to a progressive amelioration of the human condition, any talk of perfectibility seemed so much enthusiastic fanaticism. For Tracy, ideology was not simply the foundation for political science and economics but all human inquiry. Indeed, the very goal of formulating the truths of ideology was “to deduce from that knowledge the first principles of all the other branches of our knowledge.” 110 This was particularly important in the science of government for far too much previous work had been mired in irrelevant historical analysis. “Such a subject requires to be treated in the manner of a theory, rather than historically” Tracy insisted, and such a theory ought “establish a priori, the principles of a truly free, legal, and peaceable constitution.” 111 It was precisely this quality in Tracy’s work that Jefferson extolled to Adams; “all its principles are demonstrated with the severity of Euclid.” 112 This foundational deductive conceit was not unique to Tracy but had been central to the entire sensationist project. Condillac claimed that his metaphysics were the essential preparative “for the study of every other branch of human knowledge” and Helvetius argued that it was only when “we regard corporeal sensibility as the first principle of morality” that “its maxims cease to be contradictory” and its “axioms all linked together will bear the most rigorous demonstration.” 113 Condorcet, the most important political spokesman for sensationism before Tracy, put it most succinctly. 114 19 Any certain “knowledge of the rights of man” must be “deduced from this simple principle; that he is a being endowed with sensation, capable of reasoning upon and understanding his interests, and of acquiring moral ideas.” 115 These moral ideas arose from “analising [sic] the faculty of experiencing pleasure and pain” as did “those general principles which form the necessary and immutable laws of justice.” 116 The ideological deduction of social science form metaphysical first principles not only simplified the process of theorization, it also simplified the theories themselves. As Emmet Kennedy has shown, because the ideologues held that social struggles were reducible to the “movement and resistance and the general conflict of wills” they could be easily surmounted by a policy of laissez-faire which allowed individuals to engage in free exchanges since such exchanges were the very stuff of society and were an inherently “admirable transaction, in which two contracting parties always both gain.” 117 Tracy similarly jettisoned the cumbersome taxonomy of constitutions found in Aristotle, Polybius, and Montesquieu. There were essentially only two forms of government, those which were based on the legitimate foundation of the general will and those which were not. 118 Perhaps most striking of all was the abandonment of the ornate bric-a-brac of traditional constitutional doctrine. Mixed government, the separation of powers, and especially the system of check and balances were denounced by Tracy as “erroneous and indefensible.” 119 In their stead was a simple unicameral legislature bounded by the clearly established rights of man. Condorcet marveled at “how much more pure, accurate, and profound, are the principles upon which the constitution and laws for France have been formed, than those which directed the Americans.” The reason for this superiority was obvious. Abandoning the delusive guidance of history that had led the Americans astray in favor of the demonstrable rights of man, “the limits prescribed to political power have been put in the place of that specious balance which has so long been admired” by the statesmen of revolutionary France. 120 For Adams and his fellow empiricists, any attempt to deduce social science from metaphysical first principles was absurd. Given the “prevailing skepticism” concerning the “principles of metaphysical and moral philosophy,” Dugald Stewart argued instead for the application of “the method of induction” found in the natural sciences. 121 Particularly useful for political and social science was history which afforded ample data 20 for comparative analysis. “The records of wars, intrigues, factions, and revolutions” Hume claimed, “are so many collections of experiments.” It was by means of these experiments that “the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science.” 122 As C. Bradley Thompson has demonstrated, this Baconian, inductive approach to comparative history was an explicit methodological principle for Adams that informed all his major works. 