Joseph Priestley: “Enlightenment Man”

Apparatus for impregnating water with fixed air, Joseph Priestley, 1772 (detail)

If anyone does, Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) warrants the description “Renaissance man.” But, to avoid confusion, since Priestley lived a couple of centuries after the Renaissance, let me argue here that this “Enlightenment man,” as much or more than any “Renaissance man,” took all knowledge as his purview. And then he added a list of new disciplines including (for example) psychology, education, demography, sociology, economics, and geology.