Joseph Priestley - Everything Philosophers

Joseph Priestley Joseph Priestley FRS was an 18th century English separatist theologian, natural philosopher, chemist, innovative grammarian, multi-subject educator, and liberal political theorist who published over 150 works. He has historically been credited with the discovery of oxygen, having isolated it in its gaseous state, although Carl Wilhelm Schiele and Antoine Lavoisier also have strong claims to the discovery. During his lifetime, Priestley's considerable scientific reputation rested on his invention of soda water, his writings on electricity, and his discovery of several airs, the most famous being what Priestley dubbed dephlogisticated air. However, Priestley's determination to defend phlogiston theory and to reject what would become the chemical revolution eventually left him isolated within the scientific community. Priestley's science was integral to his theology, and he consistently tried to fuse Enlightenment rationalism with Christian theism. In his metaphysical texts, Priestley attempted to combine theism, materialism, and determinism, a project that has been called audacious and original. He believed that a proper understanding of the natural world would promote human progress and eventually bring about the Christian millennium. Priestley, who strongly believed in the free and open exchange of ideas, advocated toleration and equal rights for religious dissenters, which also led him to help found Unitarianism in England. The controversial nature of Priestley's publications, combined with his outspoken support of the French Revolution, aroused public and governmental suspicion, he was eventually forced to flee in 1791, first to London and then to the United States, after a mob burned down his Birmingham home and church. He spent his last ten years in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. A scholar and teacher throughout his life, Priestley also made significant contributions to pedagogy, including the publication of a seminal work on English grammar and books on history, and he prepared some of the most influential early timelines. These educational writings were among Priestley's most popular works. It was his metaphysical works, however, that had the most lasting influence, being considered primary sources for utilitarianism by philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer. Priestley was born to an established English dissenting family in Burst Hall, near Batley in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He was the oldest of six children born to Mary Swift and Jonas Priestley, a finisher of cloth. To ease his mother's burdens, Priestley was sent to live with his grandfather around the age of one. He returned home, five years later, after his mother died. When his father remarried in 1741, Priestley went to live with his aunt and uncle, the Because Priestley was precocious at the age of four he could flawlessly recite all 107 questions and answers of the Westminster Shorter Catechism his aunt sought the best education for the boy, intending him for the ministry. During his youth, Priestley attended local schools where he learned Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Around 1749, Priestley became seriously ill and believed he was dying. Raised as a devout Calvinist, he believed a conversion experience was necessary for salvation, but doubted he had had one. This emotional distress eventually led him to question his theological upbringing, causing him to reject election and to accept universal salvation. As a result, the elders of his home church, the independent Upper Chapel of Heckmann-Dweick, refused him admission as a full member. Priestley's illness left him with a permanent stutter and he gave up any thoughts of entering the ministry at that time. In preparation for joining a relative in trade in Lisbon, he studied French, Italian and German in addition to Aramaic and Arabic. He was tutored by the Rev. George Hagerstone, who first introduced him to higher mathematics, natural philosophy, logic, and metaphysics through the works of Isaac Watts, Willem S. Gravesandy, and John Locke. Priestley eventually decided to return to his theological studies and, in 1752, matriculated at Daventry, a dissenting academy. Because he had already read widely, Priestley was allowed to skip the first two years of coursework. He continued his intense study, this, together with the liberal atmosphere of the school, shifted his theology further leftward and he became a rational dissenter. Abhorring dogma and religious mysticism, rational dissenters emphasized the rational analysis of the natural world and the Bible. Priestley later wrote that the book that influenced him the most, save the Bible, was David Hartley's Observations on Man. Hartley's psychological, philosophical, and theological treatise postulated a material theory of mind. Hartley aimed to construct a Christian philosophy in which both religious and moral facts could be scientifically proven, a goal that would occupy Priestley for his entire life. In his third year at Daventry, Priestley committed himself to the ministry, which he described as the noblest of all professions. Robert Schofield, Priestley's major modern biographer, describes his first call in 1755 to the dissenting parish in Needham Market, Suffolk, as a mistake for both Priestley and the congregation. Priestley yearned for urban life and theological debate, whereas Needham Market was a small, rural town with a congregation wedded to tradition. Attendance and donations dropped sharply when they discovered the extent of his heterodoxy. Although Priestley's aunt had promised her support if he became a minister, she refused any further assistance when she realized he was no longer a Calvinist. To earn extra money, Priestley proposed opening a school, but local families informed him that they would refuse to send their children. He also presented