A metaphysical writer, was born in London in 1705, and was educated at Bishop’s Stortford School and Merton College, Oxford. He studied for a while at the Inner Temple, but was not admitted to the bar. He died in 1774. He published, “Freewill, Fore-knowledge, and Fate; a Fragment” by Edward Search (London 1763): “Man in Quest of Himself, or a Defence of the Individuality of the Human Mind or Self,” etc., by Cuthbert Comment, Gent. (1763). His great work, however, is “The Light of Nature Pursued,” by Edward Search (1768–78).

Light of Nature Pursued, 1768–78

  Read Tucker’s “Introduction to his Light of Nature Pursued.” There is a desultoriness in his style and manner for which I have no mercy on such topics as he has undertaken to treat.

  I have found in this writer more original thinking and observation upon the several subjects that he has taken in hand, than in any other, not to say than in all others put together. His talent also for illustration is unrivalled. But his thoughts are diffused through a long, various, and irregular work. I shall account it no mean praise if I have been sometimes able to dispose into method, to collect into heads and articles, or to exhibit in more compact and tangible masses, what, in that otherwise excellent performance is spread over too much surface.

  I do not know of any work in the shape of a philosophical treatise that contains so much good sense so agreeably expressed.

  But I must be permitted to add that as a metaphysician he seems to me much more fanciful and solid, and, at the same time, to be so rambling, verbose, and excursive as to be more likely to unsettle than to fix the principles of his readers.

  A vast mine of thought.

  It is in mixed, not in pure philosophy, that his superiority consists. In the part of his work which relates to the intellect, he has adopted much from Hartley, hiding but aggravating the offence by a change of technical terms; and he was ungrateful enough to countenance the vulgar sneer which involves the mental analysis of that philosopher in the ridicule to which his physiological hypothesis is liable…. Take him all in all, however, the neglect of his writings is the strongest proof of the disinclination of the English nation, for the last half century, to metaphysical philosophy.

  Happy beyond all men in the power of illustrating the obscure by the familiar; but happier still in the most benevolent and cheerful temper, and in a style which beautifully reflects the constitutional gaiety and kindness of his heart. There is a charm even in his want of method, and in the very clumsiness of his paragraphs; for each sentence bears him testimony that he is too intent on his object to think of anything else, and that to teach controversialists to understand and to love each other was the single end for which he lived and wrote. Of his metaphysical speculations, the most original and curious is the “Enquiry into the Nature and the Operation of Motives.” But his excellence consists in the brightness and in the variety of the lights he has thrown round the whole circle of those topics over which natural and revealed religion exercise a common and indivisible dominion. To rid them of mere logomachies, to show much the fiercest disputants may be unconsciously agreed, to prove how greatly Christianity is misrepresented by many of her opponents, and misunderstood by many of her friends—and, without ever assuming the preacher’s office, to explain the depths of the great Christian canon of mutual love as the universal substratum of all moral truth,—this is the duty which he has undertaken, and which he executes, often successfully, and always with such courage, diligence, and vivacity, and with so unbroken a sunshine of a placid and playful temper, as to render the “Light of Nature” one of the most attractive books in our language, both to those who read to be themselves instructed on these questions, and to those who read with the view of imparting such instruction to others.

  Tucker’s style has several charms rarely met in philosophical works—charms, indeed, that are more or less incompatible with rigorous scientific precision. The diction is simple, thickly interspersed with colloquial idioms, and has an exquisitely musical flow. In every other sentence we are delighted with some original felicity of expression or of illustration. The loose and often ungrammatical structure of the sentences, and the diffusive rambling character both of the work as a whole and of the several divisions, forbid his being taken as a model for strict scientific exposition; but the popular expositor of practical wisdom might learn a great deal from his copious and felicitous language and imagery. Obviously, however, it will not do even for popular purposes to imitate him closely. The expense of his voluminous treatise may have something to do with the general neglect of so ingenious a writer; but at any rate it is significant against close imitation of his style that the views of Happiness and Virtue in Paley’s “Moral Philosophy,” which are simply Tucker’s summarised and formulated, are never referred to their original author.

  The voluminous but fascinating “Light of Nature Pursued” a huge storehouse of thought that is not seldom original, put with constant vividness and much humour, though diffusely and without order.

General

  The most agreeable of metaphysicians.

  Tucker is an example of a very rare species—the philosophical humorist, and is called by Mackintosh a “metaphysical Montaigne.” The resemblance consists in the frankness and simplicity with which Tucker expounds his rather artless speculations, as he might have done in talking to a friend. He was an excellent country squire, not more widely read than the better specimens of his class, but of singularly vivacious and ingenious intellect. His illustrations, taken from the commonest events and objects, are singularly bright and happy. He has little to say upon purely metaphysical points, in which he accepts Locke as his great authority; but his psychological and ethical remarks, though unsystematic and desultory, are full of interest. He was obviously much influenced by Hartley, whom, however, he seems to have disliked. His chief interest was in ethical discussions.