Arthur Collier

Arthur Collier was an English Anglican priest and philosopher born in Steeple Langford, Wiltshire, on October 12, 1680. He died in September 1732. Collier attended Pembroke College and Balliol College at Oxford. He became a priest and was presented to the benefice of Steeple Langford in 1704, serving until his death. Despite his philosophical speculations, his sermons remained conventional. Collier faced financial difficulties and had to sell the reversion of the Langford advowson. His philosophical ideas were influenced by Descartes, Malebranche, and John Norris, though he does not reference Locke. By 1703, he had concluded that an absolute external world does not exist. His major work, "Clavis Universalis: or, A New Inquiry after Truth. Being a Demonstration of the Non-Existence, or Impossibility, of an External World," was published in 1713. This work posits that the distinction between imagination and sense perception is only a matter of degree and argues against the existence of an external world. His views have been compared to those of George Berkeley, as both were dissatisfied with the theory of representative perception. Collier married Margaret Johnson, and they had four children. He was a High Church adherent in theology, though his views were not entirely orthodox, and he wrote on theological topics.