a series of scientific lectures titled Use of the Globes that was more successful. Priestley's Daventry friends helped him obtain another position and in 1758 he moved to Nantwich, Cheshire, living at Sweetbriar Hall in the town's Hospital Street, his time there was happier. The congregation cared less about Priestley's heterodoxy and he successfully established a school. Unlike many school masters of the time, Priestley taught his students natural philosophy and even bought scientific instruments for them. Appalled at the quality of the available English grammar books, Priestley wrote his own, The Rudiments of English Grammar. His innovations in the description of English grammar, particularly his efforts to dissociate it from Latin grammar, led 20th century scholars to describe him as one of the great grammarians of his time. After the publication of Rudiments and the success of Priestley's school, Warrington Academy offered him a teaching position in 1761. In 1761, Priestley moved to Warrington and assumed the post of Tutor of Modern Languages and Rhetoric at the town's Dissenting Academy, although he would have preferred to teach mathematics and natural philosophy. He fitted in well at Warrington, and made friends quickly. These included John Aiken, his sister Anna Laetitia Aiken, and Josiah Wedgwood. Wedgwood met Priestley in 1762, after a fall from his horse. Wedgwood and Priestley met rarely, but exchanged letters, advice on chemistry, and laboratory equipment. Wedgwood eventually created a medallion of Priestley in Cremon Blue Jasperware 37. On June 23, 1762, Priestley married Mary Wilkinson of Wrexham. Of his marriage, Priestley wrote, This proved a very suitable and happy connection, my wife being a woman of an excellent understanding, much improved by reading, of great fortitude and strength of mind, and of a temper in the highest degree affectionate and generous, feeling strongly for others, and little for herself. Also, greatly excelling in everything relating to household affairs, she entirely relieved me of all concern of that kind, which allowed me to give all my time to the prosecution of my studies, and the other duties of my station. On April 17, 1763, they had a daughter, whom they named Sarah after Priestley's aunt. All of the books Priestley published while at Warrington emphasized the study of history, Priestley considered it essential for worldly success as well as religious growth. He wrote Histories of Science and Christianity in an effort to reveal the progress of humanity and, paradoxically, the loss of a pure, primitive Christianity. In his essay on a course of liberal education for civil and active life, Lectures on History and General Policy, and other works, Priestley argued that the education of the young should anticipate their future practical needs. This principle of utility guided his unconventional curricular choices for Warrington's aspiring middle-class students. He recommended modern languages instead of classical languages and modern rather than ancient history. Priestley's lectures on history were particularly revolutionary, he narrated a providentialist and naturalist account of history, arguing that the study of history furthered the comprehension of God's natural laws. Furthermore, his millennial perspective was closely tied to his optimism regarding scientific progress and the improvement of humanity. He believed that each age would improve upon the previous and that the study of history allowed people to perceive and to advance this progress. Since the study of history was a moral imperative for Priestley, he also promoted the education of middle-class women, which was unusual at the time. Some scholars of education have described Priestley as the most important English writer on education between the 17th century John Locke and the 19th century Herbert Spencer. Lectures on history was well received and was employed by many educational institutions, such as New College at Hackney, Brown, Princeton, Yale, and Cambridge. Priestley designed two charts to serve as visual study aids for his lectures. These charts are in fact timelines, they have been described as the most influential timelines published in the 18th century. Both were popular for decades, and the trustees of Warrington were so impressed with Priestley's lectures and charts that they arranged for the University of Edinburgh to grant him a Doctor of Law degree in 1764. The intellectually stimulating atmosphere of Warrington, often called the Athens of the North during the 18th century, encouraged Priestley's growing interest in natural philosophy. He gave lectures on anatomy and performed experiments regarding temperature with another tutor at Warrington, his friend John Seddon. Despite Priestley's busy teaching schedule, he decided to write a history of electricity. Friends introduced him to the major experimenters in the field in Britain John Canton, William Watson and the visiting Benjamin Franklin who encouraged Priestley to perform the experiments he wanted to include in his history. In the process of replicating others' experiments, Priestley became intrigued by unanswered questions and was prompted to undertake experiments of his own design. In 1767, the 700-page The History and Present State of Electricity was published to positive reviews. The first half of the text is a history of the study of electricity to 1766, the second and more influential half is a description of contemporary theories about electricity and suggestions for future research. Priestley reported some of his own discoveries in the second section, such as the conductivity of charcoal and other substances and the continuum between conductors and non-conductors. This discovery overturned what he described as one of the earliest and universally received maxims of electricity, that only water and metals could conduct electricity. This and other experiments on the electrical properties of