The 18th-Century Search for the Soul

In the quiet village of Rawdon in West Yorkshire in 1684 an old man called Henry Layton (1622-1705) began to have doubts about the immortality of his soul. In the same year he sponsored the building of a local church and drafted a five-volume treatise on practical theology. But by the time he died two decades later, Layton had written some 1,500 pages arguing that if humans had souls, they were no more than material substances that perished with the body. Despite having been ‘nursed, taught, and educated’ in the dogma of the soul’s immortality, ‘in a mature and decaying age’ (his early sixties) he now found himself convinced of what he called ‘the Material Opinion’. Around his 70th birthday Layton became the first person to publicly identify as a materialist, a term of abuse associated with atheism that historians have assumed was first used positively only in the radical Enlightenment.