Thomas Robert Malthus, naturalist of the mind

ABSTRACT

In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus’s infamous An Essay on the Principle of Population was published. The publication of the Essay is best remembered for Malthus’s principle – that population multiplies geometrically as opposed to subsistence increasing arithmetically. What is not well known, however, is that Malthus’s Essay also offered a sophisticated – and heterodox – theory of mind. Despite a recent revival in Malthusian scholarship, Malthus’s theory of mind has been largely forgotten. The present study attempts to address this neglected area within the literature, by evaluating Malthus’s contribution to the naturalization of the soul. I first situate Malthus’s theory of mind within the Essay’s broader naturalization project, examining Malthus’s role as naturalist; his views on humans as animals; and the Essay’s cosmology. This is followed by an exploration of the making and reception of the Essay, illustrating how readers widely interpreted Malthus’s theory of mind as a theory of naturalization. Finally, I reconstruct Malthus’s naturalized system of mind, discussing the mechanisms and dynamics involved in the operation of a materialist mind. In sum, I argue for the centrality of Malthus’s Essay in the larger naturalization movement, specifically as it pertains to the soul.

KEYWORDS:

• Malthus
• Darwin
• theory of mind
• materialism
• naturalization

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Rob Iliffe for his instruction, feedback, and encouragement at the start of this project. This paper has significantly benefitted from discussions held at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland; and the Longest Nineteenth Century Reading Group at the University of Cambridge. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the following readers: Anne and Jim Secord, Ian Hesketh, Ryan Walter, Michelle Pfeffer, Jennifer Rumbell, Paige Donaghy, Karolina Partyga, and the anonymous referees whose criticisms have greatly improved this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 On significance of anonymous publishing see James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Ian Hesketh, Victorian Jesus: J.R. Seeley, Religion, and the Cultural Significance of Anonymity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017).

2 Piers J. Hale, Political Decent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 44.

3 For the reception of Malthus’s ideas on evolutionary discourses in the nineteenth century see ibid.

4 For recent scholarship see Sergio Cremaschi, Utilitarianism and Malthus’ Virtue Ethics: Respectable, Virtuous and Happy (New York: Routledge, 2014); Robert J. Mayhew, Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014); Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Robert J. Mayhew, ed., New Perspectives on Malthus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); David Reisman, ‘Thomas Robert Malthus’, in Great Thinkers in Economics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

5 James Bonar, Malthus and His Work (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924 [1885]), p. 38.

6 See foreword by Austin Robinson in Thomas Robert Malthus, First Essay on Population 1798 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1966).

7 Secord, Victorian Sensation, p. 515.

8 See Peter Vorzimmer, ‘Darwin, Malthus, and the Theory of Natural Selection’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 30 (1969); Sandra Herbert, ‘Darwin, Malthus, and Selection’, Journal of the History of Biology, 4 (1971); Peter J. Bowler, ‘Malthus, Darwin, and the Concept of Struggle’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 37 (1976).

9 Samuel Hollander, for example, referred to these chapters as an ‘embarrassment’ and irrelevant to Malthus’s main thesis. He further stated that their exclusion from later editions had no consequence: Samuel Hollander, The Economics of Thomas Robert Malthus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 918–19.

10 See D. L. Lemahieu, ‘Malthus and the Theology of Scarcity’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 40 (1979); Anthony Michael C. Waterman, Revolution, Economics, and Religion: Christian Political Economy, 1798–1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 58–112; Hollander, pp. 917–48.

11 These contradictions have led Waterman to describe these chapters as being ‘unsatisfactory’, ‘vague’, ‘muddled’, ‘amateurish’, and a ‘failure’: Waterman, pp. 96–98.

12 [Thomas Robert Malthus], An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers, 1st ed (London: J. Johnson, 1798), p. iv.

13 Stephen Gaukroger, The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739–1841 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 287–92.

14 Samuel M. Levin, ‘Malthus and the Idea of Progress’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 27 (1966), 99.

15 [Malthus], p. 355.

