EDWARDS, Jonathan, American theolo gian: b. in South(then East) Windsor, Conn., 5 Oct. 1703; d. Princeton, N. J. 22 March 1758. His father, the Rev. Timothy Edwards, a graduate of Harvard, was parish minister at Windsor for nearly 60 years. His mother, Esther Stoddard, a daughter of the Rev. Solo mon Stoddard, minister in Northampton, Mass., is celebrated for force of character and native vigor of intelligence. There were 10 other children in the family, all girls. Jonathan, the fifth child, was brought up with his sisters in an environment peculiarly adapted to his devel opment. The quiet beauty of the landscape about Windsor and the outward simplicity of the life in the village and the home, where the interests of recognized supremacy were those of the spirit and the mind, exerted congenial influence on a character pre-eminently disposed to reflection and to the feeling and practical acknowledgment of things invisible. Religion, both in its experimental and in its theoretical aspects, early became his absorbing preoccupa tion. The precocity of his intellectual develop ment is shown in his first essays, a metaphysical tract on the nature of the soul, written when he was 10, and a paper, remarkable for accuracy of observation and acuteness and breadth of reasoning, on the habits of the °flying spider," written some two years later. At 13 he entered the Collegiate School at Saybrook, afterward Yale College, from which he graduated at New Haven, with the valedictory in a class of 10, shortly before his 17th birthday (1720). The event of greatest intellectual significance for Edwards, and one which may even be said to mark a turning-point in the history of philoso phy in America, was his reading, in his sopho more year in college, of Locke's
valuable as they are as evidence of his genius, express in their main contents only an incident in his thinking. But the psychology and philos ophy of both series of notes, especially the notes on the mind, are intimately connected with his theological interests. Here the influence of Locke is marked, but more striking still the originality of the writer's response to it. Ed wards accepts Locke's empiricism only in part. He makes all our ideas "begin from" sensation; he recognizes distinctly the fundamental import ance of the mechanism of association and the part played by "images" in the higher intel lectual processes. But he is very far from re garding mind as constituted of passively re ceived impressions and their copies. He em phasizes rather the intellectualistic elements in Locke's doctrine; his tendency is toward Kant rather than toward Hume. The mind is, in his view, essentially active, in pleasure and pain, in sentiment and emotion, as well as in judgment and choice/ In its intellectual constructions, moreover, the mind is guided by intuitively cer tain principles (being, cause, finality, etc.) and is capable, by reflection, of rising above all things sensible to the contemplation of things spiritual and eternal. Universals are not all of pragmatic origin and merely nominal im port; the most considerable species have their foundation in °the order of the world." The most noteworthy metaphysical advance beyond Locke lies in the idealistic theory of matter. The general conception was not new; already in the 18th century, before the earliest of these notes were written, Norris, Collier and Berkeley had propounded similar views. Edwards may have heard of their writings, but it is doubtful if he had read any, and practically certain that he had not then read Berkeley. However sug gested, the doctrine is worked out in a thor oughly independent fashion and the expression of it is wholly original; the true substance of the material universe is declared to be God and its esse not percipi, but an °infinitely exact and precise divine idea, together with an answer able, perfectly exact and stable Will, with re spect to correspondent communications to cre ated minds, and effects on their minds? In a later note in his diary he desires as clear a con ception of the relation to God of finite minds. In one of the notes on the mind, he rejects Locke's notion that personal identity consists in identity of consciousness. The whole trend of his metaphysics pointed to another solution.