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ANDREW BAXTER (1686-1750)

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Originally appearing in Volume V03, Page 551 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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ANDREW BAXTER (1686-1750)  , Scottish metaphysician, was born in Aberdeen and educated at King's College . He maintained himself by acting as tutor to noblemen's sons . From 1741 to 1747 he lived with Lord Blantyre and Mr Hay of Drummelzier at Utrecht, and made excursions in Flanders, France and Germany . Returning to Scotland, he lived at Whittingehame, near
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Edinburgh, till his
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death in 1750 . At
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Spa he had met John Wilkes, then twenty years of age, and formed a lasting friendship with him . His chief
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work, An Inquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul (
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editions 1733, 1737 and 1745; with appendix added in 1750 in answer to an attack in Mac- laurin's Account of
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Sir I . Newton's Philosophical Discoveries, and dedication to John Wilkes), examines the properties of
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matter . The, one essential
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property of matter is its inactivity, vis inertiae (accepted later by Monboddo) . All
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movement in matter is, therefore, caused by some immaterial force, namely,
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God . But the movements of the
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body are not analogous to the movements of matter; they are caused by a
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special immaterial force, the soul . The soul, as being immaterial, is immortal, and its consciousness does not depend upon its connexion with the body . The
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argument is supported by an analysis of the phenomena of dreams, which are ascribed to
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direct spiritual influences .

Lastly

Baxter attempted to prove that matter is finite . His work is an attack on Toland's Letters to Serena (1704), which argued that motion is essential to matter, and on Locke and Berkeley . His criticism of Berkeley (in the second
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volume) is, however, based on the
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common misinterpretation of his theory (see BERKELEY) . Sir Leslie Stephen speaks of him as a curious example of " the effects of an exploded metaphysics on a feeble though ingenious intellect." Beside the Inquiry, Baxter wrote Matho sive Cosmotheoria Puerilis (an exposition in Latin of the elements of astronomy written for his pupils—editions in
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English 1740, 1745 and 1765, with one
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dialogue re-written); Evidence of Reason in Proof of the Immortality of the Soul (published posthumously from
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MSS . by Dr Duncan in 1779) . See
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life in Biographia Britannica; McCosh's Scottish Philosophy, PP . 42-49 .

End of Article: ANDREW BAXTER (1686-1750)
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