Reprinted 1706 with a Preface.

A plea for greater emphasis on Mathematics in the university curriculum.  In 1704 Arbuthnot, who was a close friend of Pope, Swift, and Gay, became a member of the Royal Society and was one of Queen Anne’s physicians from 1705 until her death in 1714.  Arbuthnot cared for and brought “Wild Peter” to England; Peter (1725-85), suffering from autism, had been found wandering on all fours in the woods of Hameln in Hanover.  Swift and Defoe were among those who wrote about him, and Monboddo, in his Origin and Progress of Language (1773-92), mentioned Peter, whom he met in 1782, in the context of his evolution theory.  Ferguson also found occasion to write in An Essay on the History of Civil Society: “A wild man . . . caught in the woods, where he had always lived apart from his species, is a singular instance, not a specimen of any general character.”

A translation of Louis Moréri's Grand Dictionnaire historique (1674); supplementary volumes appeared in 1705 and 1721.

Published between 1701 and 1704. Anthony Collins wrote a long letter to John Locke attacking Norris's work.

Rowe's play remained popular throughout the eighteenth century. It was staged annually on 5 November, the date of William III’s landing in England and the beginning of the end for James II. Tamerlane stood in for William III, while the Ottoman Sultan Bajazet was identified as Louis XIV.

“From the beginning (1702) of Anne’s reign (Sacheverell) obtained great notoriety as a high church scourge of Whigs, Dissenters, and Latitudinarians, and was known as the author of a violent pamphlet entitled The Character of a Low Churchman in which he denounced any political or doctrinal concessions to Nonconformists. In December 1705 he preached before the University of Oxford a sermon on the perils among false brethren, in which he attacked Whigs, Dissenters, and moderate Tories. This sermon passed without public notice, but he reproduced the substance at St. Paul’s before the lord mayor on Nov. 5, 1709, assailing the Whig ministers as “wily Volpones,” using the nickname of the earl of Godolphin, lord treasurer. Godolphin, who had long been smarting under clearicl attacks, demanded satisfaction; the extremer members of the Whig junto wanted to end Tory sniping from the pulpit before the election due in 1710, and Sacheverell was impeached. The result was calamitous for the government. There was a deluge of pamphlets. The London mob rioted wildly in sympathy with Sacheverell. Dissenting meeting-houses were wrecked and troops were called out. The trail was a public spectacle. The preacher was condemned by only 69 votes to 52, and was sentenced merely to three years suspension from preaching. This was as good as a Tory victory. Sacheverell’s journeys to and fro were like royal progresses, and the enthusiasm encouraged Anne to dismiss Godolphin and the Whigs before the next election.

Sacheverell was despised even by those who took advantage of his notoriety, but when his sentence expired, he was presented (1713) by the queen to the valuable living of St. Andrew’s, Holbern. In 1716 he married a rich widow. He quarreled on various occasions with his parishioners. He died at Highgate on June 5, 1724, and was buried in St. Andrew’s. In 1747 the sexton of that church was imprisoned for stealing his lead coffin.” (Encyclopædia Britannica)

Sermons delivered in 1701–1702 in supported of revealed religion.

Steele’s first major publication which drew on his experience of the ‘irregularity’ of army life to convey the view that only the religious man can find greatness.

Steele’s first comedy, acted at Drury Lane with “more than expected success.”

An account of Swift’s own Whig principles and an appeal to both political parties for moderation.

An argument for the Hanoverian succession to the British throne, which brought Toland a place on an extraordinary embassy to Hanover, where he was received by the electress Sophia with favour.

2nd edition.

A defence of Locke that was published anonymously.

This pamphlet landed Defoe in the pillory when its ironic attack on the Dissenters was taken seriously. Defoe had sought to discredit the high-church Tories by writing from their point of view and reducing their arguments to absurdity. At the time the Tories were determined to prevent the practice, carried out by dissenters and low churchmen who were mainly Whigs, of ‘occassional conformity’; the practice, that is, of receiving the sacraments according to the rights of the Church of England, in order to qualify for public service, and then attending dissenters worship services. The pamphlet land Defoe in trouble with both dissenters and highchurchmen; he was arrested in May 1703 for seditious libel and indicted at the Old Bailey as “a seditious man and of a disordered mind, and a person of a bad name, reputation and conversation”. He received a harsh sentence: a fine of 200 marks, to stand three times in the pillory and to find sureties for his good behaviour for seven years. The pamphlet was the first work for which Defoe became widely known.

