The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Summary: Sorley - Lord Herbert of Cherbury
Professor S., after a discriminative account of the life and personality of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, proceeds to a notice of the works and especially the philosophy of the same. It is on his philosophical works that Lord Herbert's true title to fame rests. He belonged to the speculative and not to the empirical philosophers. His point of view is closely allied to that of Descartes, by whom his work was much appreciated. Such merit as belongs to priority of time must be allowed to Herbert. Herbert did not start, as Descartes did, with the sole impregnable certainty of self-consciousness. Rather he stumbled across it by the way, without recognizing its supreme importance. It is not the testimony of consciousness, so much as the witness of common consent, which he makes the criterion of truth. The Cartesian principle may gather within itself and explain the whole scope and development of experience. That of Herbert, on the contrary, is liable to have its contents diminished by every extension of our information. Had he more fully investigated the nature and conditions of what he calls the faculty of natural instinct, he might have reached a profounder doctrine and have, to some extent, anticipated Descartes. But he was carried away by the false idea which vitiated so much of the common-sense philosophy of the next two centuries, that a fact is explained if we only refer it to some supposed mental faculty, and give that faculty a name. Professor S. next shows how the cardinal points of English Deism are to be found in Herbert. Herbert is a precursor, then, of the abstract form of rationalism which was prevalent in the last century. But the method which he and the rationalists used — the method of attaining truth by the attenuation and sifting of common belief — however specious an air it has about it, is not really open to us; it has played out its game. There are no truths which can stand the test of universal consent. The truth is concrete and many-sided, the product of a long and continuous development, to which every race brings something and in which every age has a share. Herbert is the spiritual father of all those who accept things as true by reason of common consent and the belief of people in general.