Romantic Empiricism: Poetics and the Philosophy of Common Sense, 1780-1830 9780838757123, 9780838759318, 0838759319

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Empiricism, Romanticism, and the Politics of Common Sense
Bibliography
Contributors
Index.

Citation preview

Romantic Empiricism

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The Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture General Editor:

Greg Clingham, Bucknell University

Advisory Board:

Paul K. Alkon, University of Southern California Chloe Chard, Independent Scholar Clement Hawes, The Pennsylvania State University Robert Markley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Jessica Munns, University of Denver Cedric D. Reverand II, University of Wyoming Janet Todd, University of Aberdeen

The Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture aims to publish challenging, new eighteenth-century scholarship. Of particular interest is critical, historical, and interdisciplinary work that is interestingly and intelligently theorized, and that broadens and refines the conception of the field. At the same time, the series remains open to all theoretical perspectives and different kinds of scholarship. While the focus of the series is the literature, history, arts, and culture (including art, architecture, music, travel, and history of science, medicine, and law) of the long eighteenth century in Britain and Europe, the series is also interested in scholarship that establishes relationships with other geographies, literature, and cultures for the period 1660–1830. Recent Titles in This Series Chris Mounsey, ed., Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early Modern Culture Fre´de´ric Oge´e, ed., ‘‘Better in France?’’: The Circulation of Ideas across the Channel in the Eighteenth Century Roland Racevskis, Time and Ways of Knowing Under Louis XIV: Molie`re, Se´vigne´, Lafayette Laura Rosenthal and Mita Choudhury, eds., Monstrous Dreams of Reason Katherine West Scheil, The Taste of the Town: Shakespearian Comedy and the Early Eighteenth-Century Theater Philip Smallwood, ed., Johnson Re-Visioned: Looking Before and After Peter Walmsley, Locke’s Essay and the Rhetoric of Science Lisa Wood, Modes of Discipline: Women, Conservatism, and the Novel after the French Revolution Mark Blackwell, ed., The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England Chris Mounsey and Caroline Gonda, eds., Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700–1800 Susan Manning and Peter France, Enlightenment and Emancipation Evan Gottlieb, Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832 Roland Racevskis, Tragic Passages: Jean Racine’s Art of the Threshold Lesley H. Walker, A Mother’s Love: Crafting Feminine Virtue in Enlightenment France Ron Broglio, Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments, 1750–1830 Will Pritchard, Outward Appearances: The Female Exterior in Restoration London David Duff and Catherine Jones, eds., Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic Anne Milne, ‘‘Lactilla Tends her Fav’rite Cow’’: Ecocritical Readings of Animals and Women in Eighteenth-Century British Laboring-Class Women’s Poetry Gavin Budge, ed., Romantic Empiricism: Poetics and the Philosophy of Common Sense, 1780–1830

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Romantic Empiricism Poetics and the Philosophy of Common Sense, 1780–1830

Edited by

Gavin Budge

Lewisburg Bucknell University Press

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䉷 2007 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [978-0-8387-5712-3/07 $10.00 Ⳮ 8 ¢ pp, pc.]

Associated University Presses 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Romantic empiricism : poetics and the philosophy of common sense, 1780–1830 / edited by Gavin Budge. p. cm. — (The Bucknell studies in eighteenth-century literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8387-5712-3 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism 2. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Romanticism—Great Britain. 4. Empiricism in literature. 5. Scottish common sense philosophy. I. Budge, Gavin. II. Title. III. Series. PR447.R68 2007 820.9⬘145—dc22 2007033200

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Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Empiricism, Romanticism, and the Politics of Common Sense GAVIN BUDGE ‘‘Kant has not answered Hume’’: Empiricism and the Romantic Imagination CAIRNS CRAIG Robert Burns and Scottish Common Sense Philosophy NIGEL LEASK Elizabeth Hamilton’s Letters on Education: Common Sense Alternatives to Scepticism and Their Aesthetic Consequences FIONA PRICE The Law of Contract in Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House ALEX DICK Indigestion and Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought GAVIN BUDGE Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

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Acknowledgments THIS COLLECTION HAD ITS DISTANT ORIGINS IN A CONFERENCE ORGAnized at the University of Central England in Birmingham in 1996, and I would like to thank the keynote speakers, Tom Furniss, Paul Hamilton, Gary Kelly, and David Worrall, and others who participated. I would also like to thank Conrad Brunstro¨m, Scott Masson, and Sebastian Mitchell for their input during the collection’s gestation. I am grateful for the helpful and fair-minded comments of the anonymous reader who reviewed later versions of the collection for Bucknell University Press.

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Romantic Empiricism

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Introduction: Empiricism, Romanticism, and the Politics of Common Sense Gavin Budge

IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY CRITICAL TRADITION, ROMANTICISM WAS often understood as a break with ‘‘empiricism.’’ This was a tendency that became particularly pronounced after the publication of M. H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), and was reflected in the way ‘‘empiricism’’ was employed as a wholly negative term in 1980s critical theory. Recently, however, the literary critical fortunes of ‘‘empiricism’’ have begun to change, with the appearance of studies such as Alan Richardson’s British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (2001), which are influenced by recent developments in neuroscience. It now seems timely to reflect upon the relationship between the British ‘‘empiricist’’ tradition and Romantic culture—an undertaking that promises to go some way toward reconnecting literary critical discourse with the challenges of our Anglo-American cultural moment. ‘‘Empiricism’’ and its cognates are placed within quotes in the preceding paragraph in order to signal that one of the major obstacles facing any reexamination of Romanticism’s indebtedness to the empiricist tradition is the way the critical tradition has defined British ‘‘empiricism’’ in opposition to a philosophical idealism assumed to originate in Germany. If the Romantic Imagination is characterized, as it has been by many critics, as essentially ‘‘idealist,’’ then ‘‘empiricism’’ is made by contrast to seem ‘‘un-Romantic’’—a logic of exclusion which echoes the designation of certain political activities as ‘‘un-American.’’1 The nonposivitist ‘‘classical empiricism’’2 deriving from eighteenth-century thought with which this essay collection is concerned, however, cannot be legitimately opposed to philosophical idealism in this way, because it is precisely the tradition out of which philosophical idealism grew. The very fact that it is possible to characterize David Hume, the quintessential representative of British ‘‘empiricism,’’ as, philosophically speaking, an ‘‘idealist,’’ ought to be enough to put paid to this kind of facile generalization.3 11

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This ambivalent relationship between empiricism and idealism can be seen to be internal to the Anglo-American philosophical tradition in the nineteenth century, shaped as it is by the so-called Common Sense school of Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, Thomas Brown, and, slightly later, William Hamilton. Though neglected by contemporary critics, these philosophers possessed profound intellectual importance for nineteenth-century European thought, of a kind that makes modern critical dismissals of the British intellectual context as ‘‘parochial’’ simply unjustifiable in historical terms.4 As Roy Porter has noted, Anglophone intellectual life in the Romantic period has been neglected owing to ‘‘the intellectualist fallacy dear to academics who . . . prize ‘profundity’ above all and rate dead thinkers on an abstrusity scale.’’5 Whatever the intrinsic intellectual significance of the Common Sense school, which is currently being reevaluated, its historical influence on early nineteenthcentury thought is undeniable, in a way that makes it an important context for the study of British Romanticism; nor should it be assumed that great literary achievements always stem from thinking that academic philosophers would agree in finding philosophically significant. Despite David Simpson’s arguments in his 1993 study Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt against Theory, Common Sense philosophy should not automatically be dismissed as politically reactionary and blindly nationalistic, since, as Nigel Leask shows in the present volume, both Thomas Reid and his pupil Dugald Stewart were strongly associated with political radicalism in the 1790s. In postrevolutionary France, Common Sense philosophy became, under Victor Cousin, the official state philosophy for much of the nineteenth century, displacing the philosophy of Ide´ologues such as Destutt de Tracy,6 which had been tainted by assocation with the Terror, and influencing the aesthetic thought of Baudelaire and, ultimately, Proust.7 Among the Italians, as a ground-breaking paper by Brian and Rebecca Copenhaver has shown, Common Sense philosophy provided the theoretical basis for the political reunification of Italy,8 and the influence of Scottish thinkers can be traced in the notebooks of Leopardi.9 The pervasiveness of the Common Sense tradition is also apparent in the United States, where the Transcendentalist movement and Emerson’s early thought were significantly influenced by Common Sense philosophy,10 which was also important to the early philosophical pragmatism of C. S. Peirce11 and represented a formative influence on the founding of the American university system,12 whilst in addition underpinning Poe’s explorations of the thematics of perversity.13 In the Germanspeaking world, Manfred Kuehn has shown that Hamann, Herder,

