Interference and stagnation are equated in exactly similar fashion to Adam Smith and his followers.

Priestley, of course, was inconsistent in urging at the outset that government is the chief instrument of progress; but what he seems to mean is less that government has the future in its hands than that government action may well be decisive for good or evil.

Typical, too, of the later Benthamism is his glorification of reason as the great key which is to unlock all doors.

That is, of course, natural in a scientist who had himself made discoveries of vital import; but it was characteristic also of a school which scanned a limitless horizon with serene confidence in a future of unbounded good.

Even if it be said that Priestley has all the vices of that rationalism which, as with Bentham, oversimplifies every problem it encounters, it is yet adequate to retort that a confidence in the energies of men was better than the complacent stagnation of the previous age.
It is difficult to measure the precise influence that Priestley exerted; certainly among Nonconformists it cannot have been small.