Deism

PRIMARY SOURCES

Astell, Mary. Reflections upon Marriage: … To Which Is Added a Preface in Answer to Some Objections. London: Wilkin, 1706. Originally published in 1700, with an appendix added to this later edition.

Bentley, Richard. Remarks upon a Late Discourse of Free Thinking. Cambridge, U.K.: Printed for C. Crownfield, 1725.

Blount, Charles. The Oracles of Reason … In Several Letters to Mr. Hobbs and Other Persons of Eminent Quality and Learning. London, 1693.

Chubb, Thomas. A Discourse concerning Reason with Regard to Religion and Divine Reason. London, 1731.

Clarke, Samuel. A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God. London: James Knapton, 1705.

Collins, Anthony. A Discourse of Free Thinking. London, 1713.

——. A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion. London, 1724.

Diderot, Denis, and d'Alembert, Jean Le Rond. The Encyclopedia: Selections. Edited and translated by Stephen J. Gendzier. New York: Harper and Row, 1967.

Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography and Other Writings. Edited and with an introduction by Kenneth Silverman. Harmondsworth, U.K., and New York: Penguin Books, 1986.

Hume, David. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. London, 1779.

Leland, John. A View of the Principal Deistical Writers that Have Appeared in England in the Last and Present Century. London: B. Dod, 1754–1756.

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Nathan the Wise. Translated by Edward Kemp. London: Nick Hern, 2003.

Locke, John. The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures. London, 1695.

Paine, Thomas. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine. Collected and edited by Philip S. Foner, 2 vols. New York: Citadel Press, 1945.

Reimarus, Hermann Samuel. Reimarus, Fragments. Edited by Charles H. Talbert, translated by Ralph S. Fraser. Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985.

Samuel, Moses. Moses Mendelssohn: The First English Biography and Translations. Introduction by James Schmidt. Bristol, U.K.: Thoemmes Press, 2002.

Spinoza, Benedictus de. The Collected Works of Spinoza. Edited and translated by Edwin M. Curley. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Tindal, Matthew. Christianity as Old as the Creation; or The Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature. London, 1732.

Toland, John. Christianity Not Mysterious; or, A Treatise Showing, That There Is Nothing in the Gospel Contrary to Reason, Nor Above It, and That No Christian Doctrine Can Be Properly Call'd a Mystery. London, 1696.

——. Letters to Serena. London: Bernard Lintot, 1704.

——. Reasons for Naturalising the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland. London, 1714.

Voltaire, F. M. Letters concerning the English Nation. Translated by John Lockman. Dublin: George Faulkner, 1733.

Wollaston, William. The Religion of Nature Delineated. London, 1724.

Woolston, Thomas. Six Discourses on the Miracles of our Savior and Defences of His Discourses. New York: Garland, 1979.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Bedford, R. D. The Defence of Truth: Herbert of Cherbury and the Seventeenth Century. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1979. Comprehensive work on the "first English Deist."

Betts, C. J. Early Deism in France: From the So-called "Déistes" of Lyon (1564) to Voltaire's "Lettres philosophiques" (1734). Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984. The most detailed English study of French Deism; deals well with the complexities of the word's definition.

Bonoan, Raul. "The Enlightenment, Deism, and Rizal." Philippine Studies 40 (1992): 53–67.

Byrne, Peter. Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion: The Legacy of Deism. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Maintains that Deistic ideas about natural religion laid the groundwork for modern religious studies.

Champion, J. A. I. The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Deals mainly with anti-clericalism but shows, among other things, that even the most radical Deists had a religious impulse, which was filtered through notions of civil society.

Clark, William. "The Death of Metaphysics in Enlightened Prussia." In The Sciences in Enlightened Europe. Edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Dzwigala, Wanda. "Voltaire and the Polish Enlightenment: Religious Responses." Slavonic and East European Review 81 (2003): 70–87.

Hazard, Paul. The European Mind, 1680–1715. Translated by J. Lewis May. London: Hollis and Carter, 1953. A still-essential study of European intellectual history, with a chapter dedicated to Deism.

Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Should be called "Spinoza's Enlightenment." But in following Spinoza's influence of major and minor European freethinkers, this work is important.

Jacob, Margaret C. The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford Books, 2001. Excellent collection of documents on Enlightenment religion, prefaced by a clear and concise introduction.

——. The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1990. Puts forward an important and compelling argument about Newton's as well as Locke's concerns with social and political instability and therefore deals at length with rational religion.

——. The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans. London and Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1981. The original and still essential work that situates Deism among the ideas of the "radical Enlightenment"; excellent coverage of Toland and Freemasonry.

Lund, Roger D., ed. The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Important collection of essays related to Deism.

Marshall, John. John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994. The most engaging and rigorously contextualized recent work on Locke's politics and religion.

May, Henry Farnham. The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Still the standard work on this subject and good for further exploration of Deism in America.

Page, Anthony. John Jeeb and the Enlightenment Origins of British Radicalism. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Interesting study of the Cambridge cleric and London reformer.

Popkin, Richard H. The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Continues to be the standard work on Skepticism; frames well the causes of the skeptical crisis and contains a useful section on Herbert.

Porter, Roy. The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2000. Will be the unrivaled synthetic study of the British Enlightenment for years to come; brilliantly written with an excellent chapter on rational religion.

Roche, Daniel. France in the Enlightenment. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Provides essential background for understanding Deism in France.

Sullivan, Robert. John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. Good on the slipperiness of the definition of "Deism."

Sullivan, Roger J. Immanuel Kant's Moral Theory. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989. A lucid interpretive guide through Kant's theories of religion.