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Kant, and Jacobi owed much to Common Sense philosophy, as did Hegel.14 The international dimension of the Common Sense tradition raises the possibility of a comparative study of the philosophical and political allegiances of Romanticism of a kind that has not so far been attempted. It also reveals the limitations of existing comparativist studies of Romanticism, from Abrams to the present day, that effectively assume that all Romantic ideas must have originated in German philosophy,15 a position that can only be sustained by silently equating European Romanticism with German Romanticism and ignoring other significant national traditions, such as that of France. The role played by Common Sense philosophy in the articulation of various nationalisms testifies to its ability simultaneously to accommodate both epistemological and ontological perspectives on experience in a way that makes it closely akin to the poetics of Romanticism.16 As Lyotard has argued, ‘‘grand narratives’’ such as nationalism derive their legitimating power from a performativity that integrates third- and first-person discursive instances, and so constructs an enunciative subject-position in which the communication of information is inevitably combined with phatic reaffirmation of a group identity or project.17 Philosophical discourse within the Common Sense tradition shares this characteristic, in that even while setting out sophisticated analyses of mental processes it reaffirms the governance of thought by the ultimate and unanalysable principles of ‘‘common sense,’’ to which everyone must unavoidably subscribe.18 In this context, the fact that Common Sense philosophy, as Cairns Craig’s essay in the present volume points out, finds no difficulty in accommodating associationist analyses of experience, is highly significant, illustrating as it does the way in which the Common Sense tradition represents a ‘‘meta-philosophy’’19 in which even the radical epistemological scepticism of Hume can be ‘‘framed’’ so as to provide confirmation of the ontological truth of the principles of ‘‘common sense.’’20 In keeping with recent deconstructive and New Historicist challenges to the Coleridgean distinction between Imagination and Fancy on which much Romantic criticism has been based, Craig identifies in the persistence of associationist arguments within the nineteenth-century critical tradition evidence that the ‘‘Coleridgean conception of the imagination’’ is ‘‘an ideologically motivated evasion of . . . the deconstructive rigour of Hume’s scepticism,’’ arguing that associationism offers an alternative to the ahistorical model of critical authority invoked by Coleridge through its implicit temporal narrative of ‘‘successive memories,’’ which Craig identifies with the sense of national identity.

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Significantly, as commentators have pointed out,21 both the ahistorical typological worldview that Craig finds characteristic of Coleridge’s interpretation of the Bible and that is developed in Keble’s poetic theory,22 and the more secular communitarian perspective linked by Craig with nationalism of the kind represented by Walter Scott, can be accommodated within Thomas Reid’s foundational appeal to ‘‘common sense,’’ which invokes principles that are simultaneously transcendent and form the basis of human society. This kind of ambiguity, as I have argued elsewhere,23 forms the basis for the Victorian ‘‘sage discourse’’ of Carlyle and Ruskin, where art and human society simultaneously embody the transcendent while being historically situated. Common Sense philosophy represents an intellectual context within which the disintegrative tendencies of empiricism are combined in a more or less uneasy solution with the ontological imperatives of the moral law, and it is this inherent duality in the tradition, as well as its intellectual importance in the nineteenth century, which justifies this collection’s focus on Common Sense philosophy as representative of a distinctively Romantic empiricism. The Common Sense thinker who perhaps best represents this duality is Thomas Brown, whose impressive and widely read Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, published in 1820 and frequently reprinted, set out an epistemological framework in which a Humean analysis of physical causality as nothing more than ‘‘constant conjunction’’ is married to an intuitionist account of moral impulses as self-evidently necessary behavioural motivations. The sphere of the moral becomes the source of motivations that are radically unanalysable in the terms of a scientific epistemology, and thus comes to represent an early nineteenth-century version of the unconscious, a development that can be seen in the thought of J. H. Newman,24 whose description of rationalism as a kind of mania25 anticipates the cultural critique of Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Ernest Tuveson’s claims, in The Imagination as a Means of Grace, for the emergence of the category of the unconscious as coeval with empiricist discourse would only have been strengthened by greater attention to the Common Sense tradition, with which many of the writers he cites, such as Burke, Alison, Fuseli, and Stewart, have important affiliations. For example, E. S. Dallas’s pioneering 1866 treatise on the role of the unconscious in aesthetics, The Gay Science, cites Thomas Brown among its philosophical precursors.26 The origins of Brown’s philosophy in a defence of John Leslie’s scientific account of heat27 indicates the significant contribution made by the Common Sense tradition to nineteenth-century scientific debate, as

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studied by Richard Olson,28 a context that, as Daniel Brown has shown is central to understanding of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s late-Romantic poetics.29 Thomas Reid’s ground-breaking anticipation of Boole’s nonEuclidean geometry,30 for instance, is a central point of reference in the long-running debate between Charles Wheatstone, inventor of the stereoscope, and the eminent Victorian scientist Sir David Brewster, over the nature of stereoscopic vision.31 Similarly Richard Yeo has drawn attention to the important influence that Common Sense philosophy exerted over William Whewell’s conception of his philosophy of science, as it was elaborated over the 1840s.32 Despite the apparently Kantian appeal to ‘‘Ideas’’ as fundamental intuitions of the mind with which Whewell’s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences opens, Robert E. Butts has noted Whewell’s clearly non-Kantian characterization of ‘‘each of his Fundamental Ideas as . . . a non-subjective, extra-mental ontological reality,’’33 in a way that shows Whewell’s notion of ‘‘Ideas’’ to resemble the ‘‘principles of common sense’’ to which the Common Sense school appealed. A similar point could be made about the appeal of Whewell’s quondam associate S. T. Coleridge to ‘‘Ideas’’ in such writings as On the Constitution of Church and State. The problematics of an ontological dimension represented by physical science, or bodily drives, as the ‘‘dark interpreter’’ of idealist epistemology with which recent Romantic critics have engaged,34 is thus already thematized within the Common Sense tradition. De Quincey’s interest in Kant’s addiction to obsessively maintained bodily regimens, for example, which is examined by David L. Clark, exhibits a preoccupation with the psychopathology of extreme rationalism that corresponds to Thomas Reid’s argument that philosophical scepticism, if consistently acted upon, would result in behaviour indistinguishable from that of a madman;35 de Quincey would doubtless have been familiar with the Scottish tradition through his family connections with James Currie and his circle in Liverpool,36 whose interest in Reid’s philosophy Nigel Leask’s essay explores in this volume. Coleridge’s interest in the Abernethy/Lawrence debate over whether life could be described as resulting from the material organization of the body or had to be understood in terms of a superadded immaterial principle, which has been situated within a German Idealist framework by Tilottama Rajan,37 can convincingly be viewed as responding to the aporetic relationship between the philosophical determinism represented by Priestley and the Common Sense school’s insistence on divine intentionality;38 the currency of the Common Sense school among medical thinkers at

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the time is shown by references in the work of well-known figures such as Alexander Crichton,39 John Abercrombie,40 and Erasmus Darwin.41 Boswell’s description of Dr. Johnson affirming his allegiance to Reid and Beattie by ‘‘striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it’’42 brings out the extent to which appeals to the body played a central role in Common Sense philosophy. An emphasis on the legibility of the body43 closely connects the Common Sense tradition with a number of late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury sciences and pseudo-sciences whose relevance to the study of Romanticism is only just beginning to be appreciated. The mystical intuitionism of Lavaterian physiognomy,44 for example, is closely akin to Reid’s argument that all language is derived from natural bodily signs whose meaning is providentially guaranteed,45 while Charles Bell’s more materialist account of bodily expression, in its emphasis on language as the defining characteristic of the human, also reflects the emphases of Common Sense philosophy,46 with which Bell’s Scottish educational background would have made him familiar. Nigel Leask’s essay in this collection, ‘‘Robert Burns and Scottish Common Sense Philosophy,’’ suggests that the seemingly idealized figure of the Romantic genius, as theorized by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, D’Israeli, and Carlyle, originates in an empiricist emphasis on the bodily materiality of the nerves in Currie’s Life of Burns. As Leask shows, Currie understands Burns’s predicament in terms of a failure of that will which was central to the voluntarist ethics of Thomas Reid, leaving Burns subject to the escalating demands for ‘‘stimulants’’ of an unregulated bodily sensibility that resulted in his alcoholism. Currie links Burns’s addiction, which is described in the terms of Brunonian medicine, to the effect of poetic composition in overstimulating his nerves, and Leask argues persuasively that many of the formulations of the ‘‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’’ are directed against Currie’s view that poetry is essentially unhealthy, something that raises the intriguing possibility, in view of later nineteenth-century emphasis on Wordsworthian ‘‘health,’’ that Wordsworth’s poetics might be intrinsically therapeutic in orientation. The lasting influence of Currie’s account of poetry in terms of addiction can be seen from the fact that his account of Burns was still being cited by F. W. Robertson in 1853, with Coleridge as a supporting example.47 Even Darwin, the chief medical thinker with whom Rajan links Coleridge, couches his theory as a rewriting of empiricist philosophy, whose already existing links with medicine48 he deepens, and Thomas Beddoes, a close associate of Coleridge in the 1790s and possessor of the

