BAXTER, ANDREW Scottish metaphysician, born in Aberdeen and educated at King's college. From 1741-47 he lived as a tutor with Lord Blantyre and Mr. Hay at Utrecht, and made excursions in Flanders, France and Germany. Return ing to Scotland, he lived at Whittingehame, near Edinburgh, till his death in 1750. His chief work, An Inquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul (the 175o edition of which contains an answer to an attack in Maclaurin's Account of Sir I. Newton's Philosoph ical Discoveries, and a dedication to John Wilkes), examines the properties of matter. Since matter is characterized by inactivity, vis inertiae, all movement occurring in it must be caused by some immaterial force, namely, God. But in the case of the human body, movement is caused by a special immaterial force, the soul. The soul, being immaterial, is immortal, and possesses a conscious ness independent of the body. The argument is supportable by the phenomena of dreams, which are due to direct spiritual influences. Baxter's work is an attack on Toland's Letters to Serena (1704), which argued that motion is essential to matter, and on Locke and Berkeley, but his criticism of Berkeley is based on the com mon misinterpretations (see BERKELEY). Sir Leslie Stephen speaks of him as a curious example of "the effects of an exploded meta physics on a feeble though ingenious intellect." Beside the Inquiry, Baxter wrote Matho sive Cosmotheoria Puerilis, a compendium of universal scientific knowledge (edi tions in English and 1765, and Evidence of Reason in Proof of the Immortality of the Soul (published posthumously from mss. by Dr. Duncan in 1779).
See life in Kippis's Biographia Britannica; McCosh's Scottish Philosophy.