Edwards, Jonathan
Edwards, Jonathan( 1703–58),born in Connecticut, entered Yale before he was 13 and graduated in 1720. His interest in scientific observation was manifested at the age of 11 in an account Of Insects, on phenomena related to the flying spider (Andover Review, Jan. 1890), and a group of acute comments on The Soul, The Rainbow, Being, and Colours. While at Yale he read Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding with more delight than a “greedy miser” finds in “some newly discovered treasure,” and began to combine reflections on the mind with his observations of natural science. He made a precocious venture into Berkeleyan idealism, evidently without knowing Berkeley, and, in his Notes on the Mind, decided: “That which truly is the substance of all Bodies, is the infinitely exact, and precise, and perfectly stable Idea, in God's mind, together with his stable Will, that the same...
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