123 It was the study of history that Adams believed demonstrated the need for a mixed and balanced constitution replete with checks and balances. And it was from history as well as close personal observation that he discerned the fabric of human nature. In large measure it was this methodological difference that informed Adams disagreement with Jefferson over the question of natural aristocracy. Jefferson’s distinction between the natural aristocracy of virtue of talents and the artificial variant found in Europe was deduced from the meritocratic principle of human excellence. When Adams insisted that “Education, Wealth, Strength, Beauty, Stature, Birth” and a host of other attributes were “talents, as well as Genius and Science and learning,” Jefferson could not help but suspect that his old friend had succumbed to the aristocratic prejudices of his Federalist affiliation. Jefferson could not have been more wrong. “You suppose a difference of Opinion between You and me” Adams wrote, “I can find none.” Adams abhorred “hereditary honours, Offices Emoluments established by Law” every bit as much as Jefferson. 124 The real difference lay in the fact that when Adams spoke of natural aristocracy he was not invoking a normative ideal. Instead he was referring to the natural and historical process of social stratification whereby people conferred status and influence on a small elite. “Beauty Wealth, Birth, Genius and Virtues” had routinely evoked social deference, and in fact “any of the three first, can at any time over bear any one or both of the two last.” Adams was defending this deference or justifying it. He was simply noting the regularity with which it occurred. Jefferson might dismiss this tendency as “Prejudice, Folly, Ignorance, Baseness, Slavery, Stupidity” or worse, “I will not contradict you.” But the simple fact of its occurrence “in natural, moral, political, and domestic History I cannot deny or dispute or question.” 125 Adams’s understanding of natural aristocracy drew on empirical observation and induction, Jefferson’s was based on abstract principle. 21 The most striking feature of deductive ideological social and political science was its claim to certainty. In fact, one of the chief implications of the whole sensationalist account of the mind automatically reacting to its impressions was its natural infallibility. “We are perfectly, completely, and necessarily sure of all the we actually feel” Tracy averred, and “none of our judgments, taken separately, can be erroneous, since, for the very reason that we see one idea in another, it must actually be there. 126 As Emmet Kennedy has put it, “in maintaining that thinking is sensing, and that sensing is inerrant, Tracy seemed to eliminate the possibility of error.” 127 Indeed the only source of fallibility was the ambiguity of language which left the precise signification of words indeterminate. Such error could be eradicated by analysis, literally breaking each word/idea into its constituent sensationist parts. 128 Once sensationist analysis had fixed “the meaning of words in a precise and invariable manner” Condillac was convinced “we might reason in metaphysics and morals with as great exactness as geometry.” 129 The reductive materialist analysis of language resulted in the formulation of certain principles which in turn produced, as Tracy put it, “opinions necessarily correct.” 130 That was why Jefferson was convinced that Tracy’s writings were “the most complete demolition of the Skeptical doctrines which I have ever met with.” 131 It was by “rejecting all organs of information therefore but my senses” he explained to Adams, that he was able to “rid myself of the Pyrrhonism with which an indulgence in speculations hyperphysical and antiphysical uselessly occupy the mind.” 132 The certainty of ideological social science dramatically raised the stakes of both political theory and practice. An infallible science of government could not help but produce a perfect constitution or what Tracy called “the democracy of enlightened reason” which would itself generate just laws. 133 According to Helvetius, such “sagacious laws” would invariably “produce the prodigy of universal felicity.” According to Condorcet, this perfect order “built upon the truths of the political sciences” would in turn “naturally dispose men to humanity, to benevolence, and to justice.” Just as advances in mathematics and physics had improved the mechanical arts, so too would the perfection of “the moral and political sciences” have “a similar influence upon the motives that direct our sentiments and actions.” 134 Not only was the “moral goodness of man” capable of “an indeterminate improvement,” but nature herself “has connected, by a 22 chain which cannot be broken, truth, happiness, and virtue.” 135 A perfect social science producing a flawless system of politics and laws thus opened the chiliastic prospect of “the infinite perfectibility of the human mind” and heart. 136 If we would but “return to reason” Cabanis urged, “we shall soon see a new universe burst forth.” 