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largest library of German literature in Britain at that time, explicitly declares his antipathy to ‘‘modern Kantianism.’’49 While Coleridge himself seems to have turned to German idealism out of dissatisfaction with Scottish philosophy, his discussion of the philosophical impasse represented by Priestley’s determinist associationism in the Biographia Literaria reveals that he anticipated considerable familiarity with the Common Sense school on the part of his readers,50 so that it is a valid hermeneutic strategy to situate his encounters with German idealist thought within the context of reception represented by the Romantic empiricism of Common Sense philosophy, a context in which both Coleridge and his readers were immersed. My own essay in this volume, ‘‘Indigestion and Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought,’’ situates a key theme in Coleridge’s definition of Romanticism, usually attributed to German Idealist influence, within an early nineteenth-century medical discourse informed by philosophical empiricism; my argument is in substantial agreement with Rajan’s claim that the ‘‘organizing trope’’ of the Biographia Literaria is ‘‘health,’’51 but I show that this trope does not necessarily need to be understood in terms of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. The interest of critics such as Clark and Rajan in rethinking German Idealist philosophy in relation to the ontological through an emphasis on various kinds of physicality reflects, of course, the influence of Nietzsche, the importance of the body to whose thought has been studied by Kirsten Brown,52 and David F Krell,53 among others. It should not be overlooked, however, that this turn to the ontological reflects Nietzsche’s own interest in the empiricist tradition, as represented by such figures as J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Charles Darwin.54 In particular, Nietzsche’s scepticism about the truth-value of language, as expressed in his famous description of truth as ‘‘a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms,’’55 which has been so influential on recent critical analyses of the reflexive rhetorical and performative dimension of Romanticism, is strikingly anticipated within the Common Sense tradition. Reid draws attention, for example, to the essentially social nature of language,56 and suggests that philosophers need to redirect their attention away from the epistemological focus represented by purely propositional kinds of language in order to consider the nature of ontologically orientated verbal acts such as promising.57 This theoretical stance leads to a heightened degree of rhetorical self-awareness among writers in the Common Sense tradition, a dimension of reflexivity that can be compared to that exhibited by deconstructive theorists such as Derrida and that anticipates the ‘‘Romantic

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irony’’ of a Carlyle.58 Reid’s popularizer, James Beattie, and Reid’s pupil, Dugald Stewart, show themselves acutely conscious of the performativity of the act of philosophizing,59 an aspect of Reid’s thought on which Angela Esterhammer has commented.60 In this context, Deborah Elise White’s welcome reevaluation of Hazlitt’s political thought, in her 2000 study Romantic Returns, can be seen inadvertently to misrepresent his position for want of a sufficiently detailed understanding of British intellectual life, a failing shared with much other Romantic scholarship. White claims that Hazlitt ‘‘follows Hume in bringing empiricism to a crisis,’’61 suggesting that Hazlitt’s arguments reflect a quasi-Kantian preoccupation with ‘‘conditions of (im)possibility,’’62 despite the fact, not mentioned by White, that Hazlitt’s recorded response to Kantian thought was extremely negative.63 Hazlitt, then, for White is a Kantian despite himself, an argument on a par with suggesting that Richard Rorty is ‘‘really’’ a Rawlsian because both thinkers analyse the nature of political rationality. I do not want to single out White’s mostly excellent study for criticism, but to suggest that the overgeneralized nature of the analysis applied by many Romantic critics to the British empiricist tradition can often be seriously misleading. After all, the sustained philosophical critique of Hume’s version of empiricism mounted by the Common Sense school had been available to British readers for some forty years before Hazlitt wrote The Principles of Human Action, so ‘‘bringing empiricism to a crisis’’ would scarcely be an interesting or politically valuable thing for Hazlitt to be doing. Where Hazlitt’s arguments are original is in critiquing the status of the temporal continuity of the self to be regarded as one of the Common Sense school’s ‘‘principles of common sense,’’ an intervention that is particularly politically significant in that it is intended to disrupt the nascent discourse of political economy that Dugald Stewart was promoting. The discourse of Common Sense philosophy mediates between epistemological and ontological perspectives in a way that allows it to function as a kind of proto-sociology, a characteristic that it owes to its origins in eighteenth-century theorizations of the relationship between church and state.64 As I have suggested in my essay on Coleridge in the present volume, the starkest example of the manner in which writers within the Common Sense tradition switch between two radically divergent stances toward experience can be found in their treatments of the supernatural, in which rationalistic analyses of apparitions as perceptual phenomena jostle with pietistic appeals to religious belief.65 Epistemologically incommensurable modes of explanation are held within the

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same frame, a strategy to be found in the supernatural narratives of nineteenth-century authors such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton and John Polidori, where the uncanny theme of the double can be seen to reflect the epistemological dualism of the Common Sense tradition.66 The hesitation between epistemological and ontological frames of reference embodied by Common Sense philosophy corresponds to current critical interest in the category of the spectral that Marc Redfield, for example, identifies with the genre of Bildungsroman,67 similarly suspended between the epistemological perspective of the writer and the ontological perspective of the experiencing subject. Common Sense philosophy’s emphasis on the necessary limits of theoretical thought, and on the ungrounded nature of the assumptions implicit in human actions, leads to a problematizing of the nature of rationality that is closely akin to that of economic thought. The disjunction between the collective rationality of the market and the necessarily incomplete knowledge of economic actors within the market that Adam Smith bequeathed to later economists, is analogous to the disagreement between Hume and Reid over philosophy’s relationship to the intuitive ‘‘common sense’’ that enables us to participate in a social world.68 Whereas for Hume the comprehensive nature of philosophical rationality makes it necessarily at variance with the localized nature of any actual engagement with the world69 (in the same way as for Smith any individual economic decision is always to some extent in conflict with the perfect rationality of the market), Reid insists that philosophical rationality must be a this-worldly intervention, and so partial and incomplete,70 a stance that corresponds to the policy-orientated focus of Smithian political economy. While the collective model of rationality Smith invokes in The Wealth of Nations may appear to be closer to Hume’s thought, the appeal to a leap of signification on which the ethical theory of his other major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is based,71 echoes the Reidian account of the nature of perception72—it is worth noting in this context that Dugald Stewart was a major popularizer of Smithian economics.73 The ‘‘Adam Smith problem’’74 of disparity between the assumption of perfect rationality and a conception of rationality that is embedded in social context underlies Alex Dick’s essay on Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House in the present volume, in which he focusses on the shift in legal interpretations of that fundamental economic instrument, the contract, which took place in Britain during the late eighteenth century. The traditional legal hermeneutics of ‘‘consideration’’75 subordinated the details of a contract to social criteria of reasonable expectation,

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while the new emphasis, initiated by Lord Mansfield, on the written provisions of the contract implied an inherent logic to the act of contracting itself that outweighed expectations of individual parties and could not be set aside without damaging the economic basis of society. The notion of contract, as Dick shows, thus becomes a site where questions about the nature of rationality that are at once epistemological and political are played out. Central to the problem of the fundamental indeterminacy of the sources of contractual obligation to which Dick draws attention to in late eighteenth-century philosophical debates is again the ambiguous status of the foundational appeal to ‘‘common sense’’ on which Reidian philosophy is based. Drawing on David Simpson’s characterization of the Revolution debates as ‘‘two sides of the same common sense coin,’’ Dick shows that if ‘‘common sense’’ is defined purely as social consensus, then, as is revealed by Hume’s reliance on the traditional legal principle of ‘‘consideration’’ in his philosophical account of the basis of contract in convention, Hume is as much a philosopher of ‘‘common sense’’ as Reid.76 The Reidian appeal to ‘‘common sense’’, however, as Dick argues, invokes universal principles of language in a way that claims to transcend any particular and local understanding of what is meant by the language in which a contract is drawn up, so paving the way for Mansfield’s emphasis on ‘‘the binding nature of the medium of the contract’’ and Burke’s account of the English constitution as a contract that cannot be abrogated by changed circumstances. Dick’s analysis of The Old Manor House shows that the indeterminate relationship between these two accounts of contractual obligation, which ultimately reflects the indeterminacy of Common Sense philosophy’s own relationship to Humean scepticism,77 is reflected in Charlotte Smith’s novel by the indeterminate, or ‘‘spectral,’’ relationship between the aristocratic honor code and the bourgeois ‘‘sphere of trust and trade’’ in a way that anticipates the mid-Victorian ‘‘condition of England’’ novel and, I would add, Scott’s historical fiction. The conflict between a perfect rationality of the market, which Marx would later call exchange-value, and a socially embedded conception of practical reasonableness, which corresponds to the Marxian appeal to use-value, is inherent in Common Sense philosophy’s attempt to ground the interchangeable whirl of ideas and associations in fundamental and nonnegotiable intuitions, the so-called principles of common sense—it should not be forgotten that Marx, despite his Hegelianism, formulated his economic theory in response to a bourgeois political economy that had close ties with the Common Sense tradition. Derrida’s analysis of

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the condition of ‘‘spectrality’’ implicit in Marx’s descriptions of capital identifies a form of figuration in which tenor and vehicle resolutely refuse to coalesce, and that has been theorized by de Man and many subsequent critics as a mode of ‘‘allegory,’’ which exposes the Coleridgean organic symbol as an ideological fantasy. The dualism of Common Sense philosophy, in its emphasis on an absolute discontinuity between the material world of bodily sensation and the immaterial world of perception and spiritual intuition,78 brings this tradition very close to contemporary critical accounts of the sliding of the ideological signifier over the signified. Timothy Morton’s eloquent description of the ‘‘poetics of spice’’ as ‘‘rather like an emulsion: the two elements of materiality and figurality . . . not dissolved into each other but . . . really a vigorous blending of two distinct principles, a materially dense quality and a fluid, empty quality,’’79 could be compared, for example, to Thomas Reid’s sense of the philosophical slipperiness of Hume’s deployment of material metaphors for an immaterial mind through such words as ‘‘impression.’’80 The context of food in which Morton describes the elaboration of a spectral figurality is not merely incidental to this rhetorical aporia between the material and immaterial, since, as Morton points out in the preface to a recent special issue of Romanticism, what is at stake is a condition of ‘‘reflexive consumerism’’ in which the West has been increasingly caught up since the Romantic period.81 Silke-Maria Weineck, in an article in the same issue, shows the centrality of digestion to Nietzsche’s understanding of the problems of modernity,82 a theme that is also present in my essay in this volume. Given the international importance of Common Sense philosophy during the nineteenth century, and my claims for its relevance to contemporary critical preoccupation with the ontological dimension of philosophy, rhetorical performativity and the body, it may be asked why this theoretical tradition has been so neglected by literary critics. Studies of the institutional development of English literature as a university subject, such as Ian Reid’s Wordsworth and the Formation of English Studies (2003), have begun to throw light on some of the cultural forces behind the exclusive identification of Romanticism with philosophical idealism that has led to the exclusion of the Romantic empiricism of the Common Sense tradition from the theoretical canon. The cultural matrix from which the new discipline of ‘‘English’’ developed was shaped by the philosophical and political program of British Idealism, whose influence in many parts of the English-speaking world persisted until the Second World War. Romanticism, particularly in the form of Wordsworth’s poetry, was an important point of reference for British Idealists, whose

