the right to believe and worship as they wished.

The rational individual

was also a benevolent and sympathetic being, a "man of feeling" or a
"woman of sentiment" by the mid eighteenth century. For each of these
readings of human nature, there were others which were suppressed or
denied: that a human being might be inspired by the Holy Spirit, for
instance; or that egotism is the well-spring of human motivation; or that
female appetites might be safely met. And there were real human beings
whose lives and aspirations refused to fit the model: Dissenters, Quakers,
and Catholics; free-thinkers whose rational inquiry led to deism or atheism;
readers of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville; women like Aphra
Behn or Mary Astell. So to argue that Augustan discourse privileges one set
of assumptions about human nature is not to suggest that others were not
present or unacknowledged. It is simply to propose that these assumptions
were most conducive to the creation of a civilized and civilizing public
sphere.
The point can be advanced by considering the power of conversation as a
cultural trope of civility. In an Essay on Conversation Henry Fielding
expands on "the art of good breeding," by which "I mean the art of
pleasing, or contributing as much as possible to the ease and happiness of
those with whom you converse."35 This was a commonplace of the conduct
books which taught "good breeding," but it was intended to do more than
simply oil the wheels of social intercourse. Given the variety of religions
amongst us, wrote John Constable, and the propensity of human beings to
defend their religion with passion, they are a dangerous topic for discussion.
"How to manage them right in Conversation, is the present Point. . .
Commonly they are so handled, that one would almost hate to have them
brought into Conversation. They are apt to end in Disgusts, if not in
quarrels."36 Note the underlying assumption that conversations among
reasonable individuals should not be disrupted by contention, that religious
differences need to be managed. We are close to a new social rule, that
civilized, civil people keep politics and religion out of the conversation. The
Spalding Society established in Lincolnshire in 1710 proudly announced
that "we deal in all the arts and sciences, and exclude nothing from our
conversation but politics, which would throw all into confusion and
disorder."37
The civility of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century life is
properly regarded as a key to the management of difference. Civility was an
ideal, a vision of how the elite should conduct themselves, and it was put
into practice in drawing rooms and assemblies, in political clubs and on
boards and committees. Civility transformed an older vision of civic virtue
as independence, frugality, and martial vigor into sociability, urbanity, and
Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge University Press, 2006