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CLAVIS UNIVERSALIS

records give the birth of the eldest child as October 13, 1707. Of his children little is known. Two sons and two daughters survived him; and one of the latter, Jane Collier, is known as the writer of a clever book called "The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting."[1] Owing to financial difficulties during the latter part of his life, he finally sold the "reversion of Langford Rectory to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, for sixteen hundred guineas."

That Collier had little care for the practical matters of everyday life can easily be believed, but his intense interest in matters ecclesiastical and theological is evidenced by his activity in church politics and by the close union of his philosophical and religious beliefs. His philosophical system was to be the "universal key" by which to unlock the secrets of the Scriptures. Yet his sermons have no suggestion of his theory.[2] Indeed, at this period, only his manuscript works and his letters contain his exposition of the idealistic theory which so absorbed him. Among his papers there is an "outline of an essay, in three chapters, on the question of the visible world being without us or not," dated January, 1708. Dated 1712, are "two essays, still in manuscript, one on substance and accident, and the other termed 'Clavis Philosophica.'"[3] In 1713, he published the "Clavis Universalis, or a new In-

  1. ↑ Benson's "Memoirs,” p. 162.
  2. ↑ Benson's "Memoirs," p. 139.
  3. ↑ Benson's "Memoirs," p. 18.
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