2.2 The Doctrine of the Human Soul

2.2.1 Preliminary Remarks

Jonathan Edwards, of course, did not deal with the nature of the human soul de novo or in a vacuum, but stood within a particular tradition (albeit with the additional help of more contemporary philosophical influences) regarding the make-up of the various powers of human nature. Perry Miller discussed the context of the discussion about the nature of the human soul in his The New England Mind,¹ but more recently Norman Fiering has dealt with the same issue at length in two major studies,² where he cogently demonstrates that Edwards, while a brilliant thinker, was no lone genius in a barren wilderness. Nor was Edwards simply a straightforward disciple of John Locke. Edwards was conversant in the major Continental philosophical discussions of his day (which, of course included such men as Locke and Newton).
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1. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954).↩
2. Norman Fiering, Jonathan Edwards’s Moral Thought and its British Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981) and its companion volume Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).↩