350th Anniversary of the birth of Irish Philosopher, John Toland (1670-1722)

Recalling the Life of Irish Philosopher, John Toland (1670-1722)

– Some Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. John Toland –

John Toland (1670-1722)

The 350th anniversary of the birth of Irish rationalist philosopher, John Toland (1670-1722), which falls today, is being observed with the re-issue of Some Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. John Toland by Pierre des Maizeaux, first published in 1726.

Given the sparsity of biographical information about John Toland, the fact that this account of his life comes from the pen of a contemporary makes it all the more valuable to students of Toland, the early Enlightenment and of philosophy in general. The reader will gain a flavour for the times in which he lived, his character, the impression that he made on those who encountered him (both friends and adversaries) together with some helpful insight into the many polemics and controversies in which he frequently found himself embroiled. "If you would know more of him, search his writings," Toland said of himself and des Maizeaux's account provides every incentive to do just that.

Pierre des Maizeaux was a French Huguenot, living in exile in London at the time of writing. While his original purpose was simply to provide an overview of Toland’s immense literary output, it was "by greatest accident in the world, that I fell into the company of a Gentleman, who had been intimately acquainted with Mr. Toland, and who very generously communicated to me several particulars concerning him."

While John Toland left Ireland in 1698, never to return, following the fallout arising from the publication of Christianity not Mysterious, what we can glean from this short account of his life would suggest that he retained a certain connection to his Irish roots.

In a visit to Prague, in 1708, he met with Irish Franciscans, who gave testimony that "Mr. Toland was descended from an honourable, noble, and most ancient Family" contrary to some of the wilder and more sensational claims made by his detractors (who included Jonathan Swift, also born on this day but three years earlier, in 1667).

In 1719, Toland lobbied against a bill before parliament, "for the better securing the Dependency the Kingdom of Ireland, upon the Crown of Great Britain" arguing that it "shou’d not pass into a Law."

The History of the Druids is mentioned, as a project left unfinished at the time of Toland's death but which, des Maizeaux says, "I believe, he intended to pursue in good earnest", drawing upon his own knowledge of Irish manuscripts, as well as customs and traditions that he would have encountered directly during the first sixteen years of his life, growing up in "in the most northern Peninsula in Ireland … originally called Inis-Eogan, or Inis Eogain, but is now call’d Inisoen, or Enis-owen."

Some Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. John Toland by Pierre des Maizeaux is published by The Manuscript Publisher and available to buy online, in print and e-book editions.

A New Edition of Physic without Physicians by John Toland (first published in 1726)

Physic without Physicians by John Toland (1670-1722)

– first published in 1726, now re-issued in a new, modern edition –

Physic without Physicians
by John Toland (1670-1722)
as it first appeared in 1726

For the last four years of his life, John Toland lived in Putney, then a parish outside London, where he took lodgings with a carpenter, Edward Hinton. It is here that he wrote a number of his important works, including Pantheisticon. When he died on this day (11 March) in 1722, he left a legacy said to consist of not much more than "150 manuscripts piled high upon two stools."

Following his death, A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Toland, in two volumes, appeared in 1726. The collection is described as "first published from his original manuscripts with some memoirs of his life and writings."

These memoirs were written by Pierre des Maizeaux, an exiled French Huguenot living in London, who describes the last years of Toland’s life in the following terms:

Mr Toland had for above four years past liv’d at Putney, from whence he cou’d conveniently go to London and come back the same day; but he used to spend most part of the winter in London. Being in town about the middle of December, he found himself very ill; having been lingering for some time before. His appetite and strength fail’d him: and a certain Doctor, who was call’d to him made him a great deal worse, by bringing a continual vomiting and looseness upon him. However, he made a shift to return to Putney, where he grew better, and had some hopes of recovery. In this interval, he writ a Dissertation* to shew the uncertainty of Physic, and the danger of trusting our life to those who practise it: while by our own care and experience we might easily provide such medicines as are proper and necessary for us.