Published in 4 volumes in London. According to the preface, Henry Lee first compiled these notes as a help to his sons who were studying philosophy at university. “This preface gives an abstract of the main controversial points in Locke’s Essay, with the ground or reason of charging the ‘ideal principles’ with scepticism in general, and as they relate to natural and revealed religion in particular.” (Christophersen, p.53/4.Scarce. Attig 464)

A justification of the bishop’s decision in 1700 not to proceed against Toland for Christianity Not Mysterious and an avowal that the work was an indiscretion.

Published between 1703 and 1704.

The Sociable Enthusiast, published in 1703-4, was an early version of The Moralists, which appeared in 1709.

Contains the first descriptions of the fauna of Australia. After Dampier was made a captain in the Royal Navy he commanded the Roebuck to Australia.

Written while Defoe was awaiting trail for sedition, the Hymn helped to turn his punishment into something of a triumph, with a glorification of the pillory and the mob drinking to his health.

A reply to Edmund Calamy the younger in which Hoadly defended episcopal ordination and argued for a lax interpretation of the oaths and subscriptions required of the clergy. Edmund Calamy (1671-1732), a Nonconformist minister, was the author of the Account of the Ejected Ministers (1702).

Hoadly, bishop of Winchester, was the main clerical champion of whig principles in the state and of latitudinarian ideas in the church. He was a friend of Lady Sundon, one of Queen Caroline’s closet confidantes, and he was protected by the court of George II as he was by that of George I. According toEdward Gibbon, he was “the object of whig idolatry and tory abhorrence”. Hoadly became a strong defender of the Protestant succession and of individual liberty in both church and state.

Lahontan's work had an influence on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he described Indians as “not debauched by the Neighborhood of the Europeans, are strangers to the Measures of Meum and Tuum, and to all Laws, Judges, and Priests.”

One of the first sentimental comedies which only ran for six nights, being, claimed Steele, “damned for its piety.”

Heroic poem, written at the request of Lord Halifax, and celebrating Marlborough’ s victory at Blenheim.

The first of two sets of Boyle lectures Clarke gave in 1704 and 1705. They had a major influence on English 18^th century thought. In the Demonstration Clarke attempts to prove the existence of God by a method “as near mathematical as the nature of such discourse would allow”.

An attack on the French.

The Lexicon was the first dictionary in English of the arts and sciences.

Spurious attempt to create a new Formosan language.

Written mainly at Moor Park between 1696 and 1699, and published anonymously. The book gave rise to grave doubts concerning Swift’s religious orthodoxy, however, and it is thought that because Queen Anne was offended, Swift lost his chance for ecclesiastical preferment in England.

The work consists of three pieces: the Tale itself, a satire against “the numerous and gross corruptions in religion and learning”; the mock-heroic Battle of the Books; and the Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the the Spirit, directed against the manner of worship and preaching of the Dissenters.

In the Battle of the Books Swift defends Sir William Temple’s Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning (1690) which, in praise of “old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read”, had been severely attacked by William Wotton and Richard Bentley. Swift ridicules Wotton and Bentley in the famous episode of the bee and the spider, where the spider “feeding and engendering on itself . . . producing nothing at all, but Fly-bane and a Cobweb” is identified with the moderns; and the bee, which, by bringing home honey and wax, furnishes “Mankind with . . . Sweetness and Light” is equated with the ancients.

Swift published an edition of A Tale of a Tub in 1710 with many new notes, including several direct quotes for the “learned commentator” Wotton, an Apology to the Reader, as well as eight engravings. Ten editions of the work appeared during Swift’s lifetime.

Dedicated to the queen of Prussia, Sophia Charlotte of Hanover, a defence of pantheism containing an attack on Spinoza’s theory of matter and arguments later used by materialists. Holbach translated and published a French edition in 1768.

The second set of Boyle lectures Clarke gave in 1704 and 1705, in which he argues that the principles of morality are as certain as the propositions of mathematics.

Damaris Cudworth was the daughter of Ralph Cudworth, the Cambridge Platonist; in 1685 she married Sir Francis Masham, a landowner, with whom she had a son, Francis Cudworth Masham. Damaris Cudworth first met John Locke in 1682, probably at the home of their mutual friend, Edward Clarke, and they corresponded for some years during which she used the pen name “Philoclea”. Locke lived at her home, Oates in Essex, from 1691 until his death in 1704; he interested himself in the education of her son, and left half his estate to him. Locke praised her “inlightend and enlarged mind”, more learned than most male scholars. Occasional Thoughts ... and A Discourse Concerning the Love of God, (1696) were published anonymously, and both took issue with Mary Astell; both were attributed to Locke.