16 See Robert M. Young, ‘Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Theory’, Past & Present (1969).

17 Catherine Gallagher, ‘The Body Versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew’, in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 83–106 (p. 87; 96).

18 Roy Porter, ‘The Malthusian Moment’, in Malthus, Medicine, & Morality: ‘Malthusianism’ after 1798, ed. by Brian Dolan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 57–72 (p. 61). Also see Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), pp. 429–32.

19 Young, ‘Malthus and the Evolutionists’, pp. 110–11.

20 Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions (London: Chapman & Hall, 1905), p. 232.

21 [Malthus], pp. 1–2.

22 James A. Secord, Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. viii.

23 For a detailed account of Malthus’s early education see Patricia James, Population Malthus: His Life and Times (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 16–34; Mayhew, pp. 49–74.

24 Wakefield was eventually charged with seditious libel and imprisoned for two years in 1798.

25 Porter, Flesh, p. 429.

26 Ibid., p. 350.

27 See marginalia in Malthus’s copy of R. Price and J. Priestley. (1775) A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity, in a Correspondence between Dr. Price and Dr. Priestley, MH.1.14. The Malthus Library, Jesus College Old Library, Cambridge.

28 Priestley tutored at Warrington for six years 1761–1767. For a detailed examination of Priestley’s materialism and his science of mind see Charles T. Wolfe and Falk Wunderlich, ‘Joseph Priestley: Materialism and the Science of the Mind. Foundations, Controversies, Reception’, Intellectual History Review, 30 (2020).

29 See marginalia in Malthus’s copy of W. Paley (1802). Natural Theology; or Evidences and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, p. 69, MB. 4.37, The Malthus Library, Jesus College Old Library, Cambridge.

30 [Malthus], p. 10 [emphasis added].

31 It was printed for Mundell & Son by Joseph Johnson in London.

32 Thomas Brown, Observations on the Zoonomia of Erasmus Darwin (Edinburgh: Mundell & Son, 1798), pp. 466–67.

33 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life (London: J. Johnson, 1794), pp. 503–5.

34 For radical evolutionary theories see Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Hale, Political Decent.

35 Young, ‘Malthus and the Evolutionists’, p. 111.

36 Gaukroger, The Natural and the Human, pp. 270–87.

37 Edward. J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 39.

38 Joyce E. Chaplin, Benjamin Franklin’s Political Arithmetic: A Materialist View of Humanity (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Libraries, 2006), p. 7.

39 There are obvious parallels between the work of Mandeville and Malthus, although Malthus would not have identified as a Mandevillian. A footnote in the sixth edition reads: ‘let me not be supposed to give the slightest sanction to the system of morals inculcated in the Fable of the Bees, a system which I consider as absolutely false, and directly contrary to the just definition of virtue. The great art of Dr. Mandeville consisted in misnomers’: Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population; or, a View of Its Past and Present on Human Happiness; with an Inquiry into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils Which It Occasions, 6th ed., Vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1826), p. 454.

40 [Malthus], p. 5.

41 Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population; or, a View of Its Past and Present on Human Happiness; with an Inquiry into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils Which It Occasions, 2nd ed. (London: J. Johnson, 1803), p. 559.

42 Thomas Robert Malthus, A Summary View of the Principle of Population (London: John Murray, 1830), p. 4 [emphasis added].

43 [Malthus], p. 168.

44 See Marquis de Condorcet, Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind (London: J. Johnson, 1795), pp. 366–71; William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence in General Virtue and Happiness. Vol. 2 (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1793), pp. 870–72.

45 William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 1 (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1930), p. 236.

46 Young, ‘Malthus and the Evolutionists’, p. 111.

47 Bashford and Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus, p. 84.

48 [Malthus], p. 350.

49 Ibid., p. 159.

50 Joyce E. Chaplin, ‘Benjamin Franklin’s Natural Philosophy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin, ed. by Carla Mulford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 63–76 (p. 67).

51 Fernando Vidal, The Sciences of the Soul: The Early Modern Origins of Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 151.

52 [Malthus], p. 12.