*That Dissertation, intitled Physic without Physicians is printed in this Collection, Vol. II. pag. 273

New edition, published by
The Manuscript Publisher

The arguments presented in Physic without Physicians invoke the ancient writings of Pliny the Elder and Hippocrates (of the latter, he says, "we may as successfully batter Quackery by his authority, as we do superstition by that of the Bible.") as well as some contemporaries, such as Herman Boerhaave and Richard Mead. Taken as a whole, it could be considered, not so much as a reflection upon medical knowledge in itself ("which is the gift of God and Nature") but rather, the limitation of its practitioners and counsels that ultimately, people should take responsibility for their own health.

As part of the John Toland Centenaries web project, Physic without Physicians by John Toland has been re-published and, for the first time, in its own edition (ISBN: 978-1-911442-23-3) but faithfully reproduced from the original. It is on sale now and available to buy online, in print and e-book editions.

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). Public Domain

Giordano Bruno, the Italian Dominican friar who was also a philosopher, mathematician, cosmologist, poet, pantheist and polymath, died on this day in 1600. His death was no ordinary one: he was burned at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori, having been found guilty by the Roman Inquisition on charges of denial of certain core Catholic doctrines.

A martyr for science, Bruno has never been accorded the kind of posthumous 'pardon' that has been extended to others, who were similarly persecuted by the Inquisition, such as Galileo Galilei. This is on the grounds, apparently, that Bruno's sentence did not arise out of any scientific conclusions that he reached but rather, a retribution for certain stances that he held that were deemed to be heretical.

In 1942, Cardinal Giovanni Mercati, archivist of the Vatican Secret Archives and Librarian of the Vatican Library from 1936 until his death in 1957, upon discovering a number of lost documents relating to Bruno's trial, concluded that the Church was perfectly justified in condemning him!

On 20 January 1600, Pope Clement VIII declared Bruno a heretic and the Inquisition issued a sentence of death. According to the correspondence of Gaspar Schopp of Breslau, he is said to have made a threatening gesture towards his judges and to have replied: Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam ("Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it") – Wikipedia

daryl_mitchell from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada / CC BY-SA

The writings and discourses of Giordano Bruno grew greatly in influence and stature in the years following his death. That this influence can be found in the works of John Toland (1670-1722) is easily attested to (see, for example Ricorso). It hardly needs asserting that Toland would have been drawn to Bruno, even if he himself had not narrowly escaped a similar fate, when copies of his Christianity not Mysterious were publicly burned by the common hangman in Dublin, in 1697, having been denounced in both the Irish and English parliaments.

Toland is considered as among the first to have come to regard Bruno as an atheist. An account by Toland of Bruno's De l'infinito, universo e mondi ('On the Infinite Universe and Worlds', first published in London in 1584) appears in A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Toland ..., published by Pierre des Maizeaux shortly after Toland's death in 1722. Here, Bruno developed the Copernican system and was the first to postulate that the stars were objects like our sun, which may themselves have exoplanets.

Today, monuments to Bruno stand in many places, including the site of his execution in Campo de' Fiori in Rome. Asteroids and a crater on the far side of the moon have been named in honour of his contributions to astronomy and cosmology.

Plan Your Epitaph Day (because it is your funeral, after all!)

Today is Plan Your Epitaph Day, for reasons, we must admit, that remain largely obscure but, some suggest that its purpose is to offer control freaks the opportunity to plan out what their gravestone is going to say! (Cute Calendar).

However, as Days of the Year observes, "your Epitaph is going to be that one thing that is remembered forever about you, even by those who never knew you. ... This day ... is the perfect day to set aside some time to figure out what you're going to have to say about yourself before you're gone."