Published whilst Hickes was a Jacobite fugitive this study, in the comparative philosophy and the history of England, won Hickes a European reputation. Hickes was a nonjuring clergyman and a serious scholar in Hebrew, Anglo-Saxon and theology. He became chaplain to the king in 1681 and Dean of Worcester in 1683. He opposed both James II’s Declaration of Indulgence and Monmouth’s rising, and was unable to save the life of his nonconformist brother John, who had joined Monmouth. Hickes refused to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary and in 1691 was deprived of his deanery. After hiding in London he was sent to James II in France to discuss episcopal succession; on his return he was consecrated suffragan bishop of Thetford (1694).

An account of Law’s plans for the reform of the banking system.

A satire on the corruption of early eighteenth century England and reissued, with accompanying essays, in 1714 as The Fable of the Bees; or Private Vices, Public Benefits. Many bitter attacks on The Grumbling Hive, a moralising poem of 433 lines, caused Mandeville to produce several expositions, elaborations, and defenses of it, all of which grew over the years into The Fable of the Bees.

Reland attempted to dispell certain misconceptions about the nature of Islam.

A relatively sympathetic account of Islam.

Written with the help of Addison, Steele’s third play enjoyed moderate success.

Circulated clandestinely in manuscript form in the late seventeenth century, Stubbe offered a discussion of Islam that praised its notions of God as “great and noble.”

Published in 1705 or 1706, Toland argued that Islam demonstrated greater tolerance in comparison to the Roman Catholic Church.

Published between 1705 and 1707, a vulgar satire upon Whigs and the Low Church party.

An allegorical interpretation of scripture. In 1720-21 Woolston’s challenges to the clergy brought him into trouble, he was imprisoned between 1729 and 1733, and it was reported that his mind was disordered, and he lost his fellowship at Sidney Sussex.

A third edition which included a 15 page polemic against Swift’s A Tale of a Tub.

Basnage was a French Protestant theologian and historian who was exiled to Holland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). From 1715 he helped in the negotiations which lead to the treaty of the triple alliance of 1717.

Basnage was a close friend of Bayle. Like Bayle, Basnage sought to defend Spinoza. In writing the Histoire Basnage spoke to people who knew Spinoza, including a rabbi, probably Isaac Aboab, who had read out Spinoza’s excommunication sentence in 1656. An English translation appeared in 1708

A long political poem, in twelve books, attacking the divine right of kings.

The first collection of Locke’s works some of them previously unpublished; it appeared two years after his death and was published by his literary executors Anthony Collins and Sir Peter King.

On the Conduct of the Understanding was originally intended as a chapter of the Essay; it rapidly became one of his most popular pieces and appeared separately in several editions during the eighteenth century. The examination of Malebranche’s doctrine drew a reply from Leibniz, which is often reprinted in French editions of Locke’s works; a further discussion by Locke was published in Desmaizeaux’s collection in 1720, Remarks upon some of Mr. Norris’s Books, wherein he asserts P. Malebranche’s Opinion of our seeing all Things in God. The Fourth Letter for Toleration represents the last stage of a controversy with Jonas Proast of Queen’s College, Oxford; Locke was already dying when he began the draft, and it was found unfinished among his papers after his death. The New Method of a Common-Place-Book was originally written in French, and appeared in the July number of Le Clerc’s Bibliothéque Universelle et Historique de l’Anne M.D.C. LXXXVI.” All these posthumous works were included in the collected edition of Locke’s Works, 1714, and in all subsequent editions. (Attig 724.)

Samuel Clarke's Latin translation generated a new interest in vision and colour and it influenced descriptive writing thoughout the eighteenth century.

Rectoral address in which Noodt argued that according to natural law, the sovereign has absolutely no power with regard to the religion of his subjects.

A book which caused a storm. Tindal disputed whether the priests should possess any independent power over the church and defended, instead, a theory of state control.

In order to provide an outsider’s view of London, Brown imagines a companion from India being “dropped perpendicularly from the clouds, to find himself all on a sudden in the midst of this prodigious and noisy city”.

In addition to writing satires Brown translated works from Latin and French. He is best known for reputedly extemporaneous translation of Martial' s 33d epigram addressed Dr. John Fell, dean of Christ Church, Oxford: "I do not love thee, Dr. Fell, ... ." The translation prevented Brown's expulsion from Oxford.

Collins’s first major work, which like all his others, was published anonymously. In the Essay Collins demanded that all revelation should conform to man’s natural ideas of God.