53 Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 11.

54 [Malthus], p. 239.

55 Ibid., p. 353; 63; 127.

56 Ibid., p. 244.

57 Ibid., p. 390.

58 Ibid., p. 391.

59 [Thomas Robert Malthus], ‘To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine’, Monthly Magazine, 7 (1799), 179.

60 Lemahieu, ‘Malthus and the Theology of Scarcity’, p. 470; Porter, Flesh, p. 359.

61 [Malthus], ‘To the Editor’, p. 179.

62 [Malthus], p. 247; n 390–91.

63 Bonar, Malthus and His Work, p. 367.

64 Bashford and Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus, pp. 67–86.

65 Cremaschi, Utilitarianism and Malthus’ Virtue Ethics, p. 76.

66 [Malthus], p. 207.

67 Ibid., p. 485.

68 The Protestant Episcopal Church, The Book of Common Prayer, and Administartion of Sacraments, and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church (New York Bible and Common Prayer Book Society, 1865), p. 370.

69 [Malthus], p. i.

70 Otter in Thomas Robert Malthus, The Principles of Political Economy: Considered with a View to Their Practical Application, 2nd ed. (New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1951), p. xxxviii.

71 [Malthus], p. 2.

72 Bonar, Malthus and His Work, p. 39.

73 Hesketh, Victorian Jesus, p. 10.

74 Johnson published the first (1798), second (1803), third (1806), and fourth (1807) edition of the Essay. The fifth (1817) and sixth (1826) edition was published by John Murray after Johnson’s death.

75 Johnson was charged with seditious libel following the publication of Malthus’s old tutor Wakefield’s treatise, which argued against the Bishop Richard Watson. See John Bugg, ‘How Radical Was Joseph Johnson and Why Does Radicalism Matter?’, Studies in Romaticism, 57 (2018).

76 Bonar, Malthus and His Work, pp. 2–3.

77 Thomas Robert Malthus, T. R. Malthus: The Unpublished Papers in the Collection of Kanto Gakuen University, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 73–6.

78 Anon., ‘An Essay on the Principle of Populations, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society’, The Analytic Review, or History of Literature, 28 (1798), 124.

79 Anon., ‘An Essay on the Prinicple of Population’, The British Critic, 17, 282.

80 Unus, ‘On the Views of Expediency Adopted by Mr. Malthus’, The Christian Observer, 4 (1805), 539.

81 [Malthus], p. 356n.

82 R. S. Woolhouse, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz: The Concept of Substance in Seventeenth-Century Metaphysics (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 14–27.

83 Ibid., pp. 28–53.

84 Bernard Mandeville, A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases, 2nd ed. (London: J. Tonson, 1730), pp. 50–51.

85 Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1971), p. 21.

86 John Stuart Mill, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill: The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill 1849-1895, Vol. 14–17 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), p. 286.

87 Condorcet, Outlines of an Historical View, p. 366; William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, Vol. 1 (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1793), p. 177; 299.

88 Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Vol. 1, p. 320.

89 Ibid., p. 339.

90 Ibid., p. 307.

91 Condorcet, Outlines of an Historical View, p. 110.

92 Charles Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1876), p. 116.

93 [Malthus], p. 228.

94 Ibid., p. 254.

95 Ibid., p. 354.

96 James, Population Malthus, p. 120.

97 See marginalia in Malthus’s copy of R. Price and J. Priestley (1775) A free discussion of the doctrines of materialism and philosophical necessity, in a correspondence between Dr. Price and Dr. Priestley, p. 23, MH.1.14, The Malthus Library, Jesus College Old Library, Cambridge.

98 [Malthus], p. 159.

99 Ibid., p. 355.

100 Ibid., p. 354.

101 Ibid., p. 353.

102 Ibid.

103 Ibid., pp. 375–95.

104 Ibid., p. 359.

105 There is no direct evidence that Malthus read Franklin’s Dissertation, although we know that he read Franklin’s Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces (1779), which was published by Joseph Johnson. Johnson held regular dinner parties for his authors, which Malthus attended, and he knew Priestley, who was good friends with Franklin. See Chaplin, Political Arithmetic, pp. 12–14; 41–43; Bashford and Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus, p. 64.

