Joseph Priestley and the Intellectual Culture of Rational Dissent, 1752-1796 Simon Mills Department of English, Queen Mary, University of London A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 I confirm that this is my own work and that the use of material from other sources has been fully acknowledged. 2 Abstract Joseph Priestley and the Intellectual Culture of Rational Dissent, 1752-1796 Recent scholarship on the eighteenth-century polymath Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) has focused on his work as a pioneering scientist, a controversial Unitarian polemicist, and a radical political theorist. This thesis provides an extensive analysis of his comparatively neglected philosophical writings. It situates Priestley’s philosophy in the theological context of eighteenth-century rational dissent, and argues that his ideas on ethics, materialism, and determinism came to provide a philosophical foundation for the Socinian theology which came to prominence among Presbyterian congregations in the last decades of the century. Throughout the thesis I stress the importance of rational debate to the development of Priestley’s ideas. The chapters are thus structured around a series of Priestley’s engagements with contemporary figures: chapter 1 traces his intellectual development in the context of the debates over moral philosophy and the freedom of the will at the Daventry and Warrington dissenting academies; chapter 2 examines his response to the Scottish ‘common sense’ philosophers, Thomas Reid, James Beattie, and James Oswald; chapter 3 examines his writings on materialism and philosophical necessity and his debates with Richard Price, John Palmer, Benjamin Dawson, and Joseph Berington; chapter 4 focuses on his attempt to develop a rational defence of Christianity in opposition to the ideas of David Hume; chapter 5 traces the diffusion of his ideas through the syllabuses at the liberal dissenting academies at Warrington, Daventry, and New College, Hackney. The thesis illustrates the process by which Priestley’s theology and philosophy defeated a number of rival traditions to become the predominant intellectual position within rational dissent in the late eighteenth century. In the course of doing so, it illuminates some of the complex interconnections between philosophical and theological discourses in the period. 3 Table of Contents Abstract 3 Acknowledgments 6 List of abbreviations 8 Transcription procedures 10 Introduction: philosophy and rational dissent 11 1. Priestley’s intellectual development: the Daventry and Warrington dissenting academies (1752-1767) 20 Philip Doddridge’s academy lectures 22 Philosophical debate at Daventry 31 Moral philosophy at Warrington 40 The moral sense in Hartley and Priestley 53 2. Priestley and the Scottish ‘common sense’ philosophers (1774-1776) 64 Priestley on Reid, Beattie, and Oswald 67 The reception of Reid, Beattie, and Oswald among English rational dissenters 77 The reception of Priestley’s Examination and Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind among English rational dissenters 96 Joseph Berington’s response to Priestley 103 3. Priestley on materialism and philosophical necessity (1777-1782) 112 Priestley’s materialism 113 Priestley on philosophical necessity 126 Philosophical debate in Priestley’s and his circle’s correspondence 131 Richard Price, Priestley, and the Scots 141 4 Three responses to Priestley: Palmer, Dawson, and Berington 165 4. Defining rational religion: Priestley’s response to Hume (1780-1782) 181 Wodrow and Kenrick on Hume 183 Priestley’s Letter’s to a Philosophical Unbeliever (1780) 186 Responses to Priestley’s Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever 203 5. The reception of Priestley’s ideas in the liberal dissenting academies 217 (1781-1796) The philosophical career of Thomas Belsham 222 Epilogue: philosophy and rational dissent after 1796 240 Appendix I: ‘DWL MS L.57 (10)’ 252 Appendix II: ‘HMO MS Seddon 6: problems of dating and authorship’ 255 Bibliography 263 5 Acknowledgments It is a great pleasure to be able to thank all of the institutions and individuals who have helped me during the course of my research and writing. My first thanks go to Professor Isabel Rivers and Dr David Wykes, both of whom have been excellent supervisors. David Wykes has been invariably generous in sharing with me his vast knowledge of the history of eighteenth-century rational dissent and of the collections at Dr Williams’s Library. His wisdom and good humour have been a constant source of inspiration. Isabel Rivers has been incredibly generous in taking the time to discuss the project with me at every stage of its development, and in carefully reading and re-reading numerous drafts of each chapter. She has been an unwavering source of advice and encouragement, and it is to my conversations with her over the past three