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philosophical writings were often highly literary, so that study of an idealist-inflected Wordsworth became paradigmatic for a subject whose purpose was often conceived as the development of sound moral character.83 As a philosophical movement, British Idealism was characterized, as its name suggests, by a turn toward German idealist philosophy. Little attention, however, has been paid to the intellectual and cultural circumstances that prompted this development in Anglophone philosophy. These circumstances strongly suggest that the trend toward idealist readings of Wordsworth and Coleridge, which has been so dominant a feature of Romantic criticism, should be seen as the manifestation of a certain kind of cultural politics rather than the simply natural or inevitable interpretation it has been claimed to be by its proponents.84 Despite the efforts of Coleridge and Carlyle to popularize German thought, an idealist mode of philosophizing only became widespread in Britain during the 1860s and 1870s, when it was adopted by the philosophical disciples of William Hamilton in the wake of J. S. Mill’s crushing onslaught on Hamilton’s philosophy in his 1865 An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. Hamilton had been the chief representative of the Scottish Common Sense school of philosophy, so that this adoption of German Idealism by his disciples marks the end of a distinctively Scottish tradition of philosophy. The intellectual climate created by Common Sense philosophy, however, as Ralph Jessop has shown,85 had decisively marked earlier British reception of German philosophy by such important interpreters as Carlyle; indeed, it was not uncommon, as Cairns Craig has shown in an essay in the present volume, for British thinkers to find the Common Sense school’s empiricist critique of Hume’s skepticism superior to that of Kant.86 The shift in Britain during the 1860s toward idealist modes of thinking can justifiably be regarded less as an abandonment of the kind of ‘‘empiricism’’ that Common Sense philosophy represented, than as an attempt to rearticulate, with the aid of concepts borrowed from German Idealism, the immaterialist tradition of Berkeley and Thomas Reid87 in the face of Utilitarian philosophical dominance. The late nineteenthcentury Germanization of Scottish thought, which British Idealism represented, was made easier by the fact that, as Manfred Kuehn has shown, the Common Sense philosophy of Thomas Reid and James Beattie had been an important influence on Kant and subsequent German Idealists.88 The influence that this philosophical hybrid between Common Sense philosophy and German Idealism exerted over the developing tradition of Wordsworth interpretation can be seen in the writ-

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ings of William Angus Knight, who was not only Wordsworth’s first scholarly editor and founder of the Wordsworth Society, but was also a personal acquaintance of many prominent British Idealists.89 Given this cultural background to the development of modern critical readings of Romantic poetry, the apparently simple assumption that German Idealism ‘‘influenced’’ British Romanticism, which underlies much Anglophone Romantic criticism, turns out to be fraught with unexpected intellectual complexity. In the absence of compelling evidence that British Romantic writers were well versed in German Idealist writings, most critics have followed M. H. Abrams’s critical methodology of exploring ‘‘striking analogues’’ between British Romantic poetry and German Idealist philosophy,90 particularly in relation to Wordsworth. The question may legitimately be posed, however, as to whether the ‘‘analogues’’ Romantic critics have found really reflect the influence of German Idealism itself, or are products of the much more pervasive influence of Common Sense philosophy in Britain during the early nineteenth century.91 At the very least, disentangling German Idealist philosophical themes from ideas current in Scottish Common Sense philosophy would be a highly problematic critical enterprise, given the use of Reid made by Kant and his successors. The extent of the problem is illustrated by the fact that the standard English translation of Kant is itself strongly influenced by the Scottish philosophical tradition.92 Romantic critics cannot simply appeal to the role of Coleridge as a popularizer of German thought in order to dispel the possibility that the ‘‘idealism,’’ which the twentieth-century critical tradition regarded itself as having discovered in British Romanticism, might in fact be the immaterialist ‘‘empiricism’’ of the Common Sense school under another name. As successive generations of critics have found, Coleridge’s use of Kantian ideas seems very idiosyncratic when regarded from a German Idealist point of view,93 and it is arguably the case, as Rosemary Ashton has suggested,94 that Coleridge’s understanding of German philosophy was decisively shaped by the British philosophical context to which he was responding, an interpretation that is leant weight by the fact that Coleridge prefaces his famous plagiarisms from Schelling in the Biographia Literaria by an attack on the Common Sense philosophy of Reid and Beattie.95 A recent essay by Alan Barnes has shown that many of the Coleridgean ideas that have been most significant for Anglophone literary criticism can be traced back to Coleridge’s discussions of the nature of sense-perception with his patron Tom Wedgwood, discussions for which the materialism of Erasmus Darwin and the philosophy of Reid and the Common Sense school are demonstrably the

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immediate context.96 Coleridge has often been regarded as a precursor of British Idealism, but his significance in British intellectual history might lie less in having publicized German philosophical ideas than in having anticipated J. F. Ferrier in showing how these ideas might be employed to critique the Common Sense tradition.97 Given the nature of Coleridge’s philosophical interests, it would not be altogether unconvincing to characterize Coleridge as a Common Sense philosopher himself.98 I hope I have said enough to show that any interpretation of British Romanticism that refuses to consider the possibility that it was influenced by the kind of ‘‘empiricist’’ tradition represented by the Common Sense school, must be regarded as partial, in that it rehearses uncritically that disavowal of empiricist origins through which the British Idealists sought to distance themselves from a discredited philosophical tradition. Although exclusively idealist readings of Romanticism are comprehensible, within the context of Anglophone cultural politics, as interventions against a technocratic utilitarianism, such readings are at best historically one-sided, in that they neglect the mutual imbrication of ‘‘empiricist’’ and ‘‘idealist’’ positions within British thought of the Romantic period. In addition to the strand of critical commentary on Romanticism and associationism that has descended from Arthur Beatty’s William Wordsworth: His Doctrine and Art in their Historical Relations (1922), and with which Cairns Craig engages in the present volume, the specifically Romantic version of empiricism represented by Common Sense philosophy has in fact made fleeting appearances in many well-known critical works over the years, although the influence of a philosophical historiography teleologically orientated to the emergence of German Idealism has in most cases prevented any recognition of this tradition’s special significance for the study of British Romanticism. M. H. Abrams mentions Reid as a British precursor to Kant in his influential 1953 study, The Mirror and the Lamp;99 Reid and Beattie also feature in James Engell’s The Creative Imagination (1981), though with little explanation as to how they relate to the German writers to whom Engell devotes considerably more space.100 Paul Hamilton stresses the importance of Common Sense philosophy in Coleridge’s Poetic (1984),101 but the acknowledgment does not prevent him devoting much of his book to a lengthy exploration of Schelling, and he has left this aspect of his work to be developed by his student Timothy Clark.102 David Simpson refers to Reid and the Common Sense School in his seminal Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (1979),103 an interest that is developed further, though

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not at any great length, in Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt Against Theory (1993).104 One of the most extended treatments of the relationship between Common Sense philosophy and Romanticism appears in Tim Milnes’s Irony and Indifference in Romantic Thought (2003). Although this study is mostly orientated toward a German Idealist reading of British Romanticism, Milnes does treat Thomas Reid as a significant precursor of Coleridge, though he finds Reid’s theoretical pronouncements impossible to reconcile with some of the philosophical donne´es underlying Coleridgean thought. Citing Reid’s rejection of the Humean concept of ‘‘ideas’’ (conceived of as ‘‘pictures in the mind’’),105 Milnes quite correctly comments that a wholesale rejection of ‘‘ideas’’ as an explanatory mental mechanism, such as he takes Reid’s to be, would have few points of contact with Coleridge’s thinking.106 Milnes’s puzzlement, however, stems from an incomplete acquaintance with Reid’s philosophical writings, which, despite their denial of the existence of ‘‘ideas’’ as atomistic entities constituting the fundamental building-blocks of thought, nevertheless employ the language of ideas in their accounts of everyday mental processes,107 in a demonstration of terminological agnosticism that reflects Reid’s wider skepticism about the ability of philosophical language ever to describe the mind.108 Cairns Craig’s essay in the present volume explores the use of associationist psychology in the writings of the Common Sense school, to which even Archibald Alison’s well-known aesthetic treatise, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), which relies extensively on associationist arguments, may be said to belong, containing as it does a fulsome tribute to Reidian philosophy at its conclusion.109 Noel Jackson’s 2003 article ‘‘Critical Conditions: Coleridge, ‘Common Sense,’ and the Literature of Self-Experiment’’ provides a better articulation of the relationship between Coleridge’s thought and Common Sense philosophy. Drawing on research by Neil Vickers,110 Jackson compares the experimental nature of Coleridge’s thought with that of Reid (who was also a practicing scientist), and suggests that in the case of Reid quite as much as that of Coleridge the aim of the thoughtexperiments with which both writers abound is to unsettle existing assumptions as to what constitutes a ‘‘common-sense’’ perception or opinion.111 Jackson’s argument is closely akin to Fiona Price’s reading of the influence of Common Sense philosophy on the work of Elizabeth Hamilton in the present volume, in which she argues that for Hamilton, Common Sense philosophy, far from simply confirming people in their existing prejudices, represents the kind of renewal of perception which

