1 54 ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY. the conclusion, he admits the dependence of brain vibra- tions on the mechanical laws of the material world and the thoroughgoing determinateness of the human will, consol- ing himself with the belief that moral responsibility never- theless remains intact. Priestley, on the contrary, boldly avows the materialistic and deterministic consequences of his position, holds that psychical phenomena are not merely accompanied by material motions but consist in them (thought is a function of the brain), and makes psychology, as the physics of the nerves, a part of physiology. The denial of immortality and the divine origin of the world is, however, by no means to follow from materialism. Priestley not only combated the atheism of Holbach, but also entered the deistic ranks with works of his own on Natural Religion and the Corruptions of Christianity. As early as in Hartley* the principle, which is so impor- tant for ethics, appears that things and actions {e .g., pro- motion of the good of others) which at first are sought and done because they are means to our own enjoyment, in time come to have a direct worth of their own, apart from the original egoistic end. James Mill (1829) has repeated this thought in later times. As fame becomes an imme- diate object of desire to the ambitious man, and gold to the miser, so, through association, the impulse toward that which will secure approval may be transformed into the endeavor after that which deserves approval. Among later representatives of the Associational school we may mention Erasmus Darwin {Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life, 1794-96). 2. Deism. As Bacon and Descartes had freed natural science, Hobbes, the state, and Grotius, law from the authority of the Church and had placed them on an independent basis, i. e., the basis of nature and reason, so deism f seeks to free
- Cf. Jodl. Geschichte der Ethik. vol. i. p. ig7 seq.
f Cf. Lechler's Geschichte des EngUschen Deismus, 1 84 1, which is rigforously drawn from the sources. [Hunt, History of Religious Thought in England, 1871-73 [18S4] ; Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 1876 [1880]; Cairns, Unbelief in the Eighteenth Centuty, l88r.l
