NORRIS, JOHN (1657-1711 ) , English philosopher and divine, was born at Collingbourne-Kingston in Wiltshire. He was educated at Winchester and Exeter college, Oxford, being subsequently elected to a fellowship at All Souls'. His first original work was An Idea of Happiness (1683), in which, with Plato, he places the highest happiness or fruition of the soul in the con templative love of God. He studied the works of Malebranche and of Descartes and his followers and opponents. Of English thinkers, More and Cudworth, the so-called Cambridge Platonists, had influenced him most ; and in 1685 his study of their works led to a correspondence with More, published after his death by Nor ris as an appendix to his Platonically conceived essay on The Theory and Regulation of Love (1688). He also corresponded with Mrs. Astell (q.v.) and Lady Masham, the friend of Locke, to whom he addressed his Reflections upon the Conduct of Human Life (1689). In 1689 Norris was presented to the living of New ton St. Loe, in Somersetshire. In 1690 he published a volume of Discourses upon the Beatitudes, followed by three more volumes of Practical Discourses between 1690 and 1698. In an appendix to his Discourses he gave "Cursory Reflections" on Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding which anticipate many later criticisms of Locke's philosophy, though he was at one with Locke in dismissing the "grey-headed, venerable doctrine" of innate ideas. The last 20 years of Norris's life were spent at Bemerton, to the living of which he had been transferred in 1691. In 1691-1692 he was engaged in controversy with his old enemies the "Sep aratists," and with the Quakers, his Malebranchian theory of the divine illumination having been confounded by some with the Quaker doctrine of the light within. In 1697 he wrote An Account
of Reason and Faith, one of the best of the many answers to Toland's Christianity not Mysterious. Reason, according to Nor ris, is nothing but the exact measure of truth, that is to say, divine reason, which differs from human reason only in degree, not in nature. In 1701 appeared his most important work, An Essay towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World. The first volume treats the intelligible world absolutely; the second, which appeared in 1704, considers it in relation to human understanding. It is a complete exposition of the system of Malebranche, in which Norris refutes the assertions of Locke and the sensualists. In 1708 Norris wrote A Philosophical Discourse concerning the Natural Immortality of the Soul, defending that doctrine against the assaults of Dodwell. He died at Bemerton, and a monument was erected to his memory in the church. He occupies a place in the succession of ecclesiastical and mystical thinkers of whom Coleridge is the last eminent example.
See Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (ed. Bliss), iv.; Biographia Britan nica; Leslie Stephen in Dictionary of National Biography; J. Tulloch, Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the 17th Century (1874), who calls Norris "as striking and significant a figure in the history of English philosophy," as Berkeley, another idealist.