The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of Human Understanding.

London: Printed for William Innys,, 1728. A key text in the 18th-century controversy over human comprehension of the divine First edition of the author's systematic, anonymous analysis of human epistemology, his "first major contribution to philosophical theology" (Winnett, p. 102), and a challenge to John Locke's theory of ideas. In 1696, John Toland published Christianity not Mysterious, in which he adapts John Locke's theories of knowledge to contend that all Christian doctrines had to be comprehensible by human reason and not rooted simply in faith. As this argument could be construed to suggest that the mystery of the Trinity should be rejected, Toland's tract sparked a considerable Deist controversy. In Human Understanding, Peter Browne (c.1665-1735), Bishop of Cork and Ross, responds to the arguments of Toland and Locke by arguing that Christian mysteries are, indeed, rationally comprehensible. By so doing, Browne refines his famous argument that knowledge of God was essentially possible by rational analogy. The work provoked an attack on Browne by George Berkeley, his one-time pupil, who drew on the Human Understanding to question Browne's religious orthodoxy. Octavo (196 x 116 mm). Contemporary sprinkled calf, spine with raised bands forming six compartments, ruled and decorated in gilt, shadow of lost label, covers panelled in gilt with crown cornerpieces, edges sprinkled red. Woodcut tailpieces. Joints and extremities neatly restored. Lightly bumped and scuffed, minor browning and cosmetic splits to endpapers, slight foxing to endpapers and contents, faint offsetting to contents: a very good copy. Arthur Robert Winnett, Peter Browne: provost, bishop, metaphysician, 1974.