NORRIS, JOHN
(1657–1711)

John Norris, the English philosopher and disciple of Nicolas Malebranche, was associated with the Cambridge Platonists. Norris was born in Collingbourne-Kingston, Wiltshire. His father was a clergyman and at that time a Puritan. Educated at Winchester and at Exeter College, Oxford, which he entered in 1676, Norris was appointed a fellow of All Souls in 1680. During his nine years at All Souls, he was ordained (1684) and began to write, mostly in a Platonic vein and often in verse. In 1683 he published Tractatus adversus Reprobationis absolutae Decretum, in which he attacked the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. His Platonism and anti-Calvinism naturally attracted Norris to the Cambridge Platonists; in 1684 he began to correspond with Henry More and Damaris Cudworth, the daughter of Ralph Cudworth.

The philosophical essays included in Poems and Discourses (1684)—renamed A Collection of Miscellanies in the 1687 and subsequent editions—could, indeed, have been written by a Cambridge Platonist. Their main argument is that since truth is by its nature eternal and immutable, it must relate ideas which are also eternal and immutable; this condition, according to Norris, can be fulfilled only by ideas which are "in the mind of God"—that is, manifestations of God's essence. Thus, the existence of God is deducible from the very nature of truth; the atheist is involved in a self-contradictory skepticism.

In Norris's The Theory and Regulation of Love (1688)—for all that Norris dedicated it to the former Damaris Cudworth, now Lady Masham, and included as an appendix his correspondence with More—the influence of Malebranche began to predominate. At first, it reinforced rather than weakened Norris's sympathy with Cambridge Platonism. Norris followed Malebranche in distinguishing two kinds of love—desire, which seeks to unify itself with the good it pursues, and benevolence, which seeks good for others. But, as also in Reason and Religion (1689), Norris explicitly rejected Malebranche's view that the only proper object of desire is God. The objects of desire, Norris said, form a hierarchy—God, the good of the community, intellectual pleasures, and sensual pleasures are all in some measure good. God is the highest but not the only good.

In 1689, Norris married and resigned his fellowship to become rector of Newton St. Loe in Somerset. In his Reflections on the Conduct of Human Life (1690), addressed to Lady Masham and intended as an admonition to her, he condemned the life he had lived at Oxford on the ground that he had interested himself in public affairs and in intellectual pursuits; in the future he proposed to dedicate himself in retirement to the "moral improvement of my mind and the regulation of my life." This is Malebranche's, not the Cambridge Platonists', ideal of conduct; even the pursuit of knowledge is conceived of as a worldly enticement.

In 1691, as a result of John Locke's influence, Norris became rector of Bemerton, near Salisbury, where he died on February 5, 1711. He did not win the approval of his Cambridge Platonist bishop, Gilbert Burnet, who would certainly not have appreciated Norris's attack on toleration in The Charge of Schism continued (1691). Norris's Discourse concerning the Measures of Divine Love (Practical Discourses, Vol. III, 1693) and Letters concerning the Love of God (1695) reveal the complete disciple of Malebranche; we ought, Norris now said, to love nobody but God. Substantially reversing Immanuel Kant's dictum, he argued that we should treat other human beings as means—occasions of happiness to us—and never as ends. Lady Masham was naturally indignant; in her anonymous Discourse concerning the Love of God (1696), a reply to Norris, she argued that men are "made for a sociable life" and should love their fellow men in the same way they love God.

Thought

Norris's metaphysical views, sketched in Reason and Religion, are set out in detail in his Essay towards the Theory of the Ideal and the Sensible World (Vol. I, 1701; Vol. II, 1704), which fully justifies his nickname "the English Malebranche." Yet the argument of the first volume of the Essay would still entitle Norris to be described as a Platonist—or as a Thomist or an Augustinian. Plato, the "Platonic father" Augustine, Francisco Suárez, and Thomas Aquinas all taught, he tried to show, the same lesson as Malebranche—that knowledge is of the eternal and, therefore, of God.

