Bernard de Mandeville (16697-1733)

Swift would have been well content to be named with Arbuthnot, but to find Mandeville's works bracketed with his own would have given him a paroxysm of indignation. Yet they were really so closely allied in some essentials of thought that it is natural to regard them together. BERNARD DE MANDEVILLE was a misanthropical Dutch doctor settled in London, who attacked the optimism of Shaftesbury in a coarse but highly effective and readable volume called The Fable of the Bees. For twenty years after this he was a pariah of the English press, writing odious, vulgar, extremely intelligent books, in which he extended his paradoxical thesis that private vices are public benefits. Mandeville was a daring thinker, who permitted no traditional prejudice, no habit of decency, to interfere with the progression of his ideas. He was by far the ablest of the English deists, and though all the respectability of his time drew away from him, and, like the Grand Jury of Middlesex, voted him a public nuisance, he was not without his very distinct influence on the progress of English literature. He was an emancipator of thought, a rude and contemptuous critic of the conventions. In himself base and ugly-for all his writings reveal a gross individuality-the brute courage of Mandeville helped English speculation to slip from its fetters. His style is without elegance, but, what is strange in a foreigner, of a remarkable. homeliness and picturesque vigour.

Bernard de Mandeville (1669?-1733) was the son of a Dutch doctor, Michael de Mandeville, and was born at Dortrecht, as is supposed, in 1669. His father was a successful practitioner in Rotterdam, and Bernard was educated there; he left the Erasmus School for the University in the autumn of 1685. He took his degree as a physician at Leyden in 1691. We hear nothing more of him for fourteen years, when he appears in London, writing English with complete fluency, and publishing a poem, The Grumbling Hive, in which the nucleus of Mandeville's philosophy is already discovered. He must have come over to London to make his fortune, and he received a pension from certain Dutch merchants, probably in the spirit trade, for he is said to have been "hired by the distillers." With these obscure dealings in the liquor business he combined the practice of a doctor, but never achieved much success. In 1714 he republished. his poem, with a very full commentary, called An Inquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue, and notes; and styled the whole thing The Fabie of the Bees; or Private Vices Public Benefits. Little notice was taken, until, in 1723, what was practically a third edition appeared, much enlarged, with an essay on charity schools. The public now woke up to the insidious attacks of the Dutch doctor, and to his cynical system of utilitarian immorality. The Grand Jury of Middlesex presented the book as a nuisance, and it was attacked in the press and the pulpit. The Fable of the Bees enjoyed the compliment of refutation on all sides, and among those who devoted serious pains to the composition of replies were no less persons than Berkeley, Hutcheson, Law, and Dennis. Mandeville, in the zeal of disputation, said that he would destroy his book if it were proved to be immoral, and there was circulated a story to the effect that he did solemnly burn