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is such an important theme in the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge.112 Elizabeth Hamilton’s project of popular aesthetic education, which Price describes, instantiates at a practical level that ‘‘democratic intellect’’ described by George Davie as characteristic of Common Sense philosophy,113 in a way that reflects Hamilton’s close association with Dugald Stewart and the liberal whig circle around the Edinburgh Review. Price’s essay thus highlights ways in which Romanticism and the Common Sense philosophical tradition begin to diverge during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. As Price points out, while Hamilton’s aim of alerting her audience to the harmful effects of ‘‘artificial refinement’’ can be compared to the ‘‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,’’ her focus on the need to provide a plebeian education in taste, which situates the lower classes as ‘‘actively tasteful,’’ contrasts with Wordsworth’s use of ‘‘the lower ranks as a (potential) source of artistic material.’’ The difference between Hamilton’s Stewartian view of the poor as potential aesthetic arbiters and the Wordsworth/Coleridge view of the role of the poet as speaking on behalf of the poor opens up between the 1800 version of the ‘‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,’’ which responds, as Nigel Leask has shown in this collection, to Currie’s Life of Burns, and the 1802 version of the preface, with its far greater emphasis on the exceptional nature of the poet, and culminates, as Leask notes, in Coleridge’s 1815 argument in the Biographia Literaria that it is impossible for poetry to be written in the actual language used by the working classes. Ultimately the difference between Hamilton’s position and the post1802 one of Wordsworth and Coleridge reflects the ambiguous status of the Reidian invocation of ‘‘common sense,’’114 which underlies the move, which Dick examines in this collection, from the notion of contract as being based on ‘‘consideration’’ to the notion of contract as being based on language itself, as fixed in writing. The question is whether appealing to ‘‘common sense’’ should be regarded as an appeal to an actually existing democratic consensus— which might, as Elizabeth Hamilton assumes, be manufactured by education—or as an appeal to an underlying principle of agreement that only exists in potentia and can never be adequately realized, a view articulated in Coleridge’s account of the British constitution as based on an implicit ‘‘Idea,’’115 and that implies that cultural authority must necessarily be based in an e´lite ‘‘clerisy.’’116 Despite the apparently authoritarian nature of the Coleridgean version of the appeal to ‘‘common sense’’, as formulated in the footnote to the Biographia Literaria where

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Coleridge sets out a trickle-down theory in which the genius is responsible for creating what eventually counts as the ‘‘common sense’’ of the masses,117 the alternative, as represented by the Stewartian vision of Elizabeth Hamilton described in Price’s essay, is a model where no epistemological authority can be granted to the aesthetic experience of the ‘‘exceptional individual,’’ since the standards of taste are assumed to be derived from nature in a way that ensures, for the ‘‘correctly trained mind . . . an unproblematic one-to-one translatability between qualities of objects in the world and internal sensations.’’ It is this democratic aesthetic of ‘‘common sense’’ that underlies Francis Jeffrey’s claims that Wordsworth’s poetry is simply the record of a mind deluding itself through its ‘‘extraordinary sensibility’’118 in his negative review of the 1807 collection in the Edinburgh Review. What is at stake in this debate is whether it is possible for the individual to appeal to the authority of ‘‘common sense’’, represented as Wordsworth does by appealing to the ‘‘language of men,’’ in a way that transcends collective social authority, and this places the Common Sense tradition at the heart of issues surrounding the politics of Romanticism. As Price points out, later thinkers in the Common Sense tradition, such as Stewart and Elizabeth Hamilton, tend to assume, following George Campbell’s linguistic theory, that the principles of ‘‘common sense’’ can only be known at one remove, through the associative linkages presumed to be based on them,119 and this makes all linguistic novelty suspect, as a potential source of error.120 Ultimately this makes the appeal to ‘‘common sense’’ identical to an appeal to existing social conventions in a way that provides epistemological legitimation for the dictatorship of the majority, a position against which, as I argue in the present collection, Coleridge’s recourse to an aesthetic derived from the physically embodied experience of the individual represents a reaction. As is shown by the emphasis on embodied experience in the philosophy of Thomas Reid, and of his precursor George Berkeley, however, Coleridge’s bodily aesthetic does not necessarily represent a rejection of the Common Sense tradition per se, but only of the interpretation of Common Sense philosophy that Stewart and the Edinburgh Review circle represented. In addition to the explicit references in Romantic scholarship that I have surveyed, the distinctive preoccupations of Common Sense philosophy can be seen to underlie many of the concerns of scholars in the field of British Romanticism over the past thirty years, though this does not always seem to have been recognized by the scholars themselves—a phenomenon that may be accounted for by the continuation of the

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themes of British Idealism in much Romantic criticism, at least up until the mid-1980s. The pertinence of Common Sense philosophy is particularly clear in relation to scholarship on rhetoric, where Campbell’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776), a work that has extremely close intellectual affinities with Common Sense philosophy,121 has become a central text. Martha L. Henning, for example, in her 1996 study Beyond Understanding, takes from Campbell a model for affective rhetoric that she then applies to nineteenth-century women’s writing,122 an argument that an appreciation of the extensive cultural influence of Common Sense philosophy both in Britain and America during the early nineteenth century would only have served to strengthen. In this volume, Fiona Price’s essay on Elizabeth Hamilton represents an approach to women’s writing that is explicitly informed by Common Sense philosophy, an avenue that the present author has also explored in a forthcoming book on the Victorian novelist Charlotte M. Yonge.123 The Common Sense philosophers’ special focus on the language of philosophical argument124 also suggests new perspectives on the more theoretical examinations of rhetoric that have followed in the wake of Paul de Man, whose use of Rousseau arguably taps into the same eighteenth-century currents of thought which result in Common Sense philosophy.125 Jules David Law’s important study The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I. A. Richards (1993) deploys this expanded conception of rhetoric in an area that is of special relevance to the present volume, examining ‘‘empiricism’’ as a philosophical genre rather than a set of truth-claims about the world.126 Although Law does not examine Common Sense philosophy, the basic conflict he identifies in empiricist thought between a paradigm of knowledge as visuality and a paradigm of knowledge as language127 very much characterizes the dispute between Hume and Reid, with Hume insisting on referring all knowledge to quasi-visual ‘‘ideas’’128 and Reid invoking a perceptual language of divinely instituted ‘‘signs’’129 —this is the less surprising as Reid was an avid student of the philosophy of Berkeley, which is central to Law’s study. As Jackson notes,130 attention to Reidian Common Sense philosophy would have furnished greater historical grounding for Law’s highly persuasive theoretical argument; it would also have strengthened his analysis of Ruskinian empiricism, since the influence of Common Sense philosophy on Ruskin’s thought has been documented.131 My essay on Coleridge in the present volume shares Law’s emphasis on the famous Molyneux Question as the central issue in classical empiricist thought,132 exploring as it does the influence on Coleridge’s thinking about the relationship between

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tactile and visual perception of Tom Wedgwood’s anti-Berkeleyan theorising about the perception of distance. Law’s appeal to Burke’s Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756) as representative of an antivisual epistemological paradigm, which stresses the primacy of language, is typical of much rhetorically orientated recent scholarship on the eighteenth century.133 Reid’s Common Sense philosophy, as set out in his first work, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), while slightly later in point of time, has the advantage of being a much more systematic exposition of this epistemological standpoint, a fact implicitly acknowledged by Burke when he refers to Reid’s philosophy in the preface to A Vindication of Natural Society, which was written in 1765.134 Burke’s intellectual development from his early arguments for the primacy of rhetoric to later declarations of allegiance to Common Sense philosophy135 may be parallelled in the career of his Irish contemporary Thomas Sheridan, the founder of the Elocution Movement in Britain. Sheridan’s The British System of Education (1756) argues for the central pedagogical role of rhetoric on the grounds that the spread of religious infidelity in Britain is due to the clergy’s neglect of rhetoric in favor of controversial writing,136 and in later writings Sheridan explicitly connects this educational program with a Reidian epistemological paradigm.137 In view of these intellectual trajectories, it makes sense to regard Common Sense philosophy as forming part of a series of wider cultural developments within eighteenth-century Britain that could be described as forming a British ‘‘counter-Enlightenment’’ and whose chief early eighteenth-century representatives are the philosophy of Berkeley, Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), and William Warburton’s monumental The Divine Legation of Moses (1738–42).138 The theorization of rhetoric, and particularly of metaphor, forms a central part of this British intellectual project, which responds to the attacks of freethinkers such as Toland and Collins on the meaningfulness and legitimacy of religious language.139 The status of the Common Sense tradition as a philosophical articulation of central theological concerns ensured its continued relevance to religious debate up to the mid-nineteenth century, with aspects of its arguments being appropriated by Evangelicals such as Thomas Chalmers, and the later Fundamentalist movement,140 as well as by the Tractarians Keble and Newman and less easily classifiable theological writers such as Edward Irving, F. D. Maurice, and R. H. Hutton.141 The Common Sense school’s fundamental agnosticism about the possi-