137 For Condorcet and his fellow ideologues, the perfection of deductive social science meant “that we are approaching the era of one of the great revolutions of the human race.” 138 Jefferson shared this faith in the spread of enlightenment and human perfectibility. As he explained to Adams in 1823, this irreversible process had begun with “the art of printing” which had illuminated the minds of Europe’s “middling classes.” As of his writing, this process had met with some setbacks and would require future sacrifices. In fact, he suspected that universal perfectibility and enlightenment would only come with “rivers of blood” and after “years of desolation.” Nonetheless, given the stakes involved, Jefferson was convinced that the price was none too high. “The object is worth rivers of blood, and years of desolation” he insisted. After all, “what inheritance so valuable can man leave to his posterity?” 139 For Adams and his fellow empiricists, such claims to certainty and perfectibility were illusory and foolhardy. Indeed, it was precisely these claims to certainty that Stewart found so objectionable in “Condillac and his successors” in the ideological movement. 140 What they failed to understand was that the demonstrative rigor and clarity of geometry and algebra was only possible because mathematics was an artificial language. As such, its terms could be set by explicitly and precisely because they had no empirical reference. It was this lack of existential implications that allowed mathematical problem to solved formally through the quasi-mechanical manipulation of symbols; “the solution of a problem may be reduced to something resembling the operation of a mill.” The referential apparatus of natural language, by contrast, was essentially ambiguous and could only be interpreted holistically. 141 One could produce a rigorous set of definitions for each political and ethical term by fiat and generate an axiomatic deductive system, but insofar as their sense was fixed without reference to common usage and experience “the terms true and false cannot be applied to them, at least in the sense in which they are applicable to propositions of facts.” 142 Such a project “could answer not other purpose than to display the ingenuity of the inventor.” 143 The entire ideological project was 23 mistaken in that it failed to distinguish between the properties of natural and artificial languages. If the quest for certainty was illusory, then the faith in human perfectibility was a species of utopian madness. To think that human nature could be fundamentally altered was to deny that the future will resemble the past, the very uniformity of nature that underlay all scientific and practical knowledge. It was precisely such erroneous fantasies that had produced the fanaticism of the French Revolution and served to justify the Jacobin reign of terror. Adams compared the French Revolutionaries to “Sailors flushed with recent pay” who filled with fanatical zeal “mounted on wild Horses, lashing and spurring, till they would kill the Horses and break their own Necks.” Filled with the spirit of enthusiasm, they had not only topped the spread of human progress but actually gave it “a retrograde course.” 144 “I leave those profound Phylosophers whose Sagacity perceives the Perfectibility of Humane Nature” wrote a sarcastic Adams, “to enjoy their transporting hopes.” That was of course “provided that they will not engage us in Crusades and French Revolutions, nor burn Us for doubting.” Adams own “spirit of Prophecy” could extend “no farther than, New England guesses.” 145 Adams did not, of course, deny the possibility or even reality of human progress. Like Jefferson, he too believed that the print revolution had inaugurated an epoch of general enlightenment which in turn had led to political and moral progress. But he also saw both limits and reverses to this progress. “Our hopes of sudden tranquility ought not to be too sanguine” he warned Jefferson. “Fanaticism and superstition will still be selfish, subtle, intriguing” and “will yet for a long time continue a Fermentation, which will excite alarms and require vigilance.” 146 The simple fact was that “the faculties of our understanding are not adequate to penetrate the Universe” and were thus incapable of ushering in a secular golden age. The lesson Adams drew from this skepticism was one of prudential caution and moderation. Rather than pursuing the holy grail of perfectibility, “let us do our duty which is, to do as we would be done by.” Such a simple goal “could not be difficult, if we honestly aim at it.” 147 It was precisely this prudential caution which informed his distaste for Dupuis’s atheistic critique of revealed religion. Like Hume, Adams recognized that, however fallacious, orthodox religion served a vital ethical function by buttressing the rewards and punishments for human action. 