Introduction

Philosophy was a field in which Nonconformists were much less innovative than in the previous century, but it remained important to them, especially in their training for the ministry. Evangelicals in general adopted the common sense school of philosophy pioneered by Thomas Reid and popularised by Dugald Stewart. It meshed readily with their theology, where it is deployed to vindicate revelation. Much writing was concerned with the borderland between theology and natural philosophy - what today would be called science - and can properly be labelled natural theology. The self-assured intellectual posture of Nonconformity is apparent in the attitude to the philosophers of the age and the arrival of its representatives in the University of Oxford. The miscellaneous writings covered here include a defence of Dissenting principles, a claim that those principles, when thoroughly followed out, led to a Unitarian position and a critique of Evangelical phraseology by an insider.