Price, RICHARD

Price, RICHARD, philosopher, was born at Tyn-
ton, in Glamorganshire, on 22d February 1723. His father was a dissenting minister, morose, bigoted, and intolerant, in complete antithesis to the disposition of the son. As a boy he read Clarke and Butler, went at eighteen to a dissenting academy in London, and at the close of his studies became chaplain to a Mr Streatfield at Stoke-Newington, with whom he lived for thirteen years. Legacies from his patron and an uncle in 1756 enabled him to marry. He laboured as a preacher at Newington Green and at Hackney, and established a reputation by his somewhat heavy but able Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (1758). His apologetic work, On the Importance of Christianity, appeared in 1766. In 1769 he received from Glasgow the degree of D.D., and published his Treatise on Reversionary Payments; which was followed by the compilation of the celebrated Northampton Mortality Tables, and various other works of value relating to life assurance and annuities. In 1771 appeared his famous Appeal to the Public on the Subject of the National Debt; in 1776 his Observations on Civil Liberty and the Justice and Policy of the War with America. The latter brought him the freedom of the city of London and an invitation from congress to assist in regulating its finances. Price lived long enough to herald the promise of the French Revolution, and to be denounced in Burke's Reflections. He died April 19, 1791. Price was a believer in the immateriality of the soul, holding that it remained in a dormant state between death and resurrection. Their difference of opinion on this subject led to a controversy of some celebrity between him and his friend Dr Priestley. His views respecting the divinity of Christ were what is called Low or semi-Arian. As a moralist he has a close affinity with Cudworth, and in some points strangely foreshadows the greater name of Kant. Of his great treatise on morals the chief positions are these: actions are in themselves right or wrong; right and wrong are simple ideas incapable of analysis; these ideas are received immediately by the intuitive power of the reason or understanding. See the Life by his nephew, William Morgan (1815).