John Ray (1627–1705), a blacksmith’s son from Black Notley, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, until he resigned rather than take the Act of Uniformity’s oath in 1662. He is the father of English natural history: the first to define a species in the modern sense, and the classifier whom Linnaeus built on. The Wisdom of God turned a set of college divinity lectures into the founding book of English natural theology, and everything Paley wrote a century later is downstream of it.
Works (3)
- A Persuasive to a Holy Life — Ray’s last book, and the only one of his that is straightforwardly practical divinity: that a holy life is also the happy one, argued through every good men actually pursue — health, safety, riches, pleasure, honour, friends — and then through the happiness of the inward man and of the life to come. (13 notes)
- The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation — The book that made natural theology an English habit of mind, grown out of Ray’s divinity lectures in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge. It clears the Epicurean and Cartesian accounts of the world out of the way and then goes through the creation in order — the heavens, the elements, meteors, minerals, plants, and at greatest length animals and the human body — reading contrivance off each in turn. Paley’s Natural Theology is its grandchild, and Darwin read it. (12 notes)
- Three Physico-Theological Discourses — Three discourses on the earth’s own history: the creation of the world, the general deluge — with the question of what fossils are, which Ray was among the first to answer correctly — and the dissolution of the world by fire. They are the beginning of geology in English as much as they are theology, and Ray keeps returning to the same difficulty: how long the evidence in the rocks needs, against how long Scripture seems to allow. (24 notes)