materials and on the electrical effects of chemical transformations demonstrated Priestley's early and ongoing interest in the relationship between chemical substances and electricity. Based on experiments with charged spheres, Priestley was among the first to propose that electrical force followed an inverse square law, similar to Newton's law of universal gravitation. However, he did not generalize or elaborate on this, and the general law was enunciated by French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb in the 1780s. Priestley's strength as a natural philosopher was qualitative rather than quantitative and his observation of a current of real air between two electrified points would later interest Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell as they investigated electromagnetism. Priestley's text became the standard history of electricity for over a century, Alessandro Volta, William Herschel and Henry Cavendish all relied upon it. Priestley wrote a popular version of the history of electricity for the general public titled A Familiar Introduction to the Study of Electricity. He marketed the book with his brother Timothy, but unsuccessfully. Perhaps prompted by Mary Priestley's ill health, or financial problems, or a desire to prove himself to the community that had rejected him in his childhood, Priestley moved with his family from Warrington to Leeds in 1767, and he became Mill Hill Chapel's minister. Two sons were born to the Priestleys in Leeds, Joseph Jr. on July 24, 1768 and William three years later. Theophilus Lindsay, a rector at Catterick, Yorkshire, became one of Priestley's few friends in Leeds, of whom he wrote, I never chose to publish anything of moment relating to theology, without consulting him. Although Priestley had extended family living around Leeds, it does not appear that they communicated. Schofield conjectures that they considered him a heretic. Each year Priestley travelled to London to consult with his close friend and publisher, Joseph Johnson, and to attend meetings of the Royal Society. When Priestley became its minister, Mill Hill Chapel was one of the oldest and most respected dissenting congregations in England, however, during the early 18th century the congregation had fractured along doctrinal lines, and was losing members to the charismatic Methodist movement. Priestley believed that by educating the young, he could strengthen the bonds of the congregation. In his magisterial three-volume Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, Priestley outlined his theories of religious instruction. More importantly, he laid out his belief in Socinianism. The doctrines he explicated would become the standards for Unitarians in Britain. This work marked a change in Priestley's theological thinking that is critical to understanding his later writings it paved the way for his materialism and necessitarianism. Priestley's major argument in the Institutes was that the only revealed religious truths that could be accepted were those that matched one's experience of the natural world. Because his views of religion were deeply tied to his understanding of nature, the text's theism rested on the argument from design. The Institutes shocked and appalled many readers, primarily because it challenged basic Christian orthodoxies, such as the divinity of Christ and the miracle of the virgin birth. Methodists in Leeds pender him asking God to the Unitarian fiend expel slash and chase his doctrine back to hell. Priestley wanted to return Christianity to its primitive or pure form by eliminating the corruptions which had accumulated over the centuries. The fourth part of the Institutes, An History of the Corruptions of Christianity, became so long that he was forced to issue it separately in 1782. Priestley believed that the corruptions was the most valuable work he ever published. In demanding that his readers apply the logic of the emerging sciences and comparative history to the Bible and Christianity, he alienated religious and scientific readers alike scientific readers did not appreciate seeing science used in the defense of religion and religious readers dismissed the application of science to religion. Priestley engaged in numerous political and religious pamphlet wars. According to Schofield, he entered each controversy with a cheerful conviction that he was right, while most of his opponents were convinced, from the outset, that he was willfully and maliciously wrong. He was able, then, to contrast his sweet reasonableness to their personal rancor, but as Schofield points out Priestley rarely altered his opinion as a result of these debates. While at Leeds he wrote controversial pamphlets on the Lord's Supper and on Calvinist doctrine, thousands of copies were published, making them some of Priestley's most widely read works. Priestley founded the Theological Repository in 1768, a journal committed to the open and rational inquiry of theological questions. Although he promised to print any contribution, only like-minded authors submitted articles. He was therefore obliged to provide much of the journal's content himself. After only a few years, due to a lack of funds, he was forced to cease publishing the journal. He revived it in 1784 with similar results. Many of Priestley's political writings supported the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which restricted the rights of dissenters. They could not hold political office, serve in the armed forces, or attend Oxford and Cambridge unless they subscribed to the 39 Articles of the Church of England. Dissenters repeatedly petitioned Parliament to repeal the Acts, arguing that they were being treated as second-class citizens. Priestley's friends, particularly other rational dissenters, urged him to publish a work on the injustices experienced by dissenters, the result was his essay on the first principles of government. An early work of modern liberal