Bernard De Mandeville

MANDEVILLE, BERNARD DE (167o-1733), English philosopher and satirist, was born at Dordrecht, where his father practised as a physician. On leaving the Erasmus school at Rotter dam he gave proof of his ability by an Oratio scholastica de medicines (1685), and at Leyden university in 1689 he main tained a thesis De brutorum operationibus, in which he advo cated the Cartesian theory of automatism among animals. In 1691 he took his medical degree, pronouncing an "inaugural dis putation," De chylosi vitiata. Afterwards he came to England "to learn the language," and succeeded so remarkably that many re fused to believe he was a foreigner. He died in January ( 19th or 21st) 1733-4 at Hackney.

The work by which he is known is the Fable of the Bees or Pri vate Vices made Public Benefits, published first in 1705 under the title of The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turn'd Honest (two hun dred doggerel couplets) and often reprinted, with additions. The book was primarily written as a political satire on the state of England in 1705, when the Tories were accusing Marlborough and the ministry of advocating the French War for personal reasons. The edition of 1723 was presented as a nuisance by the Grand Jury of Middlesex, was denounced in the London Journal by "Theophilus Philo-Britannus," and attacked by many writers, notably by Archibald Campbell (1691-1756) in his Aretelogia (published as his own by Alexander Innes in 1728; afterwards by Campbell, under his own name, in 1733, as Enquiry into the Orig inal of Moral Virtue). Berkeley attacked it in the second dialogue of the Alciphron (1732) and John Brown criticized him in his Essay upon Shaftesbury's Characteristics (1751).

Mandeville's main thesis is that the actions of men cannot be divided into lower and higher. The higher life of man is merely a fiction introduced by philosophers and rulers to simplify govern ment and the relations of society. It is the vices (i.e., the self

regarding actions of men) which alone, by means of inventions and the circulation of capital in connection with luxurious living, stimulate society into action and progress. Mandeville's ironical paradoxes are interesting mainly as a criticism of the "amiable" idealism of Shaftesbury, and in comparison with the serious ego istic systems of Hobbes and Helvetius. He may be said to have cleared the ground for the coming utilitarianism.

WORKS.

Typhon: a Burlesque Poem (1704) ; Aesop Dress'd, or a Collection of Fables writ in Familiar Verse (17o4); The Planter's Charity (1704) ; The Virgin Unmasked (1709, 1724, 1731, 1742), a work in which the coarser side of his nature is prominent; Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions (171I, 1715, 173o) admired by Johnson (Mandeville here protests against merely speculative therapeutics, and advances fanciful theories of his own about animal spirits in connection with "stomachic ferment": he shows a knowledge of Locke's methods, and an admiration for Sydenham) ; Free Thoughts on Religion (172o) ; A Conference about Whoring (1725) ; An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Execu tions at Tyburn (1725) ; The Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War (1732) ; A Letter to Dion occasioned by his book called Alciphron (1732). Other works attributed, probably wrongly, to him are A Modest Defence of Public Stews (1724) ; The World Unmasked (1736) and Zoologia medicinalis hibernica (1744).

See Hill's Boswell, iii. 291-293 ; L. Stephen's English Thought in the Eighteenth Century; A. Bain's Moral Science ; Windel band's History of Ethics (Eng. trans. Tufts) ; J. M. Robertson, Pioneer Humanists (1907) ; P. Sakmann, Bernard de Mandeville and die Bienenfabel-Controverse (Freiburg i/Br., 1897), and compare articles ETHICS, SHAFTESBURY, HOBBES.