Special Collections
Book of the Month, February 2008
A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, to my Lord *****
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl Shaftesbury
London: J. Morphew, 1708
[S.L.] I [Shaftesbury – 1708]
The philosopher and writer Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) exerted an enormous influence on eighteenth-century thought. He drafted his anonymous Letter Concerning Enthusiasm during the autumn of 1707, although it was not published until spring 1708 – a fact for which the publisher apologises in his preface: “the Printer cou’d not obtain his Copy till very lately, or you had had it more in season”. Although only a short work – 84 octavo pages – it caused ripples, provoking several replies, such as Edward Fowler’s Reflections on a Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1709) and the anonymous Remarks upon the Letter to a Lord, Concerning Enthusiasm (1708), both longer than Shaftesbury’s original piece. Shaftesbury subsequently revised his text to form part of the first volume of his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711).
Enthusiasm in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was seen as a negative quality: the enthusiast was a creature of uncontrolled passions, capable of contrary extremities, extravagant and unsociable. The term was used above in a religious sense, against Protestant dissidents. When Shaftesbury was writing, a group of French prophets (“Camisards”) had appeared in London and attracted considerable attention through their extravagencies and follies. Against the desire in some quarters to suppress them forcibly, Shaftesbury maintained that the best attack was raillery and good humour: “Good humour is not only the best security against enthusiasm, but the best foundation of piety and true religion” (p. 35).
This copy was purchased in 1964 for the Sterling Library. While it may at first sight seem to stand out in a collection primarily of English belles lettres, it in fact joins several other first editions of significant works of non-fiction there, besides complementing a 1773 edition of Characteristicks owned by Sterling.
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