ABSTRACT
“John Norris”, writes Tulloch in his Rational Theology in the Seventeenth Century, “stands by himself in the history of English Philosophy, the solitary Platonist of the Revolution era, who handed on the Torch of Idealism into the next century till it was grasped by the vigorous and graceful hand of Bishop Berkeley”. Norris assumes what Berkeley attains. Though, owing to the weight of the Aristotelian tradition, there was in Oxford no such enthusiastic revival of Platonic study as there was in Cambridge, Norris could claim in an early essay on Plato’s Ideas “a more than ordinary acquaintance with Plato’s works”. Philosophy, Norris goes on to urge, can prove a great deal more than it can explain. Norris submits the Cartesian doctrine of the dependence of the ideal world upon the will of God to thorough and trenchant criticism.
