ABSTRACT
The first of many editions ofIsaac Watts' Loglck: Or, The Right Use o/Reason in the Enquiry after Truth, with a Variety 0/ Rules to Guard against Error. In the Affairs 0/ ReligIOn and Human Life. as well as In the Sciences was published in London in 1725. The most notable among historians of British logic and rhetoric, Wilbur Samuel Howell, says that 'it is probably fair to say that in the English-speaking world more eighteenthcentury students and serious general readers learned their lessons about logic from Isaac Watts than from any other source' (Howell 1971, 342). The success of the Logick and its adoption as a text at Cambridge and Oxford is all the more remarkable in the light of the fact that Watts was a nonconforming minister. I
Watts was born in July of 1674 at Southampton. He was graduated at age twenty from the rather notable dissenting academy of Thomas Rowe at Stoke Newington, where, as is reported in his life in the Dictionary o/National Biography, 'The teaching in classics, logic, Hebrew, and divinity was excellent' (20: 979). In 1696 he began a five year period of service as tutor to the son of Sir John Hartopp, to which period and activity the origins of his Logick are traceable. By March of 1702 he was appointed to the pulpit of the dissenting chapel at Mark Lane, which had at one time been occupied by the famous Puritan preacher and scholar John Owen. III health prevented Watts from fulfilling most of the duties of his position - in which, however, he remained at the insistence of his admiring congregation, eventually with the assistance ofa co-pastor. In 1712 he was invited to live in the home of Sir Thomas and Lady Abney, whose generous support enabled him to devote most of his remaining thirty-six years to intellectual activity and to writing. He died in November of 1748.
