Anthony Collins

From Philosopedia

Collins, Anthony (21 June 1676 O.S. - 13 December 1729 Old Style)

Collins, whom McCabe termed a deist but others have called a theist, was described by T. H. Huxley as a “Goliath of Freethinking.”

Born in Heston, England. Collins studied at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and was a close friend of John Locke. He moved in a circle of leading freethinkers, including John Toland and Matthew Tindal. "An Essay Concerning the Use of Reason" was published (anonymously) in 1707, along with a letter addressing immateriality and the soul. A debate in 1708 with Samuel Clarke resulted in the publication of four pamphlets by each participant.

In addition to writing his various other books, he wrote A Letter to Mr. Dodwell, arguing that it is conceivable that the soul may be material, and, secondly, that if the soul be immaterial it does not follow, as Clarke had contended, that it is immortal; Vindication of the Divine Attributes (1710); Priestcraft in Perfection (1709), in which he asserts that the clause "the Church... Faith" in the twentieth of the Thirty-nine Articles was inserted by fraud.

The 1713 book, A Discourse of Freethinking, was Collins' most influential work, helping to popularize the term "freethought." It occasioned a great outcry, for it argued that all belief must be based on free inquiry and that the use of reason would involve the abandonment of supernatural revelation. Deism was made in a manner fashionable because of the controversial book, because of its style and sincere outspokenness.

Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1717) won the praise of Voltaire. In philosophy, Others have claimed that it has not been excelled, at all events in its main outlines, as a statement of the determinist standpoint. One of his arguments, however, calls for special criticism - his assertion that it is self-evident that nothing that has a beginning can be without a cause is an unwarranted assumption of the very point at issue. He was attacked in an elaborate treatise by Samuel Clarke, in whose system the freedom of the will is made essential to religion and morality. During Clarke's lifetime, fearing perhaps to be branded as an enemy of religion and morality, Collins made no reply, but in 1729 he published an answer, entitled Liberty and Necessity. Collins takes a foremost place as a defender of Necessitarianism.

Although termed by Bentley an atheist, Collins once wrote, “Ignorance is the foundation of Atheism, and Freethinking the cure of it.” But he was attacked widely. Joseph Smith in The Unreasonableness of Deism, or, the Certainty of a Divine Revelation (1720) called deists in general “the Wicked and Unhappy men we have to deal with.”

The Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724) rejected the claim that Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecies. The work, with its serious arguments against prophecy and its advancement of the scientific principle, provoked more than 30 books and essays by religionists trying to counter it.

Collins, best described as a deist and materialist who opposed "priestcraft," at one time became county squire

Collins often engaged in controversy with the clergy, wrote against priestcraft, and debated with Dr. Samuel Clarke “about necessity and the moral nature of man,” stating the arguments against human freedom, observed A. C. Fraser, with “a logical force unsurpassed by any necessitarian.”

With respect to Collins’s controversy on “the soul,” T. H. Huxley said,

• I do not think anyone can read the letters which passed between Clarke and Collins without admitting that Collins, who writes with wonderful Power and closeness of reasoning, has by far the best of the argument, so far as the possible materiality of the soul goes; and that in this battle the Goliath of Freethinking overcame the champion of what was considered orthodoxy.

Berkeley, however, claimed that Collins had announced “that he was able to demonstrate the impossibility of God’s existence,” obviously the exaggeration of an opponent.

Amusingly, according to the Biographica Britannica,

• Notwithstanding all the reproaches cast upon Mr. Collins as an enemy to religion, impartiality obliges us to remark, what is said, and generally believed to be true, upon his death-bed he declared ‘That, as be had always endeavored, to the best of his abilities to serve his God, his King, and his country, so he was persuaded he was going to the place which God had designed for those who love him’: to which he added that ‘The Catholic religion is to love God, and to love man’; and he advised such as were about him to have a constant regard to these principles.

Posthumously, two of his essays were published, including an article challenging religious authority. Although Collins left England for a time when debate heated up after the publication of A Discourse of Freethinking, the courteous scholar was debated and taken most seriously by leading religionists and Anglicans. '

Upon Collins’s death, the Earl of Egmont, John Percival, wrote the following: “Of Collins Esq. deceased December 1729 . . . [he] is a Speculative Atheist and has been for many years, as he owned to Archibald Hutchinson Esq. who told it to Dr. Dodd M.D. and he to me.”

(See entries for Infidel and for Jonathan Swift.)

{BDF;CE; EU, David Berman; FFRF; FO; FUK; HAB; JM; JMR; RAT; RE}