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his voluminous contributions to theology. In season and out of season, he was the steadfast champion of that hypothesis respecting the Divine nature which is termed Unitarianism by its f

well, and in which he showed himself so competent to enlarge the boundaries of natural knowledge and to win fame. In this cause he not only cheerfully suffered obloquy from the bigoted and the unthinking, and came within sight of martyrdom; but bore with that which is much harder to be borne t

up to it consistently, is worthy of the deepest respect, whatever opinion may be entert

Priestley, the fearless defender of rational freedom in thought and in action: to Priestley, the philosophic thinker; to that Priestley who held a foremost place among "the swi

life are so well known that I need

ame at Daventry, carried out to the letter the injunction to "try all things: hold fast that which is good," and encouraged the discussion of every imaginable proposition with complete freedom, the leading professors taking opposite sides; a discipline which, admirable as it may be from a purely scientific point of view, would seem to be calculated to make acute, rather than sound, divines. Priestley tells us, in his "Autob

1761, a career much more suited to his abilities became open to him. He was appointed "tutor in the languages" in the Dissenting Academy at Warrington, in which capacity, besides giving three courses of lectures, he taught Latin, Greek, French, and Italian, and read lectures on the theory of l

ally invited the students to drink tea with him, in order to canvass the subjects of his lectures. I do not recollect that he ever showed the least displeasure at the strongest objections that were made to what he delivered, but I distinctly remember the smile of approbation with which he usually received the

tter description of a model teache

er years. At Nantwich, where he set up a school, Priestley informs us that he bought an air pump, an electrical machine, and other instruments, in the use of which he instructed his scholars. But he does not seem to have devoted himself seriously to physical scie

he minister of a congregation at Leeds; and, here, happ

rom that house I was under the necessity of making fixed air for myself; and one experiment leading to another, as I have distinctly and faith

verpool. But I have often thought that, upon the whole, this circumstance was no disadvantage to me; as, in this situation, I was led to devise an apparatus and processes of my own, adapted to my peculiar views; wherea

tificially, thirsty souls, which those whose parched throats and hot heads are cooled by morning draughts of that beverage, cannot too gratefully acknowledge. In the same year, Priestley communicated the extensive series of observations which his industry and ingenuity had accumulated, in the c

ether these worthy ecclesiastics feared that Priestley's presence among the ship's company might expose His Majesty's sloop Resolution to the fate which aforetime befell a certain ship that went from Joppa to Tarshish; or whether they were alarmed lest a Socinian should undermine that piety which, in the days of Commodor

es of a friend of both, Dr. Price; and offered him the nominal post of librarian, with a good house and appointments, and an annuity in case of the termination of th

a desire that Priestley should return to his old footing in his house. Probably enough, the politician, aspiring to the highest offices in the State, may have found the position of the protector of a man who was being denounced all over the country as an in

were made by his friends, though none by himself, to dissuade me from persisting in it. But being, as I thought, engaged in the cause of im

what his domesticated, but not tamed, philosopher might write next, and what storm might thereby he brought down on his own head; and it speaks very highly for Lord Shelburne's delicacy that, in the midst of such perplexities, he made not the least attempt to interfere with Priestley's freedom of action. In 1780,

he time, to be "the happiest event of his life." And well he might think so; for it gave him competence and leisure; placed him within reach of the best makers of apparatus of the day; made him a member of that remarkable "Lunar Society," at whose mee

nner unparalleled, and it is to be hoped impossible, in our times; and Priestley and his friends were held up to public scorn, even in Parliament, as fomenters of sedition. A "Church-and-King" cry was raised against the Liberal Dissenters; and, in Birmingham, it was intensified and specially directed towards Priestley by a local controversy, in which he had engaged with his usual vigour. In 1791, the celebration of the second anniversary of the taking of the

s gave him a cold shoulder; and though he was elected minister of a congregation at Hackney, he felt his position to be insecure, and finally determined on emigrating to the United States. He lan

have burned his fingers a little, very few who have tried that operation have burned their fingers so little. He made admirable discoveries in science; his philosophical treatises are still well worth reading; his political works are full of insight and replete with the spirit of freedom; and while all these sparks flew off from

before he was a philosopher, and that the duties of the two former positions are at least as imperative as those of the latter. Moreover, there are men (and I think Priestley was one of them) to whom the satisfaction of throwing down a triumphant fallacy is as great as that which attends the discovery of a new truth; who feel better satisfied w

bodies; and to form a just estimate of the value of his work--of the extent to which it advanced the knowledge of fact and

ifferent kinds of air as gas ventosum and gas sylvestre, and Boyle and Hales had experimentally defined the physical properties of air, and discriminated some of the various kinds of a?riform bodie

