PALEY, WILLIAM

English divine and philosopher; b. Peterborough, July 1743; d. Lincoln, May 25, 1805. Educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, he served there as a successful lecturer and tutor until 1776, when he became rector of Musgrave in Westmorland. In 1782 he was made archdeacon of Carlisle. The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (London 1785), based on his lectures at Cambridge, went through 15 editions in his lifetime and was used at Cambridge as a standard textbook. His most original work, Horae Paulinae, or the Truth of the Scripture History of St. Paul Evinced by a Comparison of the Epistles Which Bear His Name and the Acts of the Apostles and with One Another, appeared in 1790. The most famous of his books are A View of the Evidences of Christianity (2 v. London 1794), and Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature (London 1802), in which he set forth his fully developed argument from design for the existence of God. He changed the ground of the argument from astronomy to anatomy in order to argue to God from the evidences of design in animal and human organisms. One of the most successful apologists of his time, Paley was a guiding light of the "evidential school" of rationalist theologians who were very influential in the Church of England, especially at Oxford, during the early 19th century, and against whose ideas the leaders of the oxford movement reacted.

Bibliography: Works, ed. e. paley, 7 v. (London 1825). f. c. copleston, History of Philosophy (Westminster MD 1946–63) 5:195–199. l. stephen, History of English Thought in the 18th Century, 2 v. (London 1927).

[e. sillem]