John Norris, theologian and Platonic philosopher (born 1657, died 1711), wrote “The Picture of Love Unveiled” (1682), “The Idea of Happiness” (1688), “The Theory and Regulation of Love” (1688), “Reflections on the Conduct of Human Life” (1690), “Cursory Reflections on a Book called an Essay concerning Human Understanding” (1690), “Practical Discourses on the Beatitudes” (1690), “Account of Reason and Faith in relation to the Mysteries of Christianity” (1697), and “The Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World” (1701). See Sir R. Waring’s “Quid sit Amor.”
General
| He search’d Malebranche, and now the Rabbi knows | |
| The secret springs whence truth and error flows. | |
| Directed by his leading light, we pass | |
| Through nature’s rooms and tread in ev’ry maze. |
Norris is more thoroughly Platonic than Malebranche, to whom, however, he pays great deference, and adopts his fundamental hypothesis of seeing all things in God. He is a writer of fine genius and a noble elevation of moral sentiments, such as predisposes men for the Platonic schemes of theosophy. He looked up to Augustin with as much veneration as to Plato, and respected, more perhaps than Malebranche, certainly more than the generality of English writers, the theological metaphysicians of the schools. With these he mingled some visions of a later mysticism. But his reasonings will seldom bear a close scrutiny.
Yet he is not for a moment to be compared for learning, compass of thought, or power and skill of expression, to either Cudworth or More.
Norris was a disciple of Malebranche, and expounds his master's doctrine of the vision of all things in God, in opposition to the philosophy of Locke. He is interesting as the last offshoot from the school of Cambridge Platonists, except so far as the same tendency is represented by Shaftesbury…. Norris, though an able writer, is chiefly valuable as a solitary representative of Malebranche's theories in England.