, whom so many of us recollect, attended Black's lectures when he was a student in Edinburgh. Black's researches gave the world the novel and startling conception of a gas that was a permanently elastic fluid like air, but

Henry Cavendish, published a memoir in the "Philosophical Transactions," in which he deals not only with the "fixed a

ical processes, matter is neither created nor destroyed, and indicated the path along which all future explorers must travel. Nor did he himself halt un

ing, and to ingenuity to create apparatus out of washing tubs, he discovered more new gases than all his predecessors put together had done. He laid the foundations of gas analysis; he discovered the complementary actions of animal and vegetable life upon the constituents of the atmosphere; and, finally, he crowned his work, this day one hundred years ago, by the discovery of that "pure dephlogisticated air" to which the French chemists subsequently gave the name of oxygen. Its importance, as the constituent of the atmosphere which

he facts which he discovered, or assisting in their rational explanation, his influence to the end of his life was warmly exerted in favour of error. From first to last, he was a stiff adherent of the phlogiston doctrine which was prevalent when his studies commenced; and, by a curious irony of fate, the man who by the discovery of what he called "dephlogisti

n animal breathed in air, it was supposed that a substance, "phlogiston," the matter of heat and light, passed from the burning or breathing body into it, and destroyed its powers of supporting life and combustion. Thus, air contained in a vessel in

dy "phlogisticated"; while the other fifth is free from phlogiston, or "dephlogisticated." On the other hand, Priestley found that air "phlogisticated" by combustion or respiration could be "dephlogisticated," or have the properties of pure common air restored to it, by the action of green plants in sunshine. The

nts on the evolution of air from various bodies by means of heat, it happened that, on the 1st of August 1774, he threw the heat of the sun, by means of a large

rised me more than I can well express, was that a candle burned in this air with a remarkably vigorous flame, very much like that enlarged flame with which a candle burns in nitrous air, exposed to iron or lime of sulphur; but as I had got

larger, burned with more splendour and heat than in that species of nitrous air; and a piece of red-hot wood sparkled in it, exactly lik

ew air behaved with "nitrous gas" in the same way as the dephlogisticated part of common air does; [8] but that, instead of being diminished to four-fifths, it almost completely vanished, and, therefore, showed

rom phlogiston, and applying heat; and consequently he says: "There remained no doubt on my mind but that the atmospherical air, or the thing that we breathe, consists of the nitrous acid and ear

manner in which saltpetre is formed, he enunciates the hypothesis, "that nitre is, formed by a real decomposition of the air itself, the bases that are pres

voisier undoubtedly treated Priestley very ill, and pretended to have discovered dephlogisticated air, or oxygen, as he called it, independently, we

wlands; while the second determines its length and breadth, and lays down on a chart its exact place, so that, then

, and the service which he rendered to chemistry by the definite establishment of a large number of new and fund

for the bitter hatred which was borne to him by a large body of his country-men, [12] and which found its expr

riginality, Priestley's "Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit," and his "Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated," are among the most

rmination; he denied the existence of a soul distinct from the body; a

nglish opinion, a century ago,

materialist; or, if good authorities say he is and must be so, in spite of his assertion to the contrary; or, if he acknowledge himself unable to see good reasons for believing in the natural immortality of m

man who was hated only by those who did not know him, and who charmed away the bitterest prejudices in personal intercourse; a man who never lost a friend, and the best tes

a sufficient refutation of the hypothesis, invented by bigots to cover uncharitableness, that such opinions as his must arise from moral defects. And his statue will do as good service as the brazen image that was set upon

r those who may be shocked by this doctrine to know that views, substantially identical with Priestley's, have been advocated, since his time, by two prelates of the Anglican Church: by Dr. Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, in his well-known "E

e activity of the mind by way of natural consequence; t

agai

re states of 'life' or of 'torment' beyond Hades are reserved for man, are results of our blessed Lord's victory over sin and death; that the resurrection of the dead must be preliminary to their entrance into either of the future s

hear Pri

er period. The corporeal and mental faculties, in being in the same substance, grow, ripen, and decay together; and whenever the system is dissolved it conti

agai

tate of rest and insensibility, and our only though sure hope of a future life is founded on the doctrine of the resurrection of the whole man at some distant period; this assurance being sufficiently confirmed to us both by the e

is not yet admitted that the views which are consistent with such sai

to episcopal authority in philosophical questions; but it seems right to call attention to the fact, that those of Priestley's opinions which h

d 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 fa

s of his day, so are his political conceptions based upon those of Locke. Locke's aphori

r their mutual advantage; so that the good and happiness of the members, that is, of the majority of the members,

