Alderman—Bibliographical Evidence of Shaftesbury. 59 
esteemed the head of the school of sentimental philosophy. Of late 
years he has been as much depreciated as he was before extolled. ’ 
Although it is not at present the primary purpose to examine 
definitely that host of friendly and unfriendly essays of which 
the Characteristics was provocative, it must be borne in mind 
continually that they do attest eloquently to the fact that Shaftes¬ 
bury had entered into the philosophical and theological conscious¬ 
ness of his own century, and that he was generally regarded as 
the most typical representative of a certain body of ideas, variously 
thought of as being wholesome or pernicious. It matters not, there¬ 
fore, whether a writer champions, extenuates, or assails our author, 
his manner, or his doctrines; all attitudes substantiate the fact 
that Shaftesbury was to the people of his age a figure of no incon¬ 
siderable prominence. 
Furthermore, it should be noted that, although many of the 
tenets of Shaftesbury are actually traceable to former sources, 
he is, for all practical purposes, generally regarded as their 
originator. It was he who gave them their most brilliant state¬ 
ment, and it was he, therefore, more than any one else, who was 
responsible for their vogue. It was with Shaftesbury himself, 
and not with his intellectual progenitors, that such prominent lit¬ 
erary, philosophical, and theological writers as Mandeville, Butler, 
Berkeley, and Hutcheson were concerned. The frequency of his 
name in titles, and the direct and indirect references to him in 
poems, essays, novels, and controversial literature show how inti¬ 
mately and inseparably he was connected in the general conscious¬ 
ness with the inception and propagation of the ideas that stand 
to his credit or discredit. 
This close association of the name of Shaftesbury with a large 
body of sentimental and optimistic ideas, and his indubitable 
prominence in several of the important intellectual wars of the 
century, lead one inevitably to question the validity of that form 
of criticism that has been all too religious in its attempt to trace 
to foreign sources all that is bad and much that is good in English 
thought and literature. Such a critic as Professor Babbitt sees 
immediately that ^‘Considered purely as an initiator Shaftesbury 
is probably more important than Rousseau.’’^ But even a super¬ 
ficial examination of the writings of the century enforces the fact 
that he was more than initiator; he was a sincere and vigorous 
® Walpole’s Royal and Noble Authors, 5 vols., London, 1806, IV, 55. 
Rousseau and Romanticism, p, 44. 
