Eighteenth-Century Thought completed!

Finished listening to Stephen today.  The second volume ends with a very boring narrative of development in which everything—Thompson's nature poetry and the evangelical revival's interest in feeling—are measured in their relation to the rise of Romanticism.  For Stephen, prefiguring Wordsworth is good, and Pope is very bad.  I don't really understand why Stephen has it in for Pope so badly, but he finds him boring and intellectually unsound.  Furthermore, he sets up his versions of good and bad in terms of a gender politics so irritating that I could only get through the end of the book by knitting a sweater to take my mind of my annoyance.  What Stephen likes is manly and vigorous; what he doesn't like is effete, by which I think he means gay—I suppose procreation is important to his system of the-baby-of-the-eighteenth-century-is-nineteenth-century-Romanticism...  Urgh.  Anyway, reading this much of Stephen's obsession with which philosopher has the biggest penis in the eighteenth century has made me want to punch him in the mouth.  EVERYONE he writes about for 900 pages (except some disparaging references to Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and a couple paragraphs on Edward Gibbon's aunt) is a MAN—so his ranking of them by their masculinity is particularly ridiculous.  In a context where (at least for Stephen) women don't count as part of the discussion, the praising of manly arguments shows a complete lack of awareness of the limits of his inquiry.  (And they're mostly THEOLOGIANS he's talking about, too, for heaven's sake.  Really?  He thinks "masculinity" is a useful category in talking about a century's worth of silly arguments about whether certain Christian miracles existed and if they didn't exist whether God still does in the way the Bible writes about God???  But Stephen doesn't get this irony—instead, he insists on praising Locke for the machismo of his arguments.)  

(John Locke: THE Man, according to Leslie Stephen)

What irritates me more, though, is the fact that he never explains what "masculine prose" and a "vigorous argument" actually look like, so that masculinity becomes whatever you like, and what was supposed to be a book about eighteenth-century thought turns into a not-so-covert praise of this sort of amorphous masculinity that he loves.  

History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Chapter One

Leslie Stephen claims he wanted to write about religious thought in eighteenth-century England, so he wrote this book.  (The Preface keeps going on about the "deist controversy," which Wikipedia thinks is an empirical thing about how you don't have to believe in God because you can already see God everywhere in the vibrating strings of the clavichords of your eyes that perceive the colors of the universe that is modeled after God.  Something.)  "Further," he notes, 

I have tried to indicate the application of the principles accepted in philosophy and theology to moral and political questions, and their reflection in the imaginative literature of the time.  In the chapter upon political theories, I have tried to keep as far as possible from the province of political or social history; and the last chapter is of necessity little more than a collection of hints, which could not have been worked out in detail without expanding the book beyond all permissible limits and trespassing upon the province of literary criticism.  The book, as it is, has assumed such dimensions that I have been unable to describe it satisfactorily by any other than the perhaps too ambitious title which it bears.  (1876 Putnam, volume 1, vii)

He seems interested in writing this history—at least, in what I've read so far—as a story of improvement.  Very Victorian.  Old ideas get replaced by new, better ones, because the purpose of thinking is to get to better and more complete Truths.  (He then complicates this idea, though, by talking about the intense cultural nostalgia he keeps finding in the period for older forms of thinking, and how new forms tend to be actually quite conservative: the idea "hell doesn't exist," for example, prompts the actually conservative 'new' conclusion, "so morality doesn't exist either," because that conclusion is still working in a framework in which morality is dependent on the threat of hell.)  One quaint passage: 

Old conceptions are preserved to us in the very structure of language; the mass of mankind still preserves its childish imaginations; and every one of us has repeated on a small scale the history of the race.  We start as infants with fetish worship; we consider our nursery to be the center of the universe; and learn but slowly and with difficulty to conform our imaginative constructions to scientific truths.  It is no wonder, then, if the belief, even of cultivated minds, is often a heterogeneous mixture of elements representing various stages of thought; whilst in different social strata we may find specimens of opinions derived from every age of mankind.  (Vol 1, I.6, page 5)

Then he marches though some backgrounds on eighteenth-century philosophy: there's a short bit on Descartes, then what Locke quarreled with in Descartes, then Hume and Berkeley and Reid and crazy Lord Monboddo, who "tries to show that all the higher knowledge originated in Egypt; and, most of all, he believes in the humanity of the Ouran-Outang—that interesting animal being, in his eyes, the representative of man in a state of nature when he possessed an intellect in capacity, but not in energy or actuality" (1.IV.68, p.69).  Whatever.