John, one of the most eminent of the English Platonists, was born at Collingborne-Kingston in Wiltshire, where his father was a clergyman, in 1657. With a view to the clerical profession, he was sent to Winchester school; and at the Michaelmas term of 1676 he entered Exeter College, Oxford. At school he was distinguished for his classical attainments, and at college for his enthusiastic study of philosophy. He soon exhausted the scientific knowledge then current at his university; and eager to explore the fountainhead of that stream of which the waters were so sweet, he began the study of Plato and Aristotle. It was in the groves of the Academy, however, rather than in the halls of the Lyceum, that the young spectator first found what he was in quest of. He graduated as a bachelor in arts in 1680, and having soon after obtained a fellowship in All-Souls' College, he was enabled still farther to indulge his preference for Plato and his divine dialogues. For a temper so melancholy and devout as Norris's seems to have been, the transition from his favourite philosophy to the mystic theology was at once easy and natural; and to heighten the facility still more, he had his attention arrested by the brilliant name of Father Malebranche, a philosopher at once Platonic in temper and Christian in spirit. The Recherche de la Verité was then read by all for its lofty eloquence, and studied by the few for the ingenuity of its metaphysics. Norris began an ardent admirer, and ended a zealous disciple of this charming idealist. Meanwhile little was known of this solitary thinker until he inaugurated his career as an author in 1682, in The Picture of Love Unveiled, a translation of the well-known Effigies Amoris of Robert Waringe. During the same year he published a translation from the Greek of Hierocles upon the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, a performance which he followed up by an original work in 1683, entitled An Idea of Happiness. Rejecting the common notion of "moral virtue," taught by the Stoics and Peripatetics, as incapable of making men happy in the highest sense, he adopted the more exalted idea of "divine virtue," as inculcated in the writings of Plato and the Pythagoreans. The former regulates the actions of common life; the latter engages in divine meditation and seraphic ecstasy. "He that has only the former," says Norris, "is like Moses, with much difficulty climbing up to the holy mount; but he that has the latter is like the same person conversing with God on the serene top of it, and shining with rays of anticipated glory." This small treatise at once ranked its author with that distinguished band of Platonic divines which adorned the seventeenth century in England. But it was a characteristic of Norris, as of all the thinkers of that devout and learned school, that while intensely fond of speculative retirement, and "happy in leisure and obscurity," as he sings of it, he nevertheless took an active interest in what was passing around him during that noisy and changeful time. The Rye-House plot of 1683 induced him to publish A Mirthful Treatise of Knaves, or Whiggism displayed and burlesqued out of countenance; a performance which showed that its author could discourse of more things than the ecstasies of the mystical union. This sturdy English sense has always proved too much for the full growth and fruition of the higher rhapsodies of mysticism. The political brochure hurled at the Whigs was followed by an attack upon the Calvinistic dissenters, in which the Fellow of All-Souls stanchly combated some of the positions in the theology of the Genevan divine. This tract was entitled Tractatus adversus Reprobationis Absolute Decretum, novo methodo et succinctissimo compendio adornatus, et in duos libros digestus, 1683. Nor was this the only blow aimed by the sturdy churchman at the dissenters of his day; in 1691 he charged the Nonconformists with schism in a special treatise, after having given them repeated stabs as a sort of by-play in his previous works. Norris obtained his master's degree in 1684, took orders shortly afterwards, and pub- lished his Miscellanies in prose and verse during the same year. In his poems he endeavours to be something "more than a country fiddler;" aspiring "to restore the declining genius of poetry to its primitive and genuine greatness, to wind up the strings of the Muse's lyre," and so forth; and to save his readers from becoming oblivious of his high design, he informs them occasionally, as he proceeds, "this ode is after the Pindaric way." His argument is always high, however; and amidst much purity of sentiment, deep religious fervour, and some tedious moralizing, true gleams of poetry occasionally break forth. This volume was the most popular of all his works, and passed through numerous editions during the author's lifetime. Norris had long been an admiring student of the works of Dr Henry More, then at the height of his newly-won fame as a Platonic mystic, and he resolved now to consult that philosopher respecting some speculative difficulties on which he professed igno- rance and curiosity. The correspondence thus begun in 1684 ended only with the death of More three years after- wards, and was published by Norris in 1688. In 1685 he produced a translation of Xenophon's Cyropædia in