MEMOIR OF PRIESTLEY. 147 



A material soul must necessarily be submissive to exterior impulses, 

 and thus absolute necessity, not free will, becomes the law of our deter- 

 minations. If rewards and punishments are attached to our conduct 

 it is only to give one more determining cause in favor of virtue. 



These doctrins are, many of them, those of the earlier Socinians, to 

 which Priestley only brought the support of new arguments. Without 

 stopping to discuss questions so foreign to the ordinary studies of the 

 Academy, and which it is enough to have briefly recalled, it is proper 

 to say that he sustained his opinions with but too much skill. Even 

 his adversaries give him credit for great erudition and singular dex- 

 terity in combining and disposing of his resources, and look upon him, 

 therefore, as one of the strongest controversialists and enemies of 

 orthodoxy in these latter times. =i; * * ^ * * 



It might be thought that in rejecting so many opinions Priestley had 

 but one more step to take to fall into the most absolute incredulity. 

 But this he never did ; on the contrary, it seemed to please him to 

 occupy, in theology as in physics, a post by himself, which, however 

 perilous, he distrusted not his own courage or ability to defend. 

 Those who went farther than himself or not so far, the orthodox and 

 the skeptical, were alike the objects of his attack, and wherever, in 

 all Europe, anything appeared which seemed to menace, in the least 

 degree, either revelation in general or his own manner of interpreting 

 it, that he felt himself called upon to refute. His activity in this 

 species of warfare was without bouuds ; atheists, deists, Jews, arians, 

 quakers, methodists, calvinists, church of England men, and catho- 

 lics, were all taught to recognize him as an opponent. There are 

 publications of his against each of these forms of belief, the very 

 titles of which it would be almost endless to recite. 



A proof that all this was done in good faith is the fact that he 

 thought himself authorized to predict from Scripture events that were 

 near at hand. Prophets who have not his confidence take care to 

 jDostpone the accomplishment of their predictions, so as not to have 

 them falsified during tlieir own lifetime. But Priestley felt more 

 secure of his facts ; he published, in 1799, an address to the Jews, in 

 which he announced to them, from the revelations of Daniel and St. 

 John, their speedy re-establishment in Palestine, with a reunion of 

 all creeds and the foundation of a reign of glory. Besides the calcu- 

 lation according to years, which referred this great event to the com- 

 mencement of the nineteentli century, it was to be heralded by such 

 tokens as the destruction of the pa})al power, of the Turkish empire, 

 and of the kingdoms of Europe. The French monarchy, firm as it 

 seemed, had already fallen ; the rest would soon follow; the Pope 

 was dethroned and in exile ; the Turk only subsisted through the 

 compassion of his neighbors. Priestley lived long enough to see the 

 failure of at least a part of these supposed tokens. 



Details like these, however extraordinary, could not be passed in 



trine. He had adopted the theory of Boscovich, as presented in the Theoria Philosophies 

 Jfaturalis, &c., 1758, according to which, matter consists in emanations of force from detinito 

 portions of space, and is in reality devoid of any other substratum. — Tr. 