148 Just as 24 Bernard Mandeville had shown in Fable of the Bees that private vices could produce public benefits, so Adams insisted that irrational religious dogmas helped shore up the moral fabric of society. 149 “Without Religion this World would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite society” Adams urged. In case his old friend has missed his point he added “I mean Hell.” 150 Finally, what light do these philosophical disputes shed on the struggle for the mantle of Enlightenment between Adams and Jefferson? If nothing less, they show that Jefferson’s view of Adams as having abandoned that philosophic tradition is untenable. Unless we are prepared to read Locke, Hume, and Stewart out of the Enlightenment, we must place Adams securely by their side. A more plausible alternative would be to see them as representing distinct strains of Enlightenment. Jonathan Israel has recently argued that the reductive materialism of Baruch Spinoza represented the core principle of radical enlightenment, on quite similar to that of the sensationists and ideologues. 151 Jefferson would then be the spokesman for this pure, radical strain while Adams represents its diluted, moderate variant. Several fact, however, militate against such an interpretation. Spinoza’s materialism was mechanistic while the ideology of Cabanis and Tracy was organic and “distinctively biomedical.” 152 That mean that the latter had access to final causes which the former did not. This in turn led to that “direct linkage” between ideology and politics that Kennedy has shown “makes it clearly something closer to modern ideology” than academic philosophic speculation. 153 Indeed, the last great disciple of ideology, Maine de Biran, claimed that both Tracy and Cabanis believed their project would “change the face of the earth.” Biran recognized that, like the physiocrats, the ideologues constituted a sect with a shared “secular millennialist creed.” 154 Such millennialism was hardly enlightened. In fact, it produced exactly the same fanatical enthusiasm in politics that the Enlightenment had sought to vanquish. If anything, it was a harbinger of the coming age of Romanticism whose French philosophical leadership would be assumed by Biran. That is why Staum has found in Cabanis’s writing a “fascinating link between the Enlightenment ideals of science and universalism and the indecipherable, concrete self of the Romantics.” 155 Vitalism, utopian perfectibility, and political zealotry were to be the watchwords of the Romantic movement, and in this sense Jefferson and his cherished 25 ideologues were at least proto-Romantic. 156 If nothing else, Adams would have been safe in concluding that Jefferson was more than an ideologist. He was in fact a full-blown ideologue. 26 1 Of the 258 letters John Adams and Thomas Jefferson exchanged between 1812 and 1826, 57 dealt with matters of philosophy. 2 I have culled the following list from their retirement correspondence: Bacon, Berkeley, Bolingbroke, Buffon, Butler, Cabanis, Condorcet, Cudworth, D’Alembert, Descartes, De Tracy, D’Holbach, Diderot, Du Puis, Franklin, Gibbon, Godwin, Grimm, Grotius, Helvetius, Hobbes, Hume, Hutcheson, Leibniz, Locke, Mandeville, Newton, Priestly, Price, Quesnay, Raynal, Reid, Rochefoucault, Rousseau, Smith, Stewart, and Rousseau. 3 Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, March 14, 1820 and August 15, 1820, in The Adams- Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, ed. Lester J. Cappon (1959; reprint, Chapel Hill, N. C., 1987), 561-562, 567-569. 4 Jefferson wrote 90 of the 171 letters they exchanged before 1800 as opposed to a mere 49 of the 158 drafted in the years after 1812. 5 Benjamin Rush to Thomas Jefferson, February 17, 1812 in The Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Princeton, N. J., 1951), 2:1127. 6 Abigail Adams to Thomas Jefferson, June 6, 1785, Complete Correspondence, 28. 7 Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, January 30, 1787 and February 5, 1787, in The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776-1826, ed. James Morton Smith (New York, 1995), 1:462-463. 8 Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, January 1, 1797, ibid., 2:953. The draft to Adams, never sent, can found in ibid., 2:954. 9 On Jefferson’s relations with Callender, see Michael Durey, “With the Hammer of Truth:” James Thompson Callender and America’s Early National Heroes (Charlottesville, 1990). 10 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, July 15, 1813, Complete Correspondence, 358. 