106 [Benjamin Franklin], A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (New York: The Facsimile Text Society, 1930 [1725]), p. 15.

107 Ibid.

108 Malthus was intimately acquainted with the work of Gay while studying at Cambridge. See Cremaschi, Utilitarianism and Malthus’ Virtue Ethics, p. xvii. Porter, Flesh, p. 349.

109 Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Vol. 2, p. 886; Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Vol. 1, p. 360.

110 Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet, Condorcet: Selected Writings (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1976), p. 5.

111 Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Vol. 2, p. 549.

112 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, Vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Bioren and Madan, 1796).

113 Benedict Spinoza, Spinoza: Complete Works. trans. Samual Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002), p. 680.

114 [Malthus], p. 145; 80.

115 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Vol. 2 (London: Dent, 1911), p. 127.

116 [Malthus], pp. 349–50.

117 Ibid., p. 216.

118 Ibid., pp. 262–63.

119 Ibid., p. 362.

120 Ibid., p. 377.

121 Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Vol. 2, p. 889.

122 John Rogers Commons, Institutional Economics: Its Place in Political Economy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934), p. 877.

123 Pierre Force, Self-Interest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 113.

124 [Malthus], pp. 254–55.

125 Ibid., p. 260.

126 Ibid., p. 347.

127 Bonar, Malthus and His Work, p. 331.

128 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 2nd ed., p. 558.

129 Bonar, Malthus and His Work, p. 323.

130 Cremaschi, Utilitarianism and Malthus’ Virtue Ethics, pp. 67–68.

131 Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Vol. 2, p. 809.

132 Ibid., p. 870.

133 Ibid., pp. 871–72.

134 Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Vol. 1, p. 352.

135 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 2nd ed., p. 559.

136 Ibid., p. 540.

137 [Malthus], pp. 212–13.

138 Ibid., pp. 356–57.

139 Ibid., p. 358.

140 Ibid., p. 360.

141 Robert Southey, ‘Malthus on the Principles of Population’, The Annual Review, and History of Literature, 2 (1803), 292.

142 Bowler, ‘Malthus, Darwin, and the Concept of Struggle’, p. 632.

143 Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, p. 889.

144 Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 20.

145 Paul-Henri Dietrich d’Holbach, Système De La Nature (London: 1771), p. 359.

146 [Malthus], p. 63.

147 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 2nd ed., p. 484.

148 Hirschman in Force, p. 109.

149 [Malthus], p. 65.

150 Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, p. 16.

151 Ibid., p. 18.

152 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 2nd ed., p. 497.

153 William Keir, A Summons of Wakening; or the Evil Tendency and Danger of Speculative Philosophy, Exemplified in Mr. Leslie’s Inquiry into the Nature of Heat, and Mr. Malthus’s Essay on Population, and in That Specualtive System of Common Law, Which Is at Present Administered in These Kingdoms (Hawick: Robert Strong, 1807), p. 84.

154 Michael Thomas Sadler, The Law of Population: A Treatise, in Six Books; in Disproof of the Superfecundity of Human Beings, and Developing the Real Principle of Their Increase (London: John Murray, 1830), p. 15.

155 [Malthus], ‘To the Editor’, p. 179.

156 Malthus, 6th ed., Vol. 2, p. 497.

157 Otter in Malthus, Political Economy, pp. li–lii.

158 [Malthus], pp. iv–v.

159 Alison Bashford, ‘Malthus and China’, The Historical Journal, 63 (2020), 5.

160 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 2nd ed., p. v.

161 Ibid.

162 Malthus, 6th ed., Vol. 2, p. 259.

163 Thomas Robert Malthus, T. R. Malthus: The Unpublished Papers in the Collection of Kanto Gakuen University, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 16.

164 Gaukroger, The Natural and the Human, p. 275.

165 See Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836-1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries, ed. Paul H. Barrett et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 566.