necessarianism

Scholars working on Joseph Priestley have begun to take a proper measure of his philosophical position, known as “necessarianism,” a psychological determinism based on the teachings of the midcentury physician and theologian David Hartley—with, in Priestley′s own case, the addition of materialism. To its enemies, necessarianism seemed rank fatalism, but its adherents found that it both explained the evils about them and offered a sovereign remedy (generally through one or another variety of education) to resolve them and bring mankind to perfection.