11 Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, September 9, 1793, Jefferson Papers, 24: 358 and John Adams to Benjamin Rush, January 25, 1806 in The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805-1813, ed. John A. Schutz and Douglas Adair (San Marino, Calif., 1966), 50. 27 12 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, July 13, 1813, Complete Correspondence, 354-355. 13 Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, January 11, 1816, ibid., 459. 14 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, June 10, ibid., 326-327. Jefferson had written the letter to Priestly in the spring of 1801 and was alluding to a response Adams had published during the Quasi-War to an address from a group of “Young men of the City of Philadelphia.” See John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, June 28, 1813, ibid., 338. 15 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, June 28, 1813, ibid., 340. 16 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, November 13, 1815, ibid., 456. 17 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, June 28, 1813, ibid., 340. 18 Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, June 15, 1813, ibid., 331-332. 19 Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 14, 1816, ibid., 492 and John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, November 4, 1816, ibid., 494. On Jefferson’s embrace of Scottish moral sense philosophy in relation to his Lockeanism, see Jean M. Yarbrough, Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People (Lawrence, Kansas, 1998), 29. 20 Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, August 22, 1813, Complete Correspondence, 368. 21 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, September 14, 1813, ibid., 373-4. INSERT CHAUNCY CITE HERE!! 22 Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, July 5, 1814, ibid., 432-3 and John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, July 16, 1814, ibid., 437. 23 Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 28, 1813, ibid., 388 and John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, November 15, 1813, ibid., 397. 24 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, June 28, 1812, ibid., 310. 25 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, February 3, 1812, ibid., 296. For the letter Adams responded to, see Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, January 21, 1812, ibid., 291. 26 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, July 13, 1813, ibid., 355. See also his letter comparing the communism of Plato’s Republic with that of Rousseau and Helvetius, John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, July 16, 1814, ibid., 437. 27 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, July 22, 1813, ibid., 363. 28 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, September 30, 1816, ibid., 489. Priestly had denounced Du Puis for reducing all religions to solar and zodiac cults. 28 29 Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 14, 1816, ibid., 491. For a similar assessment by Jefferson at roughly the same time, see Thomas Jefferson to Francis Gilmer, June 7, 1816, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York, 1905), 11: 534. 30 Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, January 22, 1817, ibid., 505-506 and Thomas Jefferson’s “Prospectus” to Destutt Tracy, A Treatise on Political Economy: To Which is Prefixed a Supplement to a Preceeding Work on the Understanding of Elements of Ideology: with an Analytical Table and an Introduction on the Faculty of the Will (Georgetown, D. C., 1817) in John Morris Dorsey, Psychology of Political Science, with Special Consideration for the Political Acumen of Destutt de Tracy (Detroit, 1973), v. 31 Thomas Jefferson to A. C. V. C. Destutt de Tracy, January 26, 1811, in Ford, Works, 11: 181 and Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell, January 5, 1815, ibid., 447. 32 Thomas Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, April 11, 1816, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lispcomb and Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington D.C., 1905), 19: 234 and Thomas Jefferson to the Marquis De Lafayette, May 17, 1816, ibid., 239. 33 Emmet Kennedy, A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of “Ideology” (Philadelphia, 1978), 231-232. On the adoption of Tracy’s work at William and Mary, see Thomas Jefferson to William Duane, January 22, 1813, in Liscomb and Bergh, Writings, 13: 213-214. 34 From “The Report of the Commissioners for the University of Virginia,” August 4, 1818 in Thomas Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York, 1984), 463-464. 35 William Howard Adams, The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson (New Haven, 2000), 77. 