political theory and Priestley's most thorough treatment of the subject, it unusually for the time distinguished political rights from civil rights with precision and argued for expansive civil rights. Priestley identified separate private and public spheres, contending that the government should only have control over the public sphere. Education and religion, in particular, he maintained, were matters of private conscience and should not be administered by the state. Priestley's later radicalism emerged from his belief that the British government was infringing upon these individual freedoms. Priestley also defended the rights of dissenters against the attacks of William Blackstone, an eminent legal theorist, whose commentaries on the laws of England had become the standard legal guide. Blackstone's book stated that dissent from the Church of England was a crime and that dissenters could not be loyal subjects. Furious, Priestley lashed out with his remarks on Dr. Blackstone's commentaries, correcting Blackstone's interpretation of the law, his grammar, and history. Blackstone, chastened, altered subsequent editions of his commentaries, he rephrased the offending passages and removed the sections claiming that dissenters could not be loyal subjects, but he retained his description of dissent as a crime. Although Priestley claimed that natural philosophy was only a hobby, he took it seriously. In his history of electricity, he described the scientist as promoting the security and happiness of mankind. Priestley's science was eminently practical and he rarely concerned himself with theoretical questions, his model was Benjamin Franklin. When he moved to Leeds, Priestley continued his electrical and chemical experiments. Between 1767 and 1770, he presented five papers to the Royal Society from these initial experiments, the first four papers explored coronal discharges and other phenomena related to electrical discharge, while the fifth reported on the conductivity of charcoals from different sources. His subsequent experimental work focused on chemistry and pneumatics. Priestley published the first volume of his Projected History of Experimental Philosophy, the History and Present State of Discoveries Relating to Vision, Light and Colors, in 1772. He paid careful attention to the history of optics and presented excellent explanations of early optics experiments, but his mathematical deficiencies caused him to dismiss several important contemporary theories. Furthermore, he did not include any of the practical sections that had made his history of electricity so useful to practicing natural philosophers. Unlike his history of electricity, it was not popular and had only one edition, although it was the only English book on the topic for 150 years. The hastily written text sold poorly, the cost of researching, writing, and publishing the optics convinced Priestley to abandon his history of experimental philosophy. Priestley was considered for the position of astronomer on James Cook's second voyage to the South Seas, but was not chosen. Still, he contributed in a small way to the voyage, he provided the crew with a method for making soda water, which he erroneously speculated might be a cure for scurvy. He then published a pamphlet with directions for impregnating water with fixed air. Priestley did not exploit the commercial potential of soda water, but others such as J. J. Schwepp made fortunes from it. For his discovery of soda water Priestley has been labeled the father of the soft drink, with the beverage company Schweppes regarding him as the father of our industry. In 1773, the Royal Society recognized Priestley's achievements in natural philosophy by awarding him the Copley Medal. Priestley's friends wanted to find him a more financially secure position. In 1772, prompted by Richard Price and Benjamin Franklin, Lord Shelburne wrote to Priestley asking him to direct the education of his children and to act as his general assistant. Although Priestley was reluctant to sacrifice his ministry, he accepted the position, resigning from Mill Hill Chapel on December 20, 1772, and preaching his last sermon on May 16, 1773. In 1773, the Priestleys moved to Caln in Wiltshire, and a year later Lord Shelburne and Priestley took a tour of Europe. According to Priestley's close friend Theophilus Lindsay, Priestley was much improved by this view of mankind at large. Upon their return, Priestley easily fulfilled his duties as librarian and tutor. The workload was intentionally light, allowing him time to pursue his scientific investigations and theological interests. Priestley also became a political advisor to Shelburne, gathering information on parliamentary issues and serving as a liaison between Shelburne and the dissenting and American interests. When the Priestley's third son was born on May 24, 1777, they named him Henry at the Lord's request. Priestley wrote his most important philosophical works during his years with Lord Shelburne. In a series of major metaphysical texts published between 1774 and 1780 an examination of Dr. Reed's inquiry into the human mind, Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind on the Principle of the Association of Ideas, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, and Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever he argues for a philosophy that incorporates four concepts, determinism, materialism, causation, and necessitarianism. By studying the natural world, he argued, people would learn how to become more compassionate, compassionate, happy, and prosperous. Priestley strongly suggested that there is no mind-body duality, and put forth a materialist philosophy in these works, that is, one founded on the principle that everything in the universe is made of matter that we can perceive. He also contended that discussing the soul is impossible because it is made of a divine substance, and humanity cannot perceive