V.] JOSEPH PRIESTLEY. 117 



I am not here either to defend or to attack 

 Priestley's philosophical views, and I cannot say that 

 I am personally disposed to attach much value to 

 episcopal authority in philosophical questions ; but it 

 seems right to call attention to the fact, that those of 

 Priestley's opinions which have brought most odium 

 upon him., have been openly promulgated, without 

 challenge, by persons occupying the highest positions 

 in the State Church. 



I must confess that what interests me most about 

 Priestley's materialism, is the evidence that he saw 

 dimly the seed of destruction which such materialism 

 carries within its own bosom. In the course of his 

 reading for his "History of Discoveries relating to 

 Vision, Light, and Colours," he had come upon the 

 speculations of Boscovich and Michell, and had been 

 led to admit the sufficiently obvious truth that our 

 knowledge of matter is a knowledge of its properties ; 

 and that of its substance if it have a substance we 

 know nothing. And this led to the further admission 

 that, so far as we can know, there may be no differ- 

 ence between the substance of matter and the sub- 

 stance of spirit ("Disquisitions/' p. 16). A step 



matter, but with Hartley and Bonnet, both of them stout champions 

 of Christianity. Moreover, Archbishop Whately's essay is little better 

 than an expansion of the first paragraph of Hume's famous essay on 

 the Immortality of the Soul : " By the mere light of reason it seems 

 difficult to prove the immortality of the soul ; the arguments for it 

 are commonly derived either from metaphysical topics, or moral, or 

 physical. But it is in reality the Gospel, and the Gospel alone, that 

 has brought life and immortality to light" It is impossible to imagine 

 that a man of Whately's tastes and acquirements had not read Hume 

 or Hartley, though he refers to neither. 