36 Martin S. Staum, Cabanis: Enlightenment Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution (Princeton, 1980), 18 and Kennedy, Destutt de Tracy, 32. 37 Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, July 10, 1812, Liscomb and Bergh, Jefferson Writings, 13: 177. 38 Staum, Cabanis, 150. 39 Quoted in Kennedy, Destutt de Tracy, 215. 40 Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 14 ,1816, Complete Correspondence, 491. 41 See John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, July 13, 1813, ibid., 354-355. 29 42 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, November 4, 1816, ibid., 493. 43 Pierre Jean George Cabanis, On the Relations Between the Physical and Moral Aspects of Man, ed., George Mora, trans. Margaret Duggan Smith, introductions by George Mora and Sergio Moravia (Baltimore, 1981), I:10. This context is critical to understanding Jefferson’s description of Locke as a “materialist” in his two metaphysical letters of 1820. See Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, March 14 and August, 15, 1820, Complete Correspondence, 562, 567-7. 44 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Niddich (New York, 1975), 547. 45 Locke famously claimed that perceived simple ideas “when offered to the mind, the Understanding can no more refuse to have, nor alter, when they are imprinted, nor blot them out, and make new ones it self, than a mirror can refuse, alter, or obliterate the Images or Ideas, which the Objects set before it, do therein produce.” Ibid., 118. 46 Ibid., 286, There was some variation in Locke’s treatment of the perception of the primary qualities of matter. In general he attributes it to touch as occasioned by “the resistance we find in Body” but elsewhere suggests this only produces the idea of “solidity” and it is by “reflecting” on this idea that we generate the ideas of space and extension. Ibid., 122, 172, 179-82. 47 Ibid., 119. 48 Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, August 15, 1820, Complete Correspondence, 567-9. 49 Thomas Jefferson, March 14, 1820, ibid., 562. Jefferson had dramatically exaggerated the materialism of Locke’s position: “I see no contraction in it, that the first eternal thinking Being should, if he pleased, give to certain Systems of created senseless matter, put together as he thinks fit, some degrees of sense, perception, and thought:…” Locke, Essay, 541. 50 Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, January 22, 1817, Complete Correspondence, 505-6. 51 M. de Condorcet, Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Minds (London, 1795), 240-1 and Cabanis, Relations, I:10. 52 Kennedy, Philosophe, 32 and Staum, Cabanis, 16-17. The ideologues saw themselves as “critical disciples of Condillac.” Staum, Cabanis, 4. 30 53 Locke, Essay, 105. 54 Ibid., 245, 263-7. 55 Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge; Being a Supplement to Mr. Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding, facsimile reproduction of the translation of Thomas Nugent (London, 1756), introduction by Robert G. Weyant (Delmar, N. Y., 1971), 27-39. 56 Condillac’s Treatise on the Sensations, trans. Geraldine Carr (London, 1930), 198, 200. 57 Ibid., 46. 58 Ibid., xxxi. 59 Ibid., 236-7. 60 M. Helvetius, A Treatise on Man: His Intellectual Faculties and his Education, trans. W. Hooper, M. D. (London, 1810), I:12-91. It was precisely this argument that Adams denounced as “sophistry.” John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, July 13 ,1813, Complete Correspondence, 355. 61 Helvetius, Treatise, I:134-5. 62 Ibid., I:289-90. 63 Ibid., I:312-17. 64 Ibid., I:318-19. 65 Ibid., II:10-12. 66 Ibid., II:16. 67 Ibid., I: 325. 68 See the introduction by Sergio Moravia to Cabanis, Relations, I: xxiii-xxv. On Cabanis’s medical training, see Staum, Cabanis. 69 Cabanis, Relations, 1: 116-117. 70 Ibid., 84-93. 71 Ibid., 2: 585, 601. 72 Ibid., 598. 73 Ibid., 1: 82, 91-101. 74 Tracy quoted in Staum, Cabanis, 173. Thomas Jefferson to Judge Augustus B. Woodward, March 24, 1824, Liscomb and Bergh, Writings, 16: 19. 31 75 Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, July 10, 1812, Liscomb and Bergh, Writings, 13: 177. 76 Kennedy, Philosophe, 54. 77 Thomas Jefferson’s “Prospectus” to Tracy, Treatise, p. iv. 78 Tracy, Treatise, 37. 79 Quoted in Kennedy, Philosophe, 112-113. 80 Tracy, Treatise, 44. 81 Antione Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, A Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws, trans. by Thomas Jefferson (Philadelphia, 1811, Reprint, New York, 1969), 96-97. Also see Tracy, Treatise, 70-71. 82 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, February 24, 1819, Complete Correspondence, 534- 535. 83 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, January 22, 1825, ibid., 607. 84 Locke, Essay, 536-537. 85 Ibid., 390, 539. Also see ibid., 541-545. 