First edition. Hancock’s study of the relationship between the mind and the soul is essentially a Quaker’s digestion of Locke, drawing heavily on Locke’s system of perception and his views on education. Hancock follows Locke’s conception of the mind as a tabula rasa capable of creating thoughts from nothing, but argues that the occurrence of ideas is by the stimulus of outward sensations, directed, crucially, by an innate instinct for reason and benevolence. Hancock ascribes the phenomenon of this instinctive ‘self-love’ and the existence of a natural moral conscience, which he equates to the existence of reason in mankind, to divine intervention and not education. There are some things, he argues, which cannot be taught; and each individual’s mind has a natural proclivity for some things and not for others. Christians, for example, have the greatest proclivity to goodness and truth. John Rees was a Bristol bookseller and stationer active in the 1820s, who also sold medicines and at one time lotteries, and is known to have operated a circulating library.