Richard Burthogge, the English physician and idealist philosopher, was born in Plymouth. After taking an arts degree at Lincoln College, Oxford, he studied medicine at the University of Leiden and returned to his native country to practice near Totnes in Devonshire. Of pacific and conciliatory disposition, he seems to have wavered in the religious controversy between Catholicism and Puritanism, and in philosophy, between Lockean sensationalism and Cambridge Platonism. He distinguished between heresy and error, maintaining that the former "must be eradicated," but the latter tolerated for humanity's sake. His life is obscure, and little is known of it beyond that information revealed in his writings, which have a certain importance as anticipations of Immanuel Kant.

We know the world, according to Burthogge, only through our own ideas, and these do not give us its real nature. On the contrary, our...