Logick: Or, the Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry After Truth, with A Variety of Rules to guard against Error, in the Affairs of Religion and Human Life, as well as in the Sciences. By I. Watts.
London: Printed for John Clark and Richard Hett, 1725. First edition. Woodcut head- and tail-pieces and initials. Corners worn, nineteenth-century library armorial bookplates. A good, clean copy. Contemporary calf, rebacked in modern calf, gilt burgundy morocco spine label. [2], vi, [8], 534, [+2, errata] pp. Item #16994
"...throughout the years between 1728 and 1785 the vogue of his Logick in institutions of higher learning does not appear to have slackened. When Jeremy Bentham attended Queens College, Oxford, in the first three years of the 1760s, the Logick was still in use as the standard English treatise in its field; but Bentham regarded it as 'Old Woman's logic'...Dr. Johnson said of the Logick that it 'has been received into the universities, and, therefore, wants no private recommendation'" (Howell, Eighteenth Century British Logic and Rhetoric).
Watts (1674-1748) was an English Christian minister, hymn writer, theologian, and logician, credited with 750 hymns including "Joy to the World" and "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross." In a letter dated March 1700, his brother Enoch, Watts to write his own hymns. He eventually published four verse collections including Horae Lyricae (two volumes, 1706) and The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament (1719). Watts read widely, wrote Latin and English theses, and made abridgements of standard works such as Burgersdicius's Institutiones logicae (Watt's brother Enoch gave Thomas Gibbons, Watts' friend and first biographer, his manuscript volumes). He was employed as a tutor in the family of Sir John Hartopp (1676); while there, he probably began to compose Logick.
Price: $2,000.00