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bility of any adequate system of philosophical terminology,142 coupled with the intellectual legitimacy its appeal to a providential principle of communication143 leant to overtly rhetorical modes of discourse, provided the philosophical underpinnings for what Anthony Harrison has described as ‘‘Victorian sage discourse.’’144 The rhetorical flamboyance of writers such as Carlyle, Ruskin, and Newman appeals to a conception of philosophy as a mode of rhetoric that is specific to the Common Sense tradition,145 a demonstrable influence on all of them.146 The confluence of philosophy and theology represented by thought in the Common Sense tradition has special relevance to that central concern of Romantic studies, the nature of the symbol. Accounts of the Romantic symbol by twentieth-century critics often identified it as a mainstay for doctrines of literary organicism, and much recent theoretically orientated Romantic criticism has focussed on unmasking the doctrine of the Romantic symbol as an ideologically motivated construction whose function is to legitimize the status quo.147 Common Sense philosophy provides a new perspective on this rather tired critical debate, in that the Romantic period example it provides of a theory of representation that is not articulated in organicist terms suggests that Romantic critics need to reconsider the claim that Romanticism is an intrinsically organicist poetic, in the sense implied by M. H. Abrams’s description of it as a ‘‘natural supernaturalism.’’148 Whereas Abrams’s phrase suggests that Romanticism should ultimately be regarded as philosophically naturalist in orientation, a movement that assumes the sufficiency of the natural world in enabling interpretation by human understanding, the Common Sense school’s emphasis on the semiotic nature of perception situates human reason within a theological and providentialist framework. In this context, it might be more accurate, and less philosophically tendentious, to describe Romanticism in terms of a vitalist, rather than an organicist, tradition of thought, since the term ‘‘organicist’’ imports a reductive biologism, which the recent emergence of biosemiotics has thrown into question. In the Romantic period, the employment of a typological frame of reference by many thinkers, including arguably Wordsworth himself, suggests this implicitly theological significance to perception of the natural world to which I am suggesting the Common Sense tradition corresponds on a philosophical level.149 Burke’s allusion to Common Sense philosophy in Reflections on the Revolution in France150 highlights its importance in the 1790s revolution controversy, and the role it plays in the development of nationalism both in Britain and in other European countries during the nineteenth century. The checkered career of Dugald Stewart, Reid’s foremost Ro-

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mantic period interpreter, testifies to the intense political significance that Common Sense philosophy could possess: suspected of radicalism after the 1792 publication of his first work, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Stewart, rather like Coleridge, had to enter a period of withdrawal from public life before emerging as a more conservative figure.151 Fiona Price’s essay in the present volume engages with the counter-revolutionary political ends to which Common Sense philosophy is put in the novels of Elizabeth Hamilton, to whom Stewart was a mentor. The involvement of Stewart and Thomas Brown, another exponent of Common Sense philosophy, in the setting up of the Edinburgh Review, suggests the significance of this intellectual context for an understanding of the politics of periodical reviews during the Romantic period. The well-known Quarterly Review article in which Shelley was accused of writing nonsense, for example, is almost entirely derived from Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric, a source that a recent critical commentator on Shelley’s reception in the periodicals has failed to notice.152 The fact that a popular novelist could be attacked at length in an early nineteenth-century periodical for his misunderstanding of the philosophy of Reid presumably indicates a high level of awareness of Common Sense philosophy among the general reading public.153 As I hope this introduction has suggested, much work remains to be done on the relationship between Romantic culture and empiricist philosophy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, particularly in connection with the multifaceted tradition of Common Sense philosophy. As the essays in the present volume indicate, such work will represent an exercise in defamiliarizing cultural assumptions that are prevalent throughout the Anglophone world: as the continued political resonance of appeals to ‘‘common sense’’ shows,154 the language and rhetorical techniques of the Common Sense tradition still permeate the public sphere in ways that the academy neglects at its peril. If literary scholars are to fulfil their responsibilities as public intellectuals by offering a critique of what our politicians present to us as ‘‘common sense,’’ they must be prepared to engage with that empiricist tradition in the intellectual history of the Anglo-Saxon world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that has shaped our current predicament.

NOTES 1. Cf. Thomas McFarland, ‘‘Involute and Symbol in the Romantic Imagination,’’ in Coleridge, Keats and the Romantic Imagination: Romanticism and Adam’s Dream, ed. J.

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Robert Barth SJ and John L. Mahoney (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 51–57. 2. Jules David Law, The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I A Richards (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), ix. 3. James McCosh, ‘‘David Hume,’’ in The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense (London: Macmillan, 1875) excerpted in James Fieser, Early Responses to Hume’s Metaphysical and Epistemological Writings, 2 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2000), 2:291. 4. Cf. Tilottama Rajan’s summary of Harding, ‘‘Coleridge critics must either treat him parochially as a figure in British and ecclesiastical politics after 1817, or they must radically reassess his thought by contextualizing it in European philosophy from Schelling to Heidegger,’’ (‘‘The Unavowable Community of Idealism: Coleridge and the Life Sciences,’’ European Romantic Review 14, no. 4 [2003]: 396.). As the argument of this introduction will make clear, Rajan’s formulation is a false alternative; the way in which it casually elides any distinction between European philosophy and German philosophy is also noteworthy. 5. Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 2000), 10. 6. See the conference proceedings Victor Cousin: Les Ide´ologues et Les E´cossais (Paris, 1985), and James W. Manns, Reid and His French Disciples (Leiden: Brill, 1994). 7. Anne Henry, Marcel Proust: The´ories Pour une Esthe´tique (Paris, 1981), 87. 8. Brian Copenhaver and Rebecca Copenhaver, ‘‘The Strange Italian Voyage of Thomas Reid:1800–60,’’ British Journal for the History of Philosophy 14, no. 4 (2006): 601–26. 9. Mario Verducci, Cultura Inglese in Giaccomo Leopardi (Editoriale Eco, 1994), 117. The affinities Verducci notes between Leopardi and Burke (Verducci, 133) suggest that Leopardi may have been directly influenced by the Common Sense tradition. 10. O. B. Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England: A History (New York: Harper, 1959), 122; cf. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, 16 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1960–82), 1:254. 11. Richard A. Smyth, Reading Peirce Reading (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 1997), 2–4. 12. W. P. Trent, et al., Later National Literature Part 2, Cambridge History of English and American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907–21), chap. 17, sect. 4. 13. Poe’s exposure to Scottish literature is described in Kevin J. Hayes, Poe and the Printed Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 10–12, 33. This is likely to have included Common Sense philosophy. The general influence of Common Sense philosophy on early American fiction is described in Terence Martin, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961). 14. H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Development: Night Thoughts (Jena 1801–1806) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 377. 15. Monika Schmitz-Evans, ‘‘Theories of Romanticism: The First Two Hundred Years,’’ in Nonfictional Romantic Prose: Expanding Borders, ed. Steven P. Sondrup, Virgil Nemoianu, and Gerald Gillespie (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004), 24. 16. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 206, 131. 17. J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 20–21.

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18. Thomas Reid, Works, 7th ed., ed. William Hamilton (Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart, 1872), 1:127. 19. Keith Lehrer, Thomas Reid (London: Routledge, 1989), 258–59, 293, 294–95. 20. Galen Strawson’s argument that Reid’s philosophy is less an ‘‘answer’’ to Hume than a different way of looking at Hume’s philosophical postulates is an acknowledgement of this incorporative manoeuver in Common Sense philosophy, which is ‘‘rhetorical’’ in a de Manian sense (‘‘What’s so Good about Reid?,’’ London Review of Books, 22 February 1990, 15). A similar point could be made about the philosophical eclecticism that characterizes the writings of later exponents of Common Sense philosophy, such as Thomas Brown, Dugald Stewart, and William Hamilton. 21. Terence Cuneo and Rene van Woudenberg, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 19. 22. John Keble, On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church (Oxford and London: Parker, 1868) in Gavin Budge, ed., Aesthetics and Religion in NineteenthCentury Britain, 6 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2003), vol. 3. 23. Gavin Budge, ‘‘Rethinking the Victorian Sage: Nineteenth-Century Prose and Scottish Common Sense Philosophy,’’ Literature Compass (2005): http://www.literaturecompass.com/viewpoint.asp?section’8&ref’457. 24. Johannes Artz, ‘‘Newman as a Philosopher,’’ International Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1976): 263–87. 25. John Henry Newman, Newman’s University Sermons: Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford 1826–43, introd. by D. M. MacKinnon and J. D. Holmes (London: SPCK, 1970), 145–52. 26. E. S. Dallas, The Gay Science, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), 1:185. 27. Jack Morrell, ‘‘The Leslie Affair: Careers, Kirk and Politics in Edinburgh in 1805,’’ Scottish Historical Review 54 (1975): 63–82. 28. Richard Olson, Scottish Philosophy and British Physics, 1750–1880 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). 29. Daniel Brown, Hopkins’s Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 30. Norman Daniels, ‘‘Thomas Reid’s Discovery of a Non-Euclidean Geometry,’’ Philosophy of Science 3 (1972): 219–34. 31. Nicholas J. Wade, ed., Brewster and Wheatstone on Vision (London: Academic Press, 1983), 87. 32. Richard Yeo, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 57, 63– 64, 191–96. 33. Robert E. Butts, ‘‘Necessary Truth in Whewell’s Philosophy of Science,’’ American Philosophical Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1965): 176. 34. Cf. David L. Clark, ‘‘We ‘Other Prussians’: Bodies and Pleasures in de Quincey and Late Kant,’’ European Romantic Review 14, no. 2 (2003): 261–87; Tilottama Rajan, ‘‘Unavowable Community’’; Tilottama Rajan, ‘‘Spirit’s Psychoanalysis: Natural History, the History of Nature, and Romantic Historiography,’’ European Romantic Review 14, no. 2 (2003): 187–96; Tilottama Rajan, ‘‘System and Singularity from Herder to Hegel,’’ European Romantic Review 11, no. 2 (2000): 137–49. 35. Reid, Works, 127. 36. Grevel Lindop, The Opium Eater: A Life of Thomas de Quincey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 53.

