जॉन टोलैंड

कृतियाँ

• 1696क्रिश्चियैनिटी नॉट मिस्टीरियस

  लॉक के ज्ञान-सिद्धांत के आधार पर तर्क देता है कि सुसमाचार में कुछ भी तर्क के विपरीत या उससे ऊपर नहीं है, और “रहस्य” पुरोहितों ने जोड़े; आयरिश संसद ने 1697 में पुस्तक जलाने का आदेश दिया।

• 1704सेरेना को पत्र

  पाँच पत्र, पहले तीन प्रशिया की सोफ़ी शार्लोट (“सेरेना”) को संबोधित, पूर्वाग्रहों और अमरता में विश्वास के उद्गम पर; अंतिम दो स्पिनोज़ा की गति को अव्याख्यायित छोड़ने के लिए आलोचना करते हैं और तर्क देते हैं कि गति पदार्थ के लिए अनिवार्य है।

मत

Toland is on the map as a leading freethinker of the early Enlightenment. “Christianity not Mysterious” applied the theory of knowledge of Locke’s “Essay” to religion: we can assent only to what we have clear ideas of, so nothing in the Gospel can be contrary to reason or above it, and the “mysteries” of Christianity were later additions by priests. Locke, whose Essay Bishop Stillingfleet had linked with the book, distanced himself from it, and Leibniz wrote critical notes on it. In “Letters to Serena” (1704) Toland traced prejudices and the belief in the immortality of the soul to education and priestcraft, and against Spinoza he argued that motion is not imparted to matter from outside but is essential to it – a step towards a materialist view of nature. He coined the word “pantheist” (1705) and in “Pantheisticon” (1720) described a society of pantheists with its own liturgy. He also wrote on the history of the biblical canon, on the Druids and, in “Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland” (1714), for full civic rights for Jews. Historians of the “radical Enlightenment” such as Margaret Jacob and Jonathan Israel see in him a link between Spinozism, republicanism and later materialism.

जीवन और संदर्भ

John Toland was born on 30 November 1670 on the Inishowen peninsula in County Donegal and was raised a Catholic; at sixteen he converted to Protestantism. He studied at Glasgow and Edinburgh and then at Leiden and Oxford. “Christianity not Mysterious” (1696) made him notorious: the Irish Parliament ordered the book to be burned in 1697, and he left Ireland. He lived by his pen as a writer, editor and Whig pamphleteer, edited works of Milton, James Harrington and Edmund Ludlow, and travelled on political and private missions to Hanover and Berlin, where he conversed with Sophia of Hanover, Sophie Charlotte of Prussia and Leibniz. In his last years he lived in poverty in Putney near London. He died there on 11 March 1722, having written his own epitaph.

अन्य प्रमुख कृतियाँ

• Christianity not Mysterious (1696)
• Amyntor (1699)
• Letters to Serena (1704)
• Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland (1714)
• Nazarenus (1718)
• Pantheisticon (1720)