The only claim to philosophical fame John Norris of Bemerton seems to have is that he was the first English respondent to John Locke's An Essay concerning Humane Understanding (1690). To some extent, this lack of reputation is a result of Norris's subordination of his own philosophical thinking to that of the French empirical idealist Nicolas Malebranche (1638- 1715). Norris's An Essay Towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World (1701, 1704) is, in fact, so dominated by extensive quotations from Malebranche (and from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas) that whatever is original in Norris's thinking is all but lost. And to some extent, Norris's eclipse is the result of having chosen the wrong side: the triumph of Locke over René Descartes in eighteenth-century Britain was almost total, and, indeed, one could argue that the very notion of "French philosophy" has hardly yet fully recovered its status across the...