ABSTRACT
Arthur Collier was born in 1680 at the Rectory of Langford Magna, of which he was afterwards himself the Rector for the last twenty-eight years of his life. From the maximum, Collier turns to the “minimum naturale”, or the question of the divisibility of matter, and again develops the argument for both sides: “External matter as a creature is evidently finite, and yet as external is as evidently infinite in the number of its parts, or divisibility of its substance. He is on safer ground when he goes on to show that an absolute and “self-consistent” external world is incompatible with the idea of creation and preservation. Although at the end of the Clavis Collier disowns the ability to follow its implications by a reconstruction of the theory of knowledge, he has left us in no doubt as to the metaphysical theory, on which such a reconstruction must be based.
