Abstract

In this paper I aim to explain the approach to the nature and aims of logic in the work of Isaac Watts (1674–1748): Logick: Or, the Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth (1725). I discuss Watts’s notion that the guidance and regulation of the acts and powers of the mind is the proper province of logic, as well as the pedagogical ambitions of his logical works. I focus on the cure of the imagination, which is one member of the more general cure of the intellectual powers that logic under this description seeks. I also provide the historical contexts that are apt to illuminate these features of an early Enlightenment logic: I situate Watts within the early modern development of an approach to logic as a therapeutic art of thinking; and I suggest that the pedagogical nature of Watts’s work is indebted to a specific tradition of Protestant practical divinity that fed into the pedagogical practices of early eighteenth-century English religious dissent, which Watts embraced.