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Resurrecting by Numbers in Eighteenth-Century England

How much flesh can a moral quality outweigh? The question may have crossed the minds of polite readers in the summer of 1712. The occasion was offered by an article devoted to the golden scales weighing the ‘value of every thing that is in Esteem among Men’, which was published in the Spectator of 21 August. In the article, Joseph Addison reconstructed the mythology of psychostatics and narrated a dream in which he had tried the relative merit of things that did ‘not exert their Natural Gravity, till they were laid in the Golden Ballance’.1 Seven years later, the theme of the golden scales reappeared in the Free-Thinker, a periodical taking up the legacy of the Spectator under the direction of Ambrose Philips, a Whig supporter and an admirer of Addison. Here, several articles presented the tradition of the golden scales weighing ‘true merit’ and suggested that such scales should hang in the house ‘of any British gentleman’.2 All this attention to the weighing of moral qualities may look somewhat surprising. What was behind Addison’s and Philips’s recalling of the weighing of the soul for the readers of polite periodicals? In this article, I suggest that at the turn of the eighteenth century the presentation of psychostatics in polite periodicals such as the Spectator was symptomatic of shifting attitudes towards