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37. Rajan, ‘‘Unavowable Community.’’ 38. Reid, Works, 623. 39. Alexander Crichton, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement, 2 vols. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1798), 2:293–99. 40. John Abercrombie, Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers and the Investigation of Truth, 13th ed. (London: Murray, 1849), 19–29. 41. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, fac ed. of 1794–96 ed., 2 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1974), 1:104. 42. James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 6 vols., ed. G. Birkbeck Hill and L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 1:471. 43. Reid, Works, 1:121. 44. Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1, 38, 42. 45. Reid, Works, 1:118. 46. Charles Bell, The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, 6th ed. (London, 1872), 32. 47. F. W. Robertson, Lectures on the Influence of Poetry and Wordsworth (London: Athenaeum, 1906), 25. 48. Cf. Kenneth Dewhurst, John Locke Physician and Philosopher: A Medical Biography, With an Edition of the Medical Notes in His Journals (London: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1963); George Berkeley, Works, 9 vols., ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1948–57), 5:v–vi. 49. Thomas Beddoes, Hygeia, or Essays Moral and Medical on the Causes Affecting the Personal State of Our Middling and Affluent Classes, 3 vols. (Bristol: Phillips, 1802–1803), 3:205. 50. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2 vols., ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 1:270. 51. Rajan, ‘‘Unavowable Community,’’ 399. 52. Kirsten Brown, Nietzsche and Embodiment: Discerning Bodies and Non-Dualism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006). 53. David Farrell Krell, Infectious Nietzsche (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996). 54. Robin Smith summarizes Nietzsche’s relationship to empiricist philosophy, in a way that brings out his reaction against an important aspect of the Common Sense tradition: ‘‘The ‘English’ school of moral psychology . . . had stopped where they might have achieved a general breakthrough. Having given up any religious basis for morality, it did not seek another basis, but simply took the familiar values as self evident’’ (Nietzsche and Re´e: A Star Friendship [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005], xx). 55. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘‘On Truth and Falsehood in Their Extramoral Sense,’’ in Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Maximilian A Mu¨gge (London: Foulis, 1911), 180. 56. Reid, Works, 2:664. 57. Ibid., 2:692. 58. Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 111. 59. James Beattie, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, 6th ed. (Edinburgh, 1777), 307; Dugald Stewart, Collected Works, 11 vols., ed. William Hamilton and introd. by Knud Haakonssen (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1994 [1854]), 2:48.

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60. Angela Esterhammer, ‘‘Of Promises, Contracts and Constitutions: Thomas Reid and Jeremy Bentham on Language as Social Action,’’ Romanticism 6, no. 1 (2000): 55–77. 61. Deborah Elise White, Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 80. 62. Ibid. 63. William Hazlitt, ‘‘Madame de Stae¨l’s Account of German Philosophy and Literature,’’ in Works, 21 vols., ed. P. P. Howe (London: Dent, 1930), 18–21; William Hazlitt, ‘‘Coleridge’s Literary Life,’’ in Works, 21 vols., ed. P. P. Howe (London: Dent, 1930), 123–24. 64. For an analysis from this perspective of Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses, a work that anticipates some of the characteristic emphases of Common Sense philosophy, see Gavin Budge, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in The Collected Works of William Warburton, 13 vols., introd. by Gavin Budge (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2005), 1:v–xx. 65. Walter Cooper Dendy, The Philosophy of Mystery (London, 1841), 34–35. 66. Gavin Budge, ‘‘ ‘The Vampyre’: Romantic Metaphysics and the Aristocratic Other,’’ in The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination, ed. Ruth Bienstock Anolik and Douglas L. Howard (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2004), 212–35; Gavin Budge, ‘‘Mesmerism and Medicine in Bulwer-Lytton’s Novels of the Occult,’’ in Victorian Literary Mesmerism, ed. Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 39–59. 67. Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 68. Reid, Works, 1:422. 69. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 268–71. 70. Reid, Works, 1:127. 71. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 21–22. 72. Reid, Works, 1:135. 73. Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 44–45. 74. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, by Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 20–21. 75. Mark Schoenfield, The Professional Wordsworth: Law, Labour and the Poet’s Contract (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 277–80. 76. Strawson, ‘‘What’s so Good about Reid?,’’ 15; Thomas Brown, Life and Collected Works, 8 vols., introd. by Thomas Dixon (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003), 5:142–44. 77. Brown, Works, 5:142–44. 78. Reid, Works, 128. 79. Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 33. 80. Reid, Works, 472–74. 81. Timothy Morton, ‘‘Food Studies in the Romantic Period: (S)Mashing History,’’ Romanticism 12, no. 1 (2006): 3. 82. Silke-Maria Weineck, ‘‘Digesting the Nineteenth Century: Nietzsche and the Stomach of Modernity,’’ Romanticism 12, no. 1 (2006): 35–43.

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83. Ian Reid, Wordworth and the Formation of English Studies (Aldershot and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2004). 84. McFarland, ‘‘Involute and Symbol,’’ 53. 85. Ralph Jessop, Carlyle and Scottish Thought (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1997), 27–32. 86. See Cairns Craig, ‘‘ ‘Kant has not answered Hume’: Empiricism and the Romantic Imagination’’ in this volume. 87. Phillip Fereira, ‘‘Ferrier, James Frederick (1808–64),’’ in The Dictionary of Nineteenth Century British Philosophers, ed. W. J. Mander and Alan P. F. Sell (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002), 383, 385. 88. Manfred Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1708–1800: A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s, 1987), 167–70. 89. Gavin Budge, ‘‘Knight, William Angus (1836–1916),’’ in The Dictionary of Nineteenth Century British Philosophers, ed. W. J. Mander and Alan P. F. Sell (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002), 641–45. 90. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), 11, 32. 91. Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 32–35. 92. G. E. Davie, ‘‘The Significance of the Philosophical Papers,’’ in The Credibility of Divine Existence, ed. A. J. D. Porteous, R. D. Maclennon, and G. E. Davie, by Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1967), 61. 93. Rene´ Wellek, Immanuel Kant in England: 1793–1838 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931), 126–35, 261; Deirdre Coleman, Coleridge and The Friend (1809– 1810) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 73–79; Tim Fulford, Coleridge’s Figurative Language (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), 105–7. 94. Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 46–48. 95. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1:270. 96. Alan Barnes, ‘‘Coleridge, Tom Wedgwood and the Relationship Between Time and Space in Midlands Enlightenment Thought,’’ British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 30, no. 2 (2007): forthcoming. 97. Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 3–6. Ferrier’s motivation in pointing out Coleridge’s plagiarisms from Schelling may well have been more to do with a desire to justify his own philosophical recourse to the German tradition than a wish to discredit Coleridge. 98. Cf. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1:86–87 fn. Coleridge’s interest in the influence of language over philosophical thought bears striking similarities to that of his contemporary, the Common Sense philosopher Dugald Stewart, see Stewart, 2:46–48. 99. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 161. 100. James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 69, 175. 101. Paul Hamilton, Coleridge’s Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 36–41, 44, 58, 62–72. 102. Clark, Embodying Revolution, 32–35. 103. David Simpson, Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1979), 140–42.

