in method by which natural rights are to be defended." "The good and
happiness of the members, that is, the majority of the members of any
State, is the great standard by which everything relating to that state
must finally be determined." In substance, that is to say, if not
completely in theory, we pass with Priestley from arguments of right to
those of expediency. His chief attack upon religious legislation is
similarly based upon considerations of policy. His view of the
individual as a never-ending source of fruitful innovation anticipates
all the later Benthamite arguments about the well-spring of individual
energy. Interference and stagnation are equated in exactly similar
fashion to Adam Smith and his followers. Priestley, of course, was
inconsistent in urging at the outset that government is the chief
instrument of progress; but what he seems to mean is less that
government has the future in its hands than that government action may
well be decisive for good or evil. Typical, too, of the later Benthamism
is his glorification of reason as the great key which is to unlock all
doors. That is, of course, natural in a scientist who had himself made
discoveries of vital import; but it was characteristic also of a school
which scanned a limitless horizon with serene confidence in a future of
unbounded good. Even if it be said that Priestley has all the vices of
that rationalism which, as with Bentham, oversimplifies every problem it
encounters, it is yet adequate to retort that a confidence in the
energies of men was better than the complacent stagnation of the
previous age.

It is difficult to measure the precise influence that Priestley exerted;
certainly among Nonconformists it cannot have been small. Dr. Richard
Price is a lesser figure; and much of the standing he might have had has
been obliterated by two unfortunate incidents. His sinking-fund scheme
was taken up by the younger Pitt, and proved, though the latter believed
in it to the last, to be founded upon an arithmetical fallacy which did
not sit well upon a fellow of the Royal Society. His sermon on the
French Revolution provoked the _Reflections_ of Burke; and, though much
of the right was on the side of Price, it can hardly be said that he
survived Burke's onslaught. Yet he was a considerable figure in his day,
and he shows, like Priestley, how deep-rooted was the English
revolutionary temper. He has not, indeed, Priestley's superb optimism;
for the rigi