Here we come to the first way in which Princeton’s new pedagogue helped to shape America’s founding generation. Although in Scotland he had made himself notorious by lampooning the worldliness, smugness, and theological laxity of the Moderates in the Scottish national church, on a deeper intellectual level he was closer to them than it seemed. Like many of them, he had been profoundly touched by the 18th-century intellectual cloudburst known as the Scottish Enlightenment. And it was the Scottish variant of the Enlightenment that this Calvinist pastor now imported into Princeton, from which, via his students, it shortly entered the mainstream of American thought.
When Witherspoon arrived in 1768, Princeton’s intellectual atmosphere still bore some of the marks of its revivalistic origins. The college’s tutors were ardent partisans of the philosophical idealism associated with Bishop George Berkeley in England and Jonathan Edwards in America. To the tutors’ dismay, the new president vehemently rejected Berkeleyan idealism, or “immaterialism” as he insisted on calling it. He soon instructed his students:
The truth is, the immaterial system is a wild and ridiculous attempt to unsettle the principles of common sense by metaphysical reasoning, which can hardly produce any thing but contempt in the generality of persons who hear it, and which I verily believe, never produced conviction even in the persons who pretend to espouse it.
Within a year the disappointed tutors had left the college, and Witherspoon had added the professorship of divinity to his duties.
John Witherspoon: Educating for Liberty https://t.co/X0yidcG983
— Adam M. Carrington (@carringtonam) February 20, 2024