John Toland, the Irish-born rationalist philosopher and freethinker was one who wrote his own epitaph, just a few days before his death on 11 March 1722. A Latin version (perhaps the original) has been digitised on the website of British History Online, who also note that "it was never inscribed on his tomb":

H. S. E. Johannes Tolandus, qui in Hiberniâ prope Deriam natus, in Scotiâ et Hiberniâ studuit, quod Oxonii quoque fecit adolescens; atque Germaniâ plus femel petitâ, virilem circa Londinumt ransegit ætatem: omnium literarum excultor, ac linguarum plus decem sciens: veritatis propugnator, libertatis assertor; nullius autem sectator aut cliens. Nec minis nec mails est inflexus, quin quam elegit viam perageret; utili honestum anteserens. Spiritus cum æthereo patre a quo prodiit olim, conjungitur; corpus item naturæ cedens in materno gremio reponitur. Ipse vero æternum est resurrecturus, at idem futurus Tolandus nunquam. Natus Nov. 30. Cætera ex scriptis pete.

Stephen H. Daniel, in his book John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind, provides an English-language version which reads:

Here Lyeth John Toland.
Who born near Derry in Ireland
Studyed young in Scotland and Holland
Which, growing riper, he did also in Oxford
And, having more than once seen Germany
Spent his Age of Manhood in, and about London.
He was an assertor of Liberty
A lover of all sorts of Learning
A speaker of Truth
But no mans follower, or dependant,
Nor could frowns, or fortune bend him
To decline from the ways he had chosen
His spirit is join'd with its aithereal father
From whom it originally proceeded,
His body yielding likewise to nature
Is laid again in the Lap of its Mother
But he's frequently to rise himself again,
Yet never to be the same Toland more.
Born y^e 30 of Novemb. 1670
Dy'd the 11^th of March 1722
If you would know more of him
Search his Writings

Daniel notes that "The British Museum manuscript of the epitaph is not in Toland's handwriting" and suggest that it may have been transcribed by Pierre des Maizeaux, a French Huguenot exile who was with Toland in his last days and, after his death, arranged for a collection of Toland's writings to be published in two volumes.

Whoever transcribed it, that person would have filled in the date of death but also, as Daniel further notes, incorrectly identified the year that Toland was born as 1674. To avoid confusion, Daniel changes it back to 1670 and this is how it appears above, as well as in his book.

Plan your own Epitaph day is a day for reflection on our own mortality, and thinking forward to what kind of legacy we want to leave behind for those who come after us. While we will live on in the minds of our family and friends, the story of who we are will only be told to strangers in our final message to the world, left engraved in the marble tablet of our headstone. – Days of the Year

References

• Days of the Year
• Cute Calendar
• John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind by Stephen H. Daniel

John Toland: his life and times

St Mary's Church, Putney.
The final resting place of John Toland.

Edwardx [CC BY-SA 3.0],
via Wikimedia Commons

John Toland, the celebrated Irish-born philosopher and freethinker, died on this day in 1722, at the relatively young age of 51 but, following a life that was not without controversy, incident and adventure.

His journey began on the remote, Gaelic-speaking peninsula of Inishowen, in Ireland's most northerly county of Donegal. He was educated at the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leiden and Oxford but, living Dublin when his first major work, an incendiary pamphlet that went by the title of Christianity not Mysterious, appeared in print in 1696. The pamphlet was first published anonymously however, Toland admitted authorship the following year.

The furore that enveloped led to three copies of the book being burned in Dublin by the public hangman, at the instigation of the Irish parliament. If Toland had not fled to England, where he found sanctuary among various radicals and reformers operating there, he would have been burned alive along with the copies.

Thereafter, he resided for the greater part of his life in England, mostly in and around London however, he was also a frequent visitor to the continent. He died in Putney, where he had taken lodgings with a carpenter, Edward Hinton, in 1718. It is here that he wrote most of his later works, including Pantheisticon.

Scan from the burial register of St Mary', Putney – see 15th March, 1721 (Julian calendar).
Our thanks to Thomas Brunkard for supplying this image.

Parish records from the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Putney tell us that his remains were "decently interred in the church-yard" on 13 March 1722. (see British History Online)

Elsewhere, it is mentioned that, at the time of his death, he left a legacy amounted to about 150 manuscripts, piled high on two chairs. Shortly after his death, a biography by Pierre des Maizeaux, an exiled French Huguenot writer, appeared along with a collection of his works that ran to two volumes.