PALEY, WILLIAM (1743-1805), English divine and philos opher, was born at Peterborough. He was educated at Giggles wick school, of which his father was head master, and at Christ's College, Cambridge. He graduated in 1763 as senior wrangler, became fellow in 1766, and in 1768 tutor of his college. He lectured on Clarke, Butler and Locke, and also delivered a systematic course on moral philosophy, which subsequently formed the basis of his well-known treatise on the Evidences of Christianity. The subscription controversy was then agitating the university, and Paley published an anonymous Defence of a pamphlet in which Bishop Law had advocated the retrench ment and simplification of the 39 Articles. In 1776 he was pre sented to the rectory of Musgrave in Westmoreland, supplemented at the end of the year by the vicarage of Dalston, and presently exchanged for that of Appleby. In 1782 he became archdeacon of Carlisle. At the suggestion of his friend John Law (son of Edward Law, bishop of Carlisle and formerly his colleague at Cambridge), Paley published (1785) his lectures, revised and enlarged, under the title of The Principles of Moral and Polit ical Philosophy. The book at once became the ethical text-book of the University of Cambridge, and passed through fifteen edi tions in the author's lifetime. He strenuously supported the abolition of the slave trade, and in 1789 wrote a paper on the subject. The Principles was followed in 1790 by his first essay in the field of Christian apologetics, Horae Pauline, or the Truth of the Scripture History of St. Paul evinced by a Comparison of the Epistles which bear his Name with the Acts of the Apostles and with one another, probably the most original of its author's works. It was followed in 1794 by the celebrated View of the
Evidences of Christianity. Paley's latitudinarian views are said to have debarred him from the highest positions in the Church, but he became a canon of St. Paul's, subdean of Lincoln, and rector of Bishopwearmouth. During the remainder of his life his time was divided between Bishopwearmouth and Lincoln. In 1802 he published Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Exist ence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature, his last, and, in some respects, his most remarkable book. He died on May 25, 1805.
The face of the world has changed so greatly since Paley's day that we are apt to do less than justice to his undoubted merits. He is nowhere original, and nowhere profound, but his strong reasoning power, his faculty of clear arrangement and forcible statement, place him in the first rank of expositors and advocates.
For his life, see Lives, by G. W. Meadley (1809) and his son Edmund Paley, prefixed to the 1825 edition of his works; Leslie Stephen in Dictionary of National Biography; Quarterly Review, ii. (Aug. 1809), ix. (July 1813). On Paley as a theologian and philosopher, see Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, i. 405 seq., ii. 121 seq.; R. Buddensieg, in Realencyklopiidie protestantische Theologie, xiv. (19o4).