con- junction with Francis Digby, the latter rendering the first four books, and Norris the remaining four. The Theory and Regulation of Love appeared in 1688, in which that Platonic affection of which Norris was so fond finds an in- genious and eloquent advocate. He was made rector of Newton St Loe in Somersetshire in 1689, married during the same year, and gave to the world a treatise on Reason and Religion. This was followed, in 1690, by Reflections upon the Conduct of Human Life, in a letter to John Locke's friend, the famous Lady Masham. Locke was living with that lady at the time, and on reading Norris's dedication, in which he supposed her to be blind, is said to have "made himself merry withal" at the author's ex- pense. Locke's celebrated Essay appeared for the first time during this year, and Norris, whose speculative opi- nions differed most fundamentally from those of Locke, could not resist the temptation of attaching an Appendix to his Treatise of Christian Blessedness, then passing through the press, with "Cursory Reflections upon a Book called An Essay concerning Human Understanding." His letter to Lady Masham brought him into collision with the Quakers, in A Discourse concerning the Grossness of the Quaker's Notion of the Light within, published in 1692, in which he disabused the minds of that pious sect of the opinion that he was favourable to their views. This treatise is peculiarly valuable, as casting light upon Norris's real relation to mysticism. He had before had occasion to de- nounce the opinion that all bodily pleasures are to be ab- jured, and he now insists, with great force and clearness, that "the Quakers represent this light within as a sort of extraordinary inspiration; whereas I suppose it to be a man's natural and ordinary way of understanding." Norris was now presented to the rectory of Bemerton, near Salisbury, where he remained till his death. The revenues of this position were handsome and the work light; and the labor. Norristown rious rector continued to ply his pen with increased ardour. He completed his four volumes of Practical Discourses in 1698, and his Letters concerning the Love of God, addressed to Mrs Astell, appeared in 1695. The subtle mystical ten- dencies of the writer's mind come forth in the latter work with peculiar distinctness. He exalts sentiment above science, and feeling above reason. He insists on the ab- solute exclusiveness of the love of God, and its incompati- bility with any possible earthly affection as an end in itself. These opinions he had afterwards occasion to re-assert and vindicate. A very able work from Norris's pen, entitled An Account of Reason and Faith, in relation to the Myste- ries of Christianity, appeared in 1697, in answer to the Christianity not Mysterious of the deistical writer John Toland. Perhaps none of the author's writings would be read with so much interest at the present day as this one. His discussion of the grounds and merits of the rationalism of that period was so thoroughgoing, that the more modern forms of doubt are in a great measure anticipated. None of our modern writers have marked off with a more bold and steady hand the respective provinces of Reason and Faith, whether in the region of natural or supernatural truth. And a truly earnest inquirer, with any adequate apprecia- tion of the real significance of sound speculation, will find more satisfaction in Norris's book—now all but forgotten— than in nine-tenths of all the treatises, pretentious and otherwise, addressed to the thinking public of the present day. The human Reason, according to Norris, is not co- extensive with absolute truth, and Faith occupies the bor- der-land between the known and the unknown, the hidden and the revealed. Each faculty has accordingly a legiti- mate and inalienable sphere of its own, which can only be upstaged at the peril of intellectual and moral disorganiza- tion. The work, however, by which Norris is best known to the philosophical world is one of less real merit than the former, but occupied with a subject of capital interest to all metaphysicians. He was one of the very first, as has already been observed, to raise his protest against the ap- parent sensationalism of Locke; and after meditating the subject for seven years, Norris came before the public in 1701 with an elaborate defence of idealism, in An Essay towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World. The second part appeared in 1704. This work is in effect a defence and development of the philosophy of Male- branche, whom Norris styles "the great Galileo of the in- tellectual world." It displays wide reading and vigorous thinking, and is written in a clear, forcible style. His next work was A Philosophical Discourse concerning the Na- tural Immortality of the Soul, published in 1705, defend- ing that doctrine, with great ability and moderation, against the hostile criticism of Dodwell. With the exception of small treatises on Humility (1707) and Christian Prudence (1710), and other minor pieces on practical subjects, this work may be regarded as the last of this industrious and able writer. His health, which had never been very robust, ultimately gave way under the ceaseless pressure of active labour; and after lingering for some time, he died at Be- merton in 1711, at the age of fifty-four.