page_title: Deism
section_title: Herbert of Cherbury and early English deism
hierarchical_section_title: Deism / Enlightenment deism / Herbert of Cherbury and early English deism
caption_attribution_description: Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury
context_page_description: Deism is the philosophical position that rejects revelation as a source of religious knowledge and asserts that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to establish the existence of a Supreme Being or creator of the universe.
  At least as far back as Thomas Aquinas, Christian thought has recognized two sources of knowledge of God: revelation and "natural reason". The study of the truths revealed by reason is called natural theology. During the Age of Enlightenment, especially in Britain and France, philosophers began to reject revelation as a source of knowledge and to appeal only to truths that they felt could be established by reason alone. Such philosophers were called "deists" and the philosophical position that they advocated is called "deism".
  Deism as a distinct intellectual movement declined toward the end of the 18th century. Some of its tenets continued to live on as part of other intellectual movements, like Unitarianism, and it continues to have advocates today.
context_section_description: The first major statement of deism in English is Lord Herbert of Cherbury's book De Veritate (1624).  Herbert, like his contemporary Descartes, searched for the foundations of knowledge. The first two-thirds of his book De Veritate (On Truth, as It Is Distinguished from Revelation, the Probable, the Possible, and the False) are devoted to an exposition of Herbert's theory of knowledge. Herbert distinguished truths obtained through experience and reasoning about experience, from innate truths and from revealed truths. Innate truths are imprinted on our minds, and the evidence that they are so imprinted is that they are universally accepted.  Herbert's term for universally accepted truths was notitiae communes – Common Notions.  When it came to religion, Herbert believed that there were five Common Notions.
  There is one Supreme God.
  He ought to be worshipped.
  Virtue and piety are the chief parts of divine worship.
  We ought to be sorry for our sins and repent of them
  Divine goodness doth dispense rewards and punishments both in this life and after it.
  Herbert himself had relatively few followers, and it was not until the 1680s that Herbert found a true successor in Charles Blount (1654–1693).
caption: Edward Herbert, portrait by Isaac Oliver (1560–1617)
exif: {}