In the second volume, however, when Norris came to consider in more detail how our knowledge of "the world of sense" is related to our knowledge of "the intelligible world," his break with the Platonist tradition, arising out of his allegiance to Malebranche, is at once apparent. It is true that when he did (mildly) criticize Malebranche, it is on the Platonic ground that his theory of the imagination allows too much to sensation; Malebranche's phrase "We see all things in God," he also thought, might suggest to the careless reader that sensation is our analogue for knowledge. "Divine ideas," Norris preferred to say, "are the immediate objects of our thought in the perception of things." But these are minor reformulations. Of much greater significance is the fact that he agreed with the Cartesians that "the world is a great mechanism and goes like a clock" and even accepted, although with some little hesitation, the Cartesian doctrine of animal mechanism. He did not even bother to refer to the Platonist theory of "plastic powers" or to More's criticism of René Descartes's extension-thought dualism. He is a Platonist only where Malebranche is a Platonist—for example, in his rejection of the Thomas-Locke account of abstraction.

Norris's philosophy might properly be described, in the phrase commonly applied to Benedict de Spinoza, as "God-intoxicated." God, for him as for Malebranche, is the efficient cause of all happenings, the only good, the only object of knowledge. We know God directly; everything else is known by way of our apprehension of God's nature as revealed in the ideas that emanate from him. Norris could not explain, he confessed, how spiritual ideas can represent a material world; the material world is, indeed, an embarrassment to him, fading into the empty concept of "that which occasions our apprehensions" that George Berkeley criticized. He was so concerned to leave nothing lovable in the world, nothing that could be a source of happiness to us, that he reduced it to a nonentity; it exists only as something to be shunned. The relation between our mind and God's is left in equal obscurity.

In 1692 Locke and Norris quarreled on a matter involving Lady Masham; Locke came to be very impatient with Norris's views, which probably provoked his Examination of Malebranche (first published in Posthumous Works, edited by Peter King, London, 1706); he directly criticized Norris in an essay first published in A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke (1720). In general, Locke thought of Norris as a completely reactionary thinker.

Other of Norris's works deserving mention are An Account of Reason and faith in relation to the Mysteries of Christianity (1697), in which he argued—in reply to John Toland's deistic Christianity not Mysterious (1696)—that it is not unreasonable to believe the incomprehensible, and A Philosophical Discourse concerning the Natural Immortality of the Soul (1708), which makes use of Platonic-scholastic arguments against Henry Dodwell's Epistolary Discourse proving … that the Soul is naturally Mortal (1706). Many of his works, although not The Ideal World, were extremely popular, but it is usually impossible to distinguish his influence from Malebranche's. One of the least original of philosophers, he nevertheless displays considerable powers of criticism and exposition. He had a direct influence on Arthur Collier.

See also Cambridge Platonists.

Bibliography

There is no modern edition of Norris. Norris brought together several of his minor works, including Reason and Religion, as Treatises upon Several Subjects (London, 1697). For his Poems see the edition by Alexander Balloch Grosart in the Fuller Worthies' Library, Vol. III (Blackburn, U.K., 1871), pp. 147–348; John Wesley included an abbreviated version of Treatise on Christian Prudence and Reflections upon the Conduct of Human Life in his Christian Library, Vol. XXX (London, 1827).

See also Frederick James Powicke, A Dissertation on John Norris (London, 1894); Ernest Trafford Campagnac, The Cambridge Platonists (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901); Flora Isabel MacKinnon, The Philosophy of John Norris of Bemerton, Philosophical Monographs, No. 2 of the Psychological Review (October 1910); John Henry Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy (London, 1931); John K. Ryan, "John Norris, a Seventeenth Century Thomist," in New Scholasticism 14 (2) (1940): 109–145; Charlotte Johnston, "Locke's Examination of Malebranche and John Norris," in Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (4) (1958): 551–558; Richard Acworth, The Philosophy of John Norris of Bemerton (1657–1712) (Hildesheim, NY: Olms, 1979); Richard Acworth, "Locke's First Reply to John Norris," Locke Newsletter 2 (1971): 7–11; and Charles J. McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).

John Passmore (1967)

Bibliography updated by Tamra Frei (2005)