Clarke Samuel (1675–1729), English philosopher, preacher, and theologian. Born in Norwich, he was educated at Cambridge, where he came under the influence of Newton. Upon graduation Clarke entered the established church, serving for a time as chaplain to Queen Anne. He spent the last twenty years of his life as rector of St. James, Westminster.
Clarke wrote extensively on controversial theological and philosophical issues – the nature of space and time, proofs of the existence of God, the doctrine of the Trinity, the incorporeality and natural immortality of the soul, freedom of the will, the nature of morality, etc. His most philosophical works are his Boyle lectures of 1704 and 1705, in which he developed a forceful version of the cosmological argument for the existence and nature of God and attacked the views of Hobbes, Spinoza, and some proponents of deism; his correspondence with Leibniz (1715–16), in which he defended Newton’s views of space and time and charged Leibniz with holding views inconsistent with free will; and his writings against Anthony Collins, in which he defended a libertarian view of the agent as the undetermined cause of free actions and attacked Collins’s arguments for a materialistic view of the mind. In these works Clarke maintains a position of extreme rationalism, contending that the existence and nature of God can be conclusively demonstrated, that the basic principles of morality are necessarily true and immediately knowable, and that the existence of a future state of rewards and punishments is assured by our knowledge that God will reward the morally just and punish the morally wicked.
See also HOBBES, LEIBNIZ , PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION , SPINOZ. W.L.R.