John Norris, the English philosopher and disciple of Nicolas Malebranche, was associated with the Cambridge Platonists. Norris was born in Collingbourne-Kingston, Wiltshire. His father was a clergyman and at that time a Puritan. Educated at Winchester and at Exeter College, Oxford, which he entered in 1676, Norris was appointed a fellow of All Souls in 1680. During his nine years at All Souls, he was ordained (1684) and began to write, mostly in a Platonic vein and often in verse. In 1683 he published Tractatus adversus Reprobationis absolutae Decretum, in which he attacked the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. His Platonism and anti-Calvinism naturally attracted Norris to the Cambridge Platonists; in 1684 he began to correspond with Henry More and Damaris Cudworth, the daughter of Ralph Cudworth.

The philosophical essays included in Poems and Discourses (1684)—renamed A Collection of Miscellanies in the 1687 and subsequent editions—could, indeed, have been written...