Bailey, SAMUEL

Bailey, SAMUEL, an industrious writer on political and mental philosophy, was born in 1791 in Sheffield, where afterwards he became a banker. He twice contested his native city as a 'philosophical radical' without success, and died there, after a remarkably busy but unusually quiet and uneventful life, January 18, 1870, leaving £80,000 as a bequest to the town. His first work was a really striking volume of Essays on the Formation and Publication of Opinions (1821), in which he ably defended the proposition that a man's opinions are independent of his will. His Essays on the Pursuit of Truth and on the Progress of Knowledge (1829) are only less valuable. His many controversial books on questions of political economy are already almost forgotten, though these, as well as his pamphlets and treatises on political representation, primogeniture, and the like, are characterised alike by terse exposition and vigorous style. Not less interesting but of less value, because to some extent the fruit of insufficient knowledge, are his Review of Berkeley's Theory of Vision (1842), Theory of Reasoning (1851), and Letters on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1855-63). The third series of the last contains an able defence of utilitarianism, in which the author avows himself a thorough determinist. His conjectural emendations of the text of Shakespeare, published 1862-66, are of little value.