formula, which by substituting "happiness" for "good," has converted a noble into an ignoble principle. But I do not call to mind that there is any utterance in Locke quite so outspoken as the following passage in the "

the tyrannical governors should have no friends but a few sycophants, who had long preyed upon the vitals of their fellow-citizens, and who might be expected to desert a government whenever their interests should be detached from it: if, in consequence of these circumstances, it should become manifest that the risk which would be run in attempting a revolution would be trifling, and the evils which might be apprehended from it were fa

of the Toleration Act, it is not surprising to find that Priestley had very definite opinions about Ecclesiastical Est

civil governments have arrived at a much greater degree of perfection. If, therefore, I were asked whether I should approve of the immediate dissolution of all the ecclesiastical establishments in Europe, I should answer, No.... Let experiment be

ggest four such reforms

to any Christian establishment if every man cannot claim the benefit of it who can say that he believes in the religion of Jesus Christ as it is set forth in the New Testament. You say the terms are so general that even Deist

rd, the exclusion of the Bishops from Parliament; and the fourth, complete toleration, so that every man may enjoy

ther too conservative, from a large proportion of the lineal descendants of the people who taught their children to cry "Damn Priestley;" and with that love for the practical application of science which is the source of the greatness of Birmingham, tri

stley's work, its value will become apparent when we compare the co

om the meeting of the Long Parliament in 1640, to the last Stuart rebellion in 1745, is a hundred and five years, and that, in the middle of the last century, we had but just safely freed ourselves from our Bourbons and all that they represented. The corruption of our state was as bad as that of the Second Empire. Bribery was th

t of Uniformity, the Test Act, and the Corporation Act. By law, such a man as Priestley, being a Unitarian, could neither teach nor preach, and was liable to ruinous fines and long imprisonment. [17] In those days the guns that were pointed by the Ch

who travelled went about armed, by reason of the abundance of highwaymen and the paucity and inefficiency of the police. Stage

n of biological facts. But those parts of physical science which deal with heat, electricity, and magnetism, and above all, chemistry, in the modern sense, can hardly be said to have had an existence. No one knew that two of the old elemental bodies, air and water, are compounds, and that

ast progress of our species, I am afraid that the globe will have cooled down so far, before the advent of this natural millennium, that we shall be, at best, perfected Esquimaux. For all practical purposes, however, it is enough that man may visibly impr

has its share in moral and intellectual progress. Becky Sharp's acute remark that it is not difficult to be virtuous on ten thousand a year, has its application to nations; and it is futile to expect a hungry and squalid

nce have vanished. Four and six bottle men are as extinct as the dodo. Women of good repute do not gamble

ed into the hands of the masses of the people. Those whom Priestley calls their servants have recognised their position, and have requested the master to be so good as to go to school and fit hims

present, apparently, more bent on prosecuting one another than on meddling with Dissenters. Theology itself has broadened so much, that Anglican divines put forward doctrines more liberal than those of Pr

on Baer, and of Schwann; of Smith and of Hutton, have all been carried on since Priestley discovered oxygen; and consider that they are now things of the past, concealed by the industry of those who have built upon them, as the first founders of a coral reef are hidden beneath the life's work of their successors; consider that the met

human activity: that ecclesiastical authority has been relegated to its proper place; that the good of the governed has been finally recognised as the end of government, and the com

th century is other and better than the eighteenth, it is, in great measure, to him, and to such men as he, that we owe the change. If

t died o' Wednesday." But whether Priestley's lot be theirs, and a future generation, in justice and in gratitude, set up their statues; or whether their names and fame are blotted out from remembrance, their

tno

lampada tradunt."--LUCR

of Dr. Priestley, by J

aphy, §§

countenance. He, indeed, seemed present with God by recollection, and with man by cheerfulness. I remember that, in the assembly of these distinguished men, amongst whom Mr. Boulton, by his noble manner, his fine countenance (which much resembled that of Louis XIV.), and princely munificence, stood pre-eminently as the great Mecaenas; even as a

some asperity, contents herself, in writing to Mrs. Barbauld, with the sarcasm that the Birmingha

tions on Different Kind

ons on Different Kinds of

vol. i

tions on Different Kind

. p.

e italics are P

e seen, in large characters, 'MADAN FOR EVER; DAMN PRIESTLEY; NO PRESBYTERIANISM; DAMN THE PRESBYTERIANS,' etc., etc.; and, at one time, I was followed by a number of boys, who left their play, repeating what they had seen on the walls, and shouting out, 'Dam

rities of the Christian Religion. Es

f 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.

nciples of Government,

," in Essay on First Princ

for teaching without the Bis