(68) PRIESTLEY. MENTION has already been more than once made of Dr. Priestley; and certainly history would imperfectly perform its office of recording the progress of natural knowledge should it pass over his important discoveries without the large share of attention and of praise which they are well entitled to claim. In turning, however, to recount the events of his life, we make a somewhat painful transition from contemplating the philosophic character in its perfection, to follow the course of one who united in his own person the part of the experimental inquirer after physical truth with that of the angry polemic and the fiery politician, leading sometimes the life of a sage, though never perhaps free from rooted and perverted prejudice-sometimes that of a zealot against received creeds and established institutions, and in consequence of his intemperance, alternately the exciter and the victim of persecution. Nevertheless, the services which he rendered in the former and better capacity, ought to be held in grateful remembrance by the cultivators of physical science. Nor are we to suppose that even in his polemical capacity he was not in pursuit of truth. He may have had a tendency to oppose established opinions; a disposition which led him, as he says himself, at the age of twenty "to embrace what is generally called the heterodox side of every question," just as he had a disposition pertinaciously to keep by the received and erroneous chemical theory; but if he thought for him • Works.-Memoirs, vol. i., part i., p. 25. self, and followed the bent of his convictions, we have no right to doubt his conscientious motives, the more especially as his heterodox dogmas, always manfully avowed, never brought him anything but vexation and positive injury in his temporal concerns. The pertinacity with which he defended to the end of his days the chemical doctrine of Phlogiston, and the equal zeal with which he attacked the theological tenets of original sin and the atonement, alike proceeded from sincere conviction, and no one has a right to blame him for either of these opinions, even if it be quite clear that he was wrong in both. Joseph Priestley was the son of a cloth dresser at Birstal-Fieldhead, near Leeds, and was born there, 13th of March (old style), 1733. His family appear to have been in humble circumstances; and he was taken off their hands after the death of his mother by his paternal aunt, with whom he went to live when nine years old, and who sent him to a free school at Batley, in the neighbourhood. There he learnt something of Greek and Latin, and a dissenting minister taught him a little Hebrew in the vacation of the grammarschool. To this he added some knowledge of other Eastern languages connected with Biblical literature; he made a considerable progress in Syriac and Chaldean, and began to learn Arabic; he also had a little instruction in the mathematics from a teacher who had been educated under Maclaurin, at Edinburgh. But in this science he made very little proficiency.* Indeed his whole education was exceedingly imperfect, and excepting in Hebrew and in Greek he never afterwards improved it by any systematic course of study; but in both these languages he became well versed, and he This is manifest from several parts of his writings, although he in one passage of his correspondence speaks of having once been very fond of the study; for in the same paper he speaks of Baron Maseres' work ('Scriptores Logarithmici') as if he had been the author, instead of the collector.-Mem. i., part ii., p. 490. used always to read the Scriptures in the original tongues. Even in chemistry, the science which he best knew, and in which he made so important a figure, he was only half taught; and he himself acknowledged, after having failed to obtain a chemical lectureship, that he "never could have acquitted himself properly in it, never having given much attention to the common routine of the science, and knowing but little of the common processes." "When I began my experiments," he says, "I knew very little of chemistry, and had, in a manner, no idea of the subject before I attended a course of lectures at an academy where I taught." So that he was not well-informed, and had never studied either the theoretical or the practical parts of it, but just got possession of such portions of the subject as occasionally came within the scope of the experiments he was making, and the doctrines he was discussing at the time. His whole writings, which are numberless, and without method, or system, or closeness, or indeed clearness, bear ample testimony to what we might expect would be the result of so very imperfect a foundation as his scanty and rambling education had laid. That education, however, far from redounding to his discredit, very greatly enhances the merit of the man. He presents one of the memorable examples of knowledge pursued, science cultivated, and even its bounds extended, by those whose circumstances made their exertions a continued struggle against difficulties which only virtue and genius like theirs could have overcome. He went to study for some years at the dissenting academy founded by Mr. Coward, at Daventry, and since transferred to London, where it is in a kind of union, mutually beneficial, with the University College. Mr. Ashworth had succeeded the learned and pious Dr. Doddridge as its principal teacher, and under him Priestley remained till 1755. During the three years that he studied here, he and his intimate friends used to make a point of reading, daily, ten pages of Greek, and every week one Greek play, a practice which they continued after they left the school, corresponding with each other on the subject of their studies. On quitting Daventry, having taken orders, he was appointed minister of a congregation at Needham Market, in Suffolk. He had been brought up by his father and aunt in the strictest Calvinistic principles, most of which he very soon from conviction abandoned; and so early did his spirit of free inquiry show itself, that having before he left his aunt's house desired to be admitted as a communicant at the chapel which she attended, he was rejected by the minister on his preparatory examination, in consequence of doubts expressed respecting original sin, and eternal damnation as its punishment. He describes the deep distress into which he was thrown by feeling that he was unable to experience due contrition and repentance for Adam's fault; and the rigid divine who tested the state of his mind on this point, withheld the sacred ordinances in consequence. At Needham his salary never exceeded thirty pounds; indeed it seldom amounted to so much, and he could only subsist by the aid which certain dissenting charities afforded to augment this poor stipend. His predecessor, Dr. Doddridge, had never received above thirty-five pounds a-year, and his board then (1723) only cost him ten pounds. Priestley's opinions proved distasteful to the congregation, who probably regarded the eternity of hell-torments as a peculiar privilege rudely invaded by him; and he removed in 1758 to Nantwich, in Cheshire, where he obtained some thirty pupils, beside teaching a few young ladies and acting as private tutor in an attorney's family. This increased his income, and enabled him, by means of the strictest frugality, to purchase a scanty apparatus; for he had now added a little natural philosophy to his favourite theological studies, the fruit of which had been already two works, one of them against the atonement. I say a little natural philosophy; for he confesses that when nine years later he began to write his 'History of Electricity,' he was but imperfectly acquainted with the subject. It is a careless and superficial work, hastily written, as is his History of Vision;' and the original experiments afforded no new information of any value. In 1761 he removed to Warrington Academy, in which he succeeded Dr. Aikin as tutor in the belles lettres. On settling at Warrington he married the daughter of Mr. Wilkinson, a respectable iron master in Wales. She was an amiable woman, and endowed with great strength of mind, which was destined afterwards to be severely tried. By her he had several children, one of whom survived them both. He appears to have chiefly devoted himself to theological studies, and hence the great disproportion which his Hebrew and Greek learning bears to his other acquirements. Metaphysical speculations, next to these, engaged his attention; and the influence produced on his mind, and even his conduct, by Dr. Hartley's celebrated work (Observations on Man'), has been recorded by himself. "I hardly know," he says, "whether it more enlightens the understanding or improves the heart." He says he also had studied composition, and mainly by the help of writing poetry, of no merit, but according to him the best means of learning to write good prose. That his taste, however, was somewhat deficient in this respect, we may fairly affirm, when we find him pronouncing, many years after, a decided opinion that Belsham's History' is written in a better style than Robertson's or Hume's.* The universality of his attempts may be judged from his delivering at Warrington a course of lectures on anatomy. He sought relaxation from music, and learnt to play on the flute. He strongly recommends 6 Mem. and Cor. 1796, vol i., part ii., p. 358. |