ABSTRACT
Joseph Priestley was no intellectual genius; he was nevertheless an immensely talented, widely conversant man who was sympathetic to many of those
manifestations of 'liberalism' and emancipation which accompanied the disengagements of the Enlightenment. Hence, his wide-ranging contributions
can be said to typify the outlook of those who accepted the advanced thought of the times and whose writings therefore acquire a representative interest.1 As Basil Willey puts it, his work constituted 'a compendium of contemporary notions, and it would be hard to find a better representative of what was admirable in the mind and spirit of the late eighteenth century'.2 Even when he would appear to be least typical — in his staunch Christianity — his beliefs were such that they quarrelled neither with the materialism he proclaimed after the manner of Holbach, nor with the deism which constituted, in more elevated circles, what remained of religious belief. True, to some of the philosophes he 'was the only person they had ever met with, of whose understanding they had any opinion, who professed
to believe in Christianity';3 and he himself saw his own philosophical writings as his 'attempts to defend Christianity, and to free it from those conceptions which prevent its reception with philosophical and thinking persons'.4 Those 'conceptions', however, 'included nearly everything considered by the orthodox to be of its very essence'.5
