Philosophical and Theological Writings

Jon Norris (1657-1711) was a prolific author who showed mystical tendencies and a leaning towards Platonism from early on at Oxford.

He published a dozen books and pamplets during his lifetime including many on religious topics.

However, he was deeply involved in philosophical issues too, and he is arguably the last great Idealist figure in the line of thinkers stemming from the Cambridge Platonists.

He was involved in discussions with Mary Astell and Lady Masham over the love of God, and with Berkeley he is probably the most important English thinker to be strongly influenced by Malebranche.

The most systematic of Norris's books philosophically is "An Essay Towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World" (1701-1704), a mixture of Platonism and Malebranche Cartesianism.

This work also discusses Locke's "Essay" with which Norris disagreed on several counts, and in the third edition of his "Christiam Blessedness" (1694), Norris rejected Locke's suggestions on innate ideas.

One of his last works, "Philosophical Discourse Concerning the Natural Immortality of the Soul" (1708), was written against materialists and atheists who appeared to doubt the immortality of the soul. Writing during a time of intellectual turmoil after the Civil War, this was a time of complete break with the classical Aristotlean traditions when new ideas and systems wre fighting for attention.

While the ideas of Locke held out and Malebranche came to be largely ignored outside of France, this is nonetheless an important collection of philosophical writings from an early critic of Locke, whose ideas had impact on the thinking of Shaftesbury, Reid and Hume.