Eighteenth-Century Science and Radical Social Theory: The Case of Joseph Priestley’s Scientific Liberalism

Inscribing on the Mind: Anna Letitia Barbauld's ‘Sensible Objects’

“…Associationism is particularly fitting to this task -having been fostered by Priestley, it was already loaded with progressive religious meaning. 33 It also lends itself to Dissenting devotional practice because, as is expressed in ' An Address to the Deity', it allows for an emphasis on a personal, habitual and, crucially, feeling relationship with God: a 'devotional taste', a notion so closely allied to human appetite that even Priestley deemed it unacceptable. 34 Barbauld's God is found not in the churches of the establishment but in nature.…”

“…Observations came to be immensely influential, especially following the publication of Joseph Priestley's edition of the theory in 1775; as Isaac Kramnick notes, 'Hartley, thanks to Priestley, was everywhere. '16 Ubiquitous as Hartley's theory may have been, however, it was far from being universally accepted. Embodied psychology came to be politicised by its association with the radical Priestley, who was denounced for his materialist additions to Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind.…”