86 Ibid., 653. 87 Ibid., 660. 88 George Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, ed. Robert Merrihew Adams (Indianapolis, 1979), 79. This followed from his dictum that “an idea can be like nothing but another idea.” George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, ed. Kenneth Winkler (Indianapolis, 1982), 44. 89 Berkeley specifically denied that matter was necessary post for science: “there is not any phenomenon explained on that supposition, which may not as well be explained without it, as might easily be made to appear by an induction of particulars.” Berkelely, Treatise, 44. 90 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, May 12, 1820, Complete Correspondence, 563-564. 91 Berkeley, Dialogues, 44-45. 92 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed. (New York, 1989), 229. 93 Hume, Treatise, 233. 32 94 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed., Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis, 1977), 19. 95 Hume, Treatise, 183. 96 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, May 12, 1820, Complete Correspondence, 565. 97 Hume, Enquiry, 111. 98 Hume, Treatise, 273. 99 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, July 16, 1814, Complete Correspondence, 439. 100 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, September 15, 1813, ibid., 375-376. 101 Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976), 305-362. 102 Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, vol. I in Sir William Hamilton, ed., The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, vol. II (Boston, 1854; Reprint, Westmead, Eng., 1971), 17-19. 103 Ibid., 46-47. 104 See Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, August 14, 1820 in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. H. A. Washington, vol. VII (New York, 1854), 170. 105 Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, March 14, 1820, Complete Correspondence, 562. 106 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, May 12, 1820, ibid., 563. 107 Stewart, Elements, 1: 20-21. 108 Ibid., 37-38. 109 Ibid., 2: 360. 110 Tracy, Treatise, ix. 111 Tracy, Commentary, 108. 112 Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 14, 1816, Complete Corresondence, 491. 113 Condillac, Essay, 1 and Helvetius, Treatise, 2: 432. 114 On Condorcet’s role as political spokesman for the future ideologues, see Staum, Cabanis, 168-169. 115 Condorcet, Outlines, 231. 116 Ibid., 242. 117 Kennedy, Philosophe, 211 and Tracy, Treatise, 17. 118 Tracy, Commentary, 13-14. 33 119 Ibid., 117-118. 120 Condorcet, Outlines, 268-269. 121 Stewart, Elements, 1: 8. 122 Hume, Enquiry, 55. 123 C. Bradely Thompson, John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty (Lawrence, Ks., 1998), 107-125. 124 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, November 25, 1813, Complete Correspondence, 401. 125 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, September 2, 1813, Complete Correspondence, 371- 372. 126 Tracy, Treatise, 2-3. 127 Kennedy, Philosophe, 144. Also see ibid., 142. 128 Tracy, Treatise, 5. 129 Condillac, Essay, 2-3. Also see ibid., 134-135 and 311. 130 Tracy, Commentary, 133. 131 Quoted in Kennedy, Philosophe, 230. 132 Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, August 15, 1820, Complete Correspondence, 569. 133 Tracy, Commentary, 41-42. 134 Condorcet, Outlines, 19. 135 Ibid., 354-355. 136 Ibid., 257-258. 137 Cabanis, Relations, 1: 258-260. 138 Condorcet, Outlines, 19. 139 Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, September 4, 1823, Complete Correspondence, 596- 597. 140 Stewart, Elements, 2: 100-101. 141 Ibid., 2: 107. 142 Ibid., 2: 114-115. 143 Ibid., 2: 153. 144 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, July 15, 1813, Complete Correspondence, 357-358/ 34 145 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, February 2, 1816, ibid., 462. 146 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, July 16, 1814, ibid., 435. 147 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, January 22, 1825, ibid., 607. 148 See Hume, Enquiry, 90-102. 149 Adams made this analogy in John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, November 4, 1816, Complete Correspondence, 494. 150 John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, April 19, 1817, ibid., 509. 151 Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (New York, 2001). 152 Staum, Cabanis, 8. 153 Kennedy, Philosophe, 47-48. 154 Ibid., 100-101. 155 Staum, Cabanis, 176. 156 I have argued at length elsewhere for Jefferson as a proto-Romantic. See Darren Staloff, Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding (New York, 2005). Also see Andrew Burstein, The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist (Charlottesville, 1995).