Charles Morton (15 February 1627 – 11 April 1698) was a British nonconformist minister and founder of an early dissenting academy, later in life associated in New England with Harvard College.
[2][3][4][5] As a result, Compendium Physicae is now considered to be semi-scientific, and although the work contains then-modern references to Galileo, Torricelli, and gravity, his ancient/medieval Aristotelian approach was eventually replaced by Newtonian mechanics (Principia was also published in 1687).
In 1655 Morton was appointed to the rectory of Blisland in Cornwall, but he was ejected after the 1662 Act of Uniformity, whereupon he retired to a small tenement, his own property, in St Ive.
A few years later he ran at Newington Green, in those days a village north of London, the leading school for Dissenters,[8] "probably on the site of the current Unitarian church".
[9] The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography judges Morton's "probably the most impressive of the dissenting academies [prior to 1685], enrolling as many as fifty pupils at a time".
The ODNB goes on to describe its advanced and varied curriculum (religion, classics, history, geography, mathematics, natural science, politics, and modern languages) and a well-equipped laboratory, and even "a bowling green for recreation".
Samuel Wesley the elder, a contemporary of Defoe's, described his teacher "as universal in his learning",[11] but in 1703 attacked the dissenting academies, including Morton's, in his ‘Letter from a Country Divine'.
Lectures on philosophy which he read in his own rooms were attended by several students from the college, and one or two discontented scholars desired to become inmates of his house, but these proceedings gave offence to the governing body.
His name is the second of the petitioners to the council on 2 October 1693 for some encouragement to a system of propagating Christianity among the Native Americans, and his was the senior signature to an association for mutual assistance among the ministers of New England.
By his will, dated November 1697, he left money to Harvard; his houses and lands at Charlestown and in Cornwall with the rest of his property passed to his two nephews, Charles and John Morton, and his niece in equal shares.
A Logick System is transcribed by Rick Kennedy in "Aristotelian and Cartesian Logic at Harvard," "Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts" vol.