years that the project owes the evolution of its intellectual content. A number of scholars and friends have helped me in different ways, either by answering my questions, commenting on specific parts of the thesis, or allowing me to read pre-publication versions of their own work. In this respect, I would particularly like to thank Mark Burden, Stephen Burley, Grayson Ditchfield, Rosemary Dixon, Martin Fitzpatrick, Anne Janowitz, Matthew Niblett, David Powell, Olivia Smith, M. A. Stewart, and Tessa Whitehouse. The thesis would not have been possible without the help of a number of librarians and archivists. I would like to thank all of the staff at Dr Williams’s Library, the Rare Books and Music reading room at the British Library, John Rylands University Library, the Westminster Diocesan Archives, and the Library of the Royal Society. In particular, I would like to thank Sue Killoran, who has made all of my visits to Harris Manchester College, Oxford productive and enjoyable. It has been a pleasure to have been a member of the postgraduate community at the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, and I would like to thank particularly the organisers of and participants in the London Eighteenth-Century Reading Group. It is a great honour to have been the first doctoral student at the Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies. I have very much enjoyed working at Dr Williams’s, and I hope that the Director and the Trustees will be satisfied that I have 6 made the most of this privilege. My conversations with my fellow doctoral students, as well as with the wider community of staff and scholars at Dr Williams’s, have helped me enormously. I gratefully acknowledge the receipt of a Collaborative Doctoral Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and a bursary from the Trustees of Dr Williams’s Trust. I am grateful to the Trustees of Dr Williams’s Library, Harris Manchester College, Oxford, the Westminster Diocesan Archives, and the Royal Society for permission to quote from manuscripts in their collections. Finally, I would like to thank my family and close friends: my parents Sally and Colin Mills, my grandparents Jim and Anne Rostron, Thomas Mills, and Olivia Smith, all of whom have been a constant source of love and encouragement over the last three years. 7 List of abbreviations CSI The Charles Surman Index of Ministers, Dr Williams’s Library CR The Christian Reformer; or, Unitarian Magazine and Review , 1815-33; second series, 1845-63 Disquisitions Joseph Priestley, Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit (1777) Ditchfield The Letters of Theophilus Lindsey (1723-1808) , ed. G. M. Ditchfield, 2 vols (Woodbridge, 2007), vol. I DWL Dr Williams’s Library E&D Enlightenment and Dissent ESTC English Short Title Catalogue Examination Joseph Priestley, An Examination of Dr. Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, Dr. Beattie’s Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, and Dr. Oswald’s Appeal to Common Sense in Behalf of Religion (1774) Free Discussion Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, A Free Discussion of the Doctrines of Materialism and Philosophical Necessity, in a Correspondence between Dr. Price and Dr. Priestley (1778) Haakonssen (1996) Knud Haakonssen, ed., Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1996) Haakonssen (2006) Knud Haakonssen, ed., The Cambridge History of Eighteenth- Century Philosophy , 2 vols (Cambridge, 2006) HMO Harris Manchester College, Oxford Letters to Lindsey The Letters of Joseph Priestley to Theophilus Lindsey, 1769- 1794 , ed. Simon Mills (Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies, 2008), available online at http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/pubs/JP%20letters.ht ml Locke, Essay John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding , ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975) 8 MR The Monthly Review (or Literary Journal) , 1749-1789; second series, 1790-1825 ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , ed. Colin Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford, 2004) and online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/ OED Oxford English Dictionary , ed. John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, 20 vols, 2 nd edn (Oxford, 1989), and online at http://www.dictionary.oed.com/ Peach and Thomas The Correspondence of Richard Price , ed. W. Bernard Peach and D. O. Thomas, 3 vols (Durham, NC, 1983-1994) Phil. Necessity Joseph Priestley, The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated; being an Appendix to the Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit (1777) Phil. Unbeliever Joseph Priestley, Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever. Part I. Containing an Examination of the Principal Objections to the Doctrines of Natural Religion, and especially those