the divine. Despite his separation of the divine from the mortal, this position shocked and angered many of his readers, who believed that such a duality was necessary for the soul to exist. Responding to Baron de Halbacchus' Systeme de la Nature and David Hume's dialogues concerning natural religion as well as the works of the French philosophers, Priestley maintained that materialism and determinism could be reconciled with a belief in God. He criticized those whose faith was shaped by books and fashion, drawing an analogy between the skepticism of educated men and the credulity of the masses. Maintaining that humans had no free will, Priestley argued that what he called philosophical necessity is consonant with Christianity, a position based on his understanding of the natural world. Like the rest of nature, man's mind is subject to the laws of causation, Priestley contended, but because a benevolent God created these laws, the world and the people in it will eventually be perfected. Evil is therefore only an imperfect understanding of the world. Although Priestley's philosophical work has been characterized as audacious and original, it partakes of older philosophical traditions on the problems of free will, determinism and materialism. For example, the 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza argued for absolute determinism and absolute materialism. Like Spinoza and Priestley, Leibniz argued that human will was completely determined by natural laws. However, unlike them, Leibniz argued for a parallel universe of immaterial objects so arranged by God that its outcomes agree exactly with those of the material universe. Leibniz and Priestley share an optimism that God has chosen the chain of events benevolently, however, Priestley believed that the events were leading to a glorious millennial conclusion, whereas for Leibniz the entire chain of events was optimal in and of itself, as compared with other conceivable chains of events. When Priestley's friend Theophilus Lindsay decided to found a new Christian denomination that would not restrict its members' beliefs, Priestley and others hurried to his aid. On April 17, 1774, Lindsay held the first Unitarian service in Britain, at the newly formed Essex Street Chapel in London, he had even designed his own liturgy, of which many were critical. Priestley defended his friend in the pamphlet Letter to a Layman, on the subject of the Reverend Mr. Lindsay's proposal for a reformed English church, claiming that only the form of worship had been altered, not its substance, and attacking those who followed religion as a fashion. Priestley attended Lindsay's church regularly in the 1770s and occasionally preached there. He continued to support institutionalized Unitarianism for the rest of his life, writing several defenses of Unitarianism and encouraging the foundation of new Unitarian chapels throughout Britain and the United States. Priestley's years in Calne were the only ones in his life dominated by scientific investigations, they were also the most scientifically fruitful. His experiments were almost entirely confined to heirs, and out of this work emerged his most important scientific texts, the Six Volumes of Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Heir. These experiments helped repudiate the last vestiges of the theory of four elements, which Priestley attempted to replace with his own variation of phlogiston theory. According to that 18th century theory, the combustion or oxidation of a substance corresponded to the release of a material substance, phlogiston. Priestley's work on heirs is not easily classified. As historian of science Simon Schaefer writes, it has been seen as a branch of physics or chemistry or natural philosophy, or some highly idiosyncratic version of Priestley's own invention. Furthermore, the volumes were both a scientific and a political enterprise for Priestley, in which he argues that science could destroy undue and usurped authority and that government has reason to tremble even at an air pump or an electrical machine. Volume I of Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Heir outlined several discoveries – nitrous air, vapor of spirit of salt, later called acid air or marine acid air, alkaline air, diminished or deflogisticated nitrous air, and, most famously, deflogisticated air as well as experimental findings that showed plants revitalized in closed volumes of air, a discovery that would eventually lead to the discovery of photosynthesis. Priestley also developed a nitrous air test to determine the goodness of air. Using a pneumatic trough, he would mix nitrous air with a test sample over water or mercury, and measure the decrease in volume the principle of eudiometry. After a small history of the study of heirs, he explained his own experiments in an open and sincere style. As an early biographer writes, whatever he knows or thinks he tells, doubts, perplexities, blunders are set down with the most refreshing candor. Priestley also described his cheap and easy-to-assemble experimental apparatus, his colleagues therefore believed that they could easily reproduce his experiments. Faced with inconsistent experimental results, Priestley employed phlogiston theory. This, however, led him to conclude that there were only three types of air, fixed, alkaline, and acid. Priestley dismissed the burgeoning chemistry of his day. Instead, he focused on gases and changes in their sensible properties, as had natural philosophers before him. He isolated carbon monoxide, but apparently did not realize that it was a separate air. In August 1774 he isolated an air that appeared to be completely new, but he did not have an opportunity to pursue the matter because he was about to tour Europe with Shelburne. While in Paris, however, Priestley managed to replicate the experiment for others, including French chemist Antoine Lavoisier. After returning to Britain in January 177,