PRICE, RICHARD (1723-1791), English moral and politi cal philosopher, son of a dissenting minister, was born on Feb. 23, 1723, at Tynton, Glamorganshire. He was chaplain and companion to a Mr. Streatfield at Stoke Newington, London, and by his death and that of an uncle in 1756 his circumstances were im proved. In 1757 he married Sarah Blundell.
After publishing several sermons, philosophical papers, and the Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the National Debt (1771) he turned his attention to the question of the American col onies, and in 1776 he published a pamphlet entitled Observa tions on Civil Liberty and the Justice and Policy of the War with America. A second pamphlet on the war with America, the debts of Great Britain, and kindred topics followed in the spring of 1777. His name thus became identified with the cause of American independence. He was the intimate friend of Franklin; he corresponded with Turgot.
Price was an intimate friend of Priestley, in spite of the fact that they took the most opposite views on morals and meta physics. In a published correspondence between them (1778) on the subjects of materialism and necessity, Price maintained, in opposition to Priestley, the free agency of man and the unity and immateriality of the human soul. The pamphlets on the American War made Price famous. He preached to crowded congregations, and, when Lord Shelburne acceded to power, was offered the post of private secretary to the premier. In 1786 Mrs. Price died, and the remainder of his life appears to have
been clouded by solitude and dejection. The progress of the French Revolution alone cheered him. On April 1o, 1791, he died, worn out with suffering and disease. His philosophical impor tance is in the region of ethics. The Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (1757, 3rd ed. revised 1787) is professedly a refutation of Hutcheson, but is rather constructive than polemi cal. The theory he propounds is closely allied to that of Cud worth, but is interesting mainly in comparison with the subse quent theories of Kant.
Besides the above-mentioned, Price wrote an Essay on the Popula tion of England (2nd ed., 178o) ; two Fast-day Sermons, published respectively in 1779 and 1781 ; and Observations on the importance of the American Revolution and the means of rendering it a benefit to the World (1784). A complete list of his works is given as an appendix to Dr. Priestley's Funeral Sermon. His views on the French Revolution are denounced by Burke in his Reflections on the Revolu tion in France. Notices of Price's ethical system occur in Mackintosh's Progress of Ethical Philosophy, Jouffroy's Introduction to Ethics, Whewell's History of Moral Philosophy in England; Bain's Mental and Moral Sciences. See also ETHICS, and T. Fowler's monograph on Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. For Price's life see memoir by his nephew, William Morgan. •