1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Porter, Noah

PORTER, NOAH (1811-1892), American educationalist and philosophical writer, was born in Farmington, Connecticut, on the 14th of December 1811. He graduated at Yale College, 1831, and laboured as a Congregational minister in Connecticut and Massachusetts, 1836-1846. He was elected professor of moral philosophy and metaphysics at Yale in 1846, and from 1871 to 1886 he was president of the college. He edited several editions of Noah Webster's English dictionary, and wrote on education, &c. His best-known work is The Human Intellect, with an Introduction upon Psychology and the Human Soul (1868), comprehending a general history of philosophy, and following in part the "common-sense" philosophy of the Scottish school, while accepting the Kantian doctrine of intuition, and declaring the notion of design to be a priori. He died in New Haven on the 4th of March 1892.