John Taylor

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John Taylor (1753-1824), American politician and political theorist, was a major spokesman for southern agrarian, planter society.

John Taylor was born in Virginia in December 1753. His parents died while he was a child, and he was raised by his uncle, Edmund Pendleton. Taylor attended William and Mary College (1770-1772), read law in Pendleton's office (1772-1774), and then began to practice law.

At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Taylor joined the Virginia militia and then the Continental Army. He soon became a major. When the Continental Army was reduced in 1779, he resigned and returned home. In 1783 he married Lucy Penn, the daughter of a wealthy North Carolina planter. His legal practice prospered during the next 10 years, and building on his wife's properties, he acquired a number of plantations. By 1792 Taylor was able to devote all of his time to his two major interests: scientific agriculture and public office.

From 1779 to 1785 and again from 1796 to 1800, Taylor sat in the Virginia House of Delegates. He served as a U.S. senator in 1792-1794, 1803, and 1822-1824. He early allied himself with the emerging Jeffersonian Republican party. During the 1790s he strongly opposed the financial program of Alexander Hamilton. Toward the end of the decade Taylor introduced James Madison's famous resolutions condemning the Alien and Sedition Acts in the Virginia Assembly. In 1800 he worked enthusiastically for Thomas Jefferson's election.

By about 1808, however, Taylor had become disillusioned with Jefferson's administration, accusing it of abandoning its original principles of agrarianism and states' rights. During Madison's two terms as president, Taylor moved even more sharply into opposition, speaking out vigorously against the War of 1812 and its centralizing consequences - the increased national debt, tax program, and expanded armed forces.

Much of Taylor's lasting significance rests with his published writings. Unsystematic and tedious, they nonetheless offer a cogent criticism of Hamiltonian Federalist policies and a defense of the South's agrarian, states'-rights philosophy. Among his most important publications are An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (1814) and Constructions Construed and Constitutions Vindicated (1820). Linked with these were his Arator essays (1803), suggesting agricultural reforms necessary for southern equality in the struggle against northern interests. He died on Aug. 21, 1824, at his plantation home, Hazelwood, in Virginia.

Further Reading

The modern biography of Taylor is by Henry Simms, Life of John Taylor (1932), which provides an adequate introduction to his life and thought. Eugene Mudge, The Social Philosophy of John Taylor of Caroline (1939), offers a more systematic treatment of Taylor's political and economic thought. A valuable discussion of Taylor's political activities, set in the context of the Old Republican movement, is in Norman Risjord, The Old Republicans: Southern Conservatism (1965).

Additional Sources

Shalhope, Robert E., John Taylor of Caroline: pastoral republican, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1980.

Simms, Henry Harrison, Life of John Taylor: the story of a brilliant leader in the early Virginia state rights school, Littleton, Colo.: F.B. Rothman, 1992.

Professor of applied mathematics at King's College, London, England, who was the first British scientist to investigate the phenomena of Uri Geller. Taylor was born on August 18, 1931, in Hayes, Kent. He won his way into Christ's College, Cambridge at age 16; at 18 he enrolled at Mid-Essex Technical College, where he took his B.Sc. in general science. He completed a three-year mathematics degree course in two years at Cambridge and passed with first class honors. His academic career has included visiting professorships in the United States as well as being Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Southampton and a post at King's College, London.

When Uri Geller visited Britain in 1974, Taylor conducted scientific tests of Geller's feats of metal bending and interference with a Geiger counter. Taylor also experimented with some of the children and adults who manifested paranormal abilities after seeing Uri Geller's appearances on British television programs. Taylor's interest in such phenomena was not only in its scientific validation, but also in investigation of the way in which such phenomena take place and the nature of the forces involved. He suggested the phenomena may be some low-frequency electromagnetic effect generated by human beings.

Through the 1970s Taylor was regarded as fully endorsing the paranormal metal bending of Uri Geller, but gradually has made more guarded statements; then in 1980 he largely retracted his support for Geller's paranormal talents. In 1974 he noted, "The Geller effect—of metal-bending—is clearly not brought about by fraud. It is so exceptional it presents a crucial challenge to modern science and could even destroy the latter if no explanation became available." Taylor then spent three years of careful investigation of such phenomena as psychokinesis, metal bending, and dowsing, but could not discover any reasonable scientific explanation or validation that satisfied him. He was particularly concerned to establish whether there is an electromagnetic basis for such phenomena. After failing to find this he did not believe that there was any other explanation that would suffice. Most of his experiments under laboratory conditions were negative; this left him in a skeptical position regarding the validity of claimed phenomena.

In contrast to the endorsement in his first book on psi,Superminds, he published a paper expressing his doubts in a paper in Nature (November 2, 1978) titled "Can Electromagnetism Account for Extra-sensory Phenomena?" He followed this with his book Science and the Supernatural (1980) in which he expressed complete skepticism about every aspect of the paranormal. In his final chapter he stated: "We have searched for the supernatural and not found it. In the main, only poor experimentation [including his own], shoddy theory, and human gull-ibility have been encountered."

Taylor's new position seems to stem from his failure to find an electromagnetic explanation for paranormal phenomena. In his new book he stated: "We therefore have to accept that when science faces up to the supernatural, it is a case of 'electro-magnetism or bust.' " In contrast, John Hasted, another British scientist who has tested Uri Geller, continues to support the reality of the Geller effect and also believes that there is evidence of an electromagnetic field in the phenomenon.

Sources:

Berger, Arthur S., and Joyce Berger. The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

Taylor, John The Horizons of Knowledge. N.p., 1982.

——. Science and the Supernatural. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980.

——. The Shape of Minds to Come. N.p., 1971.

——. Superminds. London: Macmillan, 1975.