In the Letter Collins argued that it is possible that the soul may be material and, secondly, that if the soul is immaterial it does not follow, as Samuel Clarke had contended, that it is immortal.

Crébillon greatest influence was Seneca, in the preface to the tragedy Atrée et Thyeste he states that his aim is to move the audience to pity through terror. In his day Crébillon Père was regarded as a rival to Voltaire. He was elected to the Academy in 1731.

Critique of public shows of piety over acts of inner piety.

Joshua Oldfield, Presbyterian dissenter, studied under Ralph Cudworth and Henry More; he later became friendly with Locke and Newton. He published various sermons and some theological works, but An Essay towards the Improvement of Reason is his most important work. “In this long, learned and densely argued book, Oldfield draws largely on the epistemologies of Bacon and Locke, defining reason theoretically as well as practically. Much of the work is given over to means and ways of improving reason as a faculty. For the most part, Oldfield recapitulates seventeenth century notions of mind, knowing, logic, and morality, but in the midst of all his empirical pronouncements one encounters assertions that seem decidedly out of place, viz. ‘Spirits are indivisible, self-moving, penetrative Beings. These do consciously, and certainly know, that they Think (in all or some of the mentioned ways) that they are pleas’d or delighted, pain’d or trouble, do themselves move, and move other Things, and therefore cannot doubt of their own Existence....’ Oldfield does not state how he came to have this knowledge of the way spirits behave.” (John Valdimir Price, author of this entry in the forthcoming Dictionary of Eighteenth Century British Philosophers.)

Published in 2 volumes in 1708 and 1714. The History was attack by Bishops Kennett, Nicolson and Burnet for popery. Collier published his replies in An Answer to Some Exceptions (1715) and Some Considerations on Dr. Kennet's . . . Letters (1717).

A poem to celebrate the Act of Union between Scotland and England (1707).

A popular work that was based on the use of original sources

The Papers destroyed the career of the popular astrologer John Partridge, who Swift wished to discredit because of his attacks on the clergy; Swift prophesied Partridge’s death and then described it with convincing detail.

Boyle lectures for 1707 which aimed to give a literal interpretation of the prophecies in the Bible.

Published posthumously. Bossuet was a defender of absolute monarchy. He claimed that “Human society has been destroyed and violated by the passions …. The first man separated himself from God, and as just punishment discord was put in his family, and Cain killed his brother Abel.” Human nature, corrupted by original sin, is incompatible with society. Government is necessary as “a brake on the passions.” A powerful ruler is required to overcome the confusion stemming from what Bossuet calls man's “unsociable” disposition.

A defence of religion directed against the work of John Toland.

According to Montesquieu, Cicero had made Greek ideas “available to all men, like reason itself”; he had been “the first of the Romans to take philosophy out of the hands of the scholars and detach it from the encumbrance of a foreign language”.

“What a pleasure it is to see him passing in review all the sects in his book De natura deorum, shaming all the philosophers and marking each prejudice with some stigma! Sometimes he battles against these monsters, sometimes he toys with philosophy. The champions he introduces destroy one another; one is confounded by a second, who finds himself beaten in his turn. All these systems fade, one before the other, and in the mind of the reader nothing remains but contempt for the philosophers and admiration for the critic.”

In the introduction, "Some Account of the Life & c. of Mr. William Shakespear", the first biography of Shakespeare, Rowe comments, "Shakespeare is indeed stored with a great many beauties, but they are in a heap of rubbish". Rowe was the first editor of Shakespeare and his six-volume edition, published by Jacob Tonson, was based largely on the 1685 Fourth Folio.

Thrice weekly paper, published between 12 April, 1709 and 2 January, 1711. In the dedication of the first collected volume (1712-15), Addison wrote: “The general purpose of this paper is to expose the false arts of life, to pull off the disguises of cunning, vanity, and affectation, and to recommend a general simplicity in our dress, our discourse , and our behaviour.” The aim of Addison and Steele was life not politics; as Addison once asked: “Is it not much better to be let into the knowledge of one’s self, than to hear what passes in Muscovy or Poland?”

The essays in the paper were dated from different coffeehouses, so that Steele, who wrote under the name “Issac Bickerstaff”, a name which had been made famous by Swift, could cover most aspects of fashionable life. Addison began to contribute with the 18^th number and wrote about 46 papers, while 36 were written jointly, with Steele writing the bulk of the 271 issues.

Published in Holland, where Toland was living at the time, an account of prodigies reported by the Roman historian Livy.

An argument for the Egyptian origin of the Jews.