Excerpt from The Philosophy of John Norris of Bemerton Among the men in all the ages who have been 'lovers Of the sight Of truth, ' there are some whose interest for later generations lies not in great discoveries Of new aspects Of that truth, nor in bringing to expression the half-thoughts Of those who were before them, but rather in the meaning Of their failure, in the significance Of what they did not attain. Of these is John Norris Of Bemerton. A follower Of Plato and the Schoolmen, yet with a quick interest in the science and mathematics Of his own day, he attempted to give an account Of reality which should reconcile philosophy and science with religion, but succeeded only in making clear the difficulties Of his chosen theories, and in helping to point out the way which later philosophies were to take. From one point Of view Norris is the last upholder Of the tradition Of Platonic idealism, from another he is the forerunner Of mod ern idealistic theories. Revealing the inadequacy Of the one by his very insistence upon it, he is blinded to the possibility Of the other. Not through timidity, for he adopted Male branche's theory in spite Of the scorn with which it was re ceived by some Of his contemporaries, but rather through a too great reverence for the past, he fails to make any real advance, and leaves to others the task Of determining the future. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

It is not always easy to maintain a proper balance between the delineation of cultural development within a given literary field and the claims of practical criticism. And yet if the history of ideas is to be more than a pastime for the student of literature, it must be rooted in the precise art of discrimination. The following chapters attempt to describe and evaluate a particular cultural development by relating the background of ideas to the literary achievement of three writers. It will be sufficient here to out line the nature of the problem, and the method and approach employed. The concept of cultural development implies a recognition of the con nections between ideology and aesthetics. There are at least two ways of exploring such connections. The one, pioneered by Basil Willey, seeks to situate the critical moments of our cultural development in the back ground of ideas, without which the contribution of a particular author cannot be justly evaluated. The danger of such an approach is that the task of discrimination comes to depend over-heavily on extra-literary criteria.