Author: MANUSCRIPT. PHILO-VERITAS (pseudonym):
Title: "Pain the Cause of human Volition, and, of all Voluntary Motion; as Pleasure the End design'd by all Voluntary Activity / By Philo-Veritas."
Description: Manuscript. 8vo, 8vo. 75 mms. x 125 mms. 64 numbered pages,. 175 mms. x 125 mms, 32 leaves, written mostly on recto and verso, two rectos blank, two of last three leaves blank, two visible stubs after main text with some writing on them, bound in contemporary limp sheep. The manuscript has several alterations and deletions by the author; a manuscript annotation in a different hand is on the page facing the title-page, saying the text is a "Manuscript of [?T] Letchworth / circa 1780", where the initial may be "T" or possibly "J". At the foot of the manuscript title-page, a verse epigraph is added in the small space remaining on the page: "Self-Love & Reason to one end aspire / Pain their aversion, Pleasure their desire," attributed to "Pope"; the couplet is indeed from Alexander Pope's poem An Essay on Man (Epistle II, Section II). The manuscript is stated on the title-page to be by "Philo-Veritas," which means "Lover of Truth." It is a pseudonym that had earlier been used by the poet Andrew Marvell, who cannot be the author here, as Marvell died well before 1780. The pseudonym was also used by Thomas Gilliland in the nineteenth century, his use of it coming several decades after 1780. Since a non-authorial hand adds a note to the page facing the title-page of the present manuscript, making an attribution of the text to a T. or J. Letchworth, we must consider that a person so named may be the author. Notably, the Oxford DNB has only one Letchworth: Thomas Letchworth (1738-1784), the Quaker writer, publisher, and poet, whose intellectual qualities were much esteemed in his lifetime. Halkett and Laing record a related pseudonym that Thomas Letchworth is sometimes credited with using, "Philaretus," meaning "Lover of Virtue." Moreover, the latter pseudonym was said to be used by Letchworth for a similar kind of philosophical essay, which was published as a pamphlet titled An Essay on Liberty and Necessity (c.1775), in which its author discussed and contrasted two key and diametrically opposing concepts, those mentioned at the outset on the title-page, liberty and necessity, just as Philo-Veritas, in this 1780 manuscript, focusses on discussing two diametrically opposed concepts himself: pain and pleasure. A caveat is mentioned by Halkett and Laing, however: they say John Whitehead has also sometimes been thought to be the author of the Essay on Liberty and Necessity (c.1775). Therefore the Philaretus pamphlet may be regarded as possibly corroborative but far from conclusive in and of itself, as to its impact on the author attribution of the present manuscript. Less in dispute is the admiration that Letchworth's intellect drew from many a contemporary. As the Oxford DNB notes, "Letchworth was recognized as a minister in Devonshire House meeting, London, while still a young man. He was an earnest and eloquent preacher, remembered as 'an intelligent, well-informed, and liberal-minded Christian' (Matthews, 4), whose abiding interests were 'the mysterious operations of the human mind [and] the passions which actuate it.' (Twelve Discourses, preface). He appears not to have travelled widely in the ministry but he was well known in London. His power as a preacher attracted many to his local meeting at the Park Meeting-House, Southwark. Twelve of his discourses, taken down in shorthand, were published posthumously in 1787." Those dozen discourses printed in 1787, tellingly, do not include the long philosophical essay here on pain and pleasure, but the present philosophical essay was surely too erudite, too closely-argued, and too long to be suitably delivered as a public talk that could then be captured in shorthand by a casual listener at a Quaker meeting in Southwark, London. Whether the present MS was written by Thomas Letchworth or some other highly learned person in the second half of the eighteenth century, this manuscript by Philo-Veritas is one of the rarest types of philosophical manuscripts to come to the market: an original, erudite, lengthy philosophical treatise in English from the eighteenth century that is unpublished and unrecorded. Far more common is to find a student notebook with lecture notes from a philosophy class or a wastebook with summaries of chapters from a textbook. It is particularly notable that Philo-Veritas carries up the theme of pain and pleasure from the philosophical anthropology of Alexander Pope (1688-1744), from the first half of the eighteenth century, while also anticipating the work of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), still to come in the early nineteenth century, in dwelling on the foundational role of the concepts of pain and pleasure to any rigorous philosophical understanding of human activity and ethics. I have traced no copy in print or manuscript in OCLC or COPAC, or anywhere else on the internet, of any book or pamphlet titled Pain the Cause of Human Volition, and no work of such content attributed either to a Philo-Veritas or to a Letchworth anywhere other than in the manuscript on offer. This authorial manuscript seems to be the unique and sole text of this original treatise.

Keywords: Philosophy volition


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