Browne, Peter (1666–1735)

Peter Browne, an Irish bishop, was a critic of Locke’s theory of ideas. His chief philosophical concern was to explain how human beings can conceive of God. He proposed that God’s existence and attributes can be understood analogically, by their real – though inevitably partial – resemblance to human things. He distinguished between analogy, which turns on a ‘real resemblance’, and metaphor, which turns on a merely imagined one.