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104. David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt Against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 42. 105. Reid, Works, 208–10. 106. Tim Milnes, Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 46–50. 107. Reid, Works, 1:387. 108. Ibid., 1:220–21. 109. Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1811), 2:416–22. 110. Neil Vickers, Coleridge and the Doctors 1795–1806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. chap. 5. 111. Noel B. Jackson, ‘‘Critical Conditions: Coleridge, ‘Common Sense,’ and the Literature of Experiment,’’ English Literary History 70 (2003): 129. My thanks to Michael-John Kooy for drawing this article to my attention. 112. For a related argument, see Fiona Price, ‘‘Democratizing Taste: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and Elizabeth Hamilton,’’ Romanticism 8 (2002): 179–96. 113. George Elder Davie, The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and Her Universities in the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1961; repr. 1982). 114. Cuneo and Woudenberg, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid, 19. 115. S. T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1976), 15–19. 116. Ben Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 117. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1:82–83. 118. John O. Hayden, ed., Romantic Bards and British Reviewers: A Selected Edition of the Contemporary Reviews of the Works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats and Shelley (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1971), 15. 119. George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: 1808) 2:124. 120. Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric, 2:124–27. 121. Kathleen Holcomb, ‘‘Campbell, George (1719–96),’’ in John W Yolton, John Voldimer Price, and John Stephens, eds., The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century British Philosophers (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999), 175. 122. Martha Henning, Beyond Understanding: Appeals to the Imagination, Passions and Will in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Fiction (New York: Lang, 1996), 5, 21–22. 123. Gavin Budge, Charlotte M. Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel (Bern: Peter Lang Publishing, forthcoming); see also Gavin Budge, ‘‘Realism and Typology in Charlotte M .Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe,’’ Victorian Literature and Culture 31, no. 1 (2003): 193–223. 124. Reid, Works, 1:220–21; Stewart, 2:173–75. 125. The affinity between Rousseau and Common Sense philosophy was recognized by Beattie, who praised Rousseau in his Essay on Truth as a ‘‘moral writer of true genius’’ (Edward Duffy, Rousseau in England: The Context for Shelley’s Critique of the Enlightenment [Berkeley, 1979], 30). Although the fideism of the Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard, to a reading of which de Man devotes considerable space in Allegories of Reading, strongly recalls some aspects of Common Sense philosophy and, given the antipathy Rousseau developed toward Hume during his visit to England, it is not unlikely that he would have taken an interest in the Common Sense school’s criticisms of Hume, Reid’s

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Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Priniciples of Common Sense, which founded Common Sense philosophy, was only published in 1764, two years after Emile, which rules out direct influence on the early Rousseau. Rousseau and the Common Sense philosophers share at least one major influence in William Warburton, however. 126. Law, The Rhetoric of Empiricism, 5–11. 127. Ibid., 51. 128. Hume, 1. 129. Reid, Works, 1:134–35. 130. Jackson, 127. 131. George Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 154. For an examination of some of the implications of Common Sense philosophy for an understanding of Ruskinian thinking, see Gavin Budge, ‘‘Poverty and the Picture Gallery: The Whitechapel Exhibitions and the Social Project of Ruskinian Aesthetics,’’ Visual Culture in Britain 1, no. 2 (2000): 43–56. 132. Law, The Rhetoric of Empiricism, 24–29. 133. Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 99–103; Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4–5; Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (London: Routledge, 1992), 40–44. 134. Edmund Burke, ‘‘A Vindication of Natural Society,’’ in The Early Writings, vol. 1 of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 9 vols., ed. T. O. Mcloughlin, James T. Boulton, and William B. Todd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 135–36. The reference is not explicit, but is unmistakeably to Reid. When Burke wrote the preface to the second edition, he had recently, without acknowledgment, reproduced the first two sections of the introductory chapter of Reid’s Inquiry in the Annual Register, as James Somerville points out in The Enigmatic Parting Shot: What Was Hume’s ‘‘Compleat Answer to Dr Reid and to That Silly Bigotted Fellow, Beattie?’’ (Aldershot: Avebury, 1995), 106. 135. Edmund Burke, ‘‘Reflections on the Revolution in France,’’ in The French Revolution 1790–1794, vol. 8 of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 9 vols., ed. L. G. Mitchell and William B. Todd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 138. 136. Thomas Sheridan, The British System of Education (Dublin: 1756), 65–66. 137. Thomas Sheridan, A Short Sketch of a Plan for the Improvement of Education in This Country (Dublin: 1788), 8–11. 138. For a discussion of Warburton from this point of view, see Gavin Budge, ‘‘Introduction,’’ Collected Works of Warburton. 139. See Gavin Budge, ‘‘Realism and Typology,’’ 199–200; Gavin Budge, ‘‘Introduction: Typological Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain,’’ in Aesthetics and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 6 vols., ed. Gavin Budge (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2003), 1:v–xxv, for a more extended discussion of this British intellectual tradition 140. Harriet Harris, Fundamentalism and Evangelicals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 118–20. 141. Gavin Budge, ‘‘Realism and Typology,’’ 201–3, 211–13; Gavin Budge, ‘‘Typological Aesthetics.’’ 142. Reid, Works, 1:220–21. 143. Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1:161. 144. Antony H. Harrison, Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture: Discourse and Ideology (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 49–52. See Gavin Budge, ‘‘Rethinking the Victorian Sage.’’

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145. Reid, Works, 1:222; Beattie, 307; Stewart, 2: 46–48. 146. Ralph Jessop, ‘‘Carlyle’s ‘Wotton Reinfred’: They Talked of Scotch Philosophy,’’ Carlyle Annual 12 (1991): 27–32; Landow, 154. 147. Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 84–92. 148. Gavin Budge, ‘‘History and the New Historicism: Symbol and Allegory as Poetics of Criticism,’’ in Critical Pasts: Writing Criticism, Writing History, ed. Philip Smallwood (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004), 115–43. 149. Ibid., 135–40. 150. Burke, ‘‘Reflections,’’ 138. 151. Knud Haakonssen, ‘‘Stewart, Dugald (1753–1828),’’ in The Dictionary of Nineteenth Century British Philosophers, ed. W. J. Mander and Alan P. F. Sell (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002), 1072. 152. Kim Wheatley, Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1999). 153. William Maginn, ‘‘Mr Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Novels; and Remarks on Novel-Writing,’’ Fraser’s Magazine 1 (1830): 512–13. 154. Cf. http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/conservativeⳭcommonⳭsense (accessed Aug 25, 2006). http://core2.trg.org.uk/reformer/2000spring/alackofcommon sense.html (accessed Aug 25, 2006). For the historical connection between conservative Evangelical social and political thought and Scottish Common Sense philosophy, see Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 94.

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‘‘Kant has not answered Hume’’: Empiricism and the Romantic Imagination Cairns Craig

1

IN 1884, J. HUTCHISON STIRLING, THE SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHER RESPONsible for introducing Hegel to British readers in his Secret of Hegel,1 and one of the leading figures in the development of the British Idealism of the second half of the nineteenth century, published an essay in Mind entitled ‘‘Kant Has not Answered Hume,’’2 challenging the very foundations of the whole German-inspired idealist movement in Britain. ‘I suppose’, Stirling wrote, ‘‘there is no one in Germany at present, and scarcely anyone anywhere else, it may be, to whom, even on slight acquaintance with the subject, it is not understood that Kant has answered Hume: rather indeed that this, so to speak, is the least of it, and that Kant has not only answered but passed Hume; with simply a word, moreover, in the bygoing to intimate: ‘I take your back, David Hume, merely as a starting ground to a leap—a leap into a new world—a new world of hitherto undiscovered metaphysic, of heretofore despaired-of philosophy.’ ’’3 Stirling’s description of the relation of Kant to Hume is one that continues still to infuse much modern criticism of the Romantic movement: Romanticism is identified with the ‘‘leap into a new world—a new world of hitherto undiscovered metaphysic’’ achieved by Kant and Hegel, a leap that makes redundant all previous philosophy. That leap into a ‘‘heretofore despaired-of philosophy,’’ it is assumed, is the same leap that is made by the British Romantics and the identification of Wordsworth and Coleridge with Kantian and post-Kantian developments in German thought has been the burden of much Anglo-American literary criticism since the Second World War—to such an extent that Cynthia Chase, for instance, in her introduction to a collection of essays on Romanticism, notes that ‘‘the connection between English Ro40

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mantic poetry and German Idealist philosophy, established through the mediation of Coleridge, has long been a truism of literary scholarship,’’ with the consequence that ‘‘some of Wordsworth’s philosophical ideas can be traced to Coleridge’s reading of Kant and Schelling.’’4 Aligning Wordsworth and Coleridge with Kant, Schelling, and Hegel has allowed Anglo-American critics—often themselves working in a Kantianderived aesthetic—to see in the English Romantics a leap into a new world beyond the presuppositions of eighteenth-century British empiricism. Despite Jerome McGann’s arguments in The Romantic Ideology about the involution of modern criticism in its relationship to Romanticism— its adoption of terminologies that ‘‘are themselves Romantic concepts’’ and that ‘‘lie at the very heart of Romanticism’s self-projection’’5—it is still the case that there is ‘‘scarcely anyone anywhere . . . to whom, even on slight acquaintance with the subject, it is not understood that Kant has answered Hume’’ and that the Kantian-Coleridgean philosophy is, therefore, not only innately superior to empiricism in the realm of aesthetic thought but also fundamentally more encouraging of creativity, more productive for literature, than anything in the empiricist tradition. Against such universal expectations, however, Stirling declared himself ‘‘greatly disposed to doubt . . . the success of the start, the success of Kant in opposition to Hume.’’6 If such were the case—if the Kantian philosophy fundamentally failed to answer the empiricist problematic posed by Hume—then our critical perspectives on the relationship of Romanticism to Kantianism might take a very different turn; we might even, indeed, question whether the Kantian-Coleridgean theory was ever as important to Romanticism in Britain as our retrospective constructions have suggested. For Stirling, Hume’s work was not simply the ‘‘spark’’ that helped Kant wake from his ‘‘dogmatic slumber’’;7 rather, ‘‘Kant’s whole work (and what alone led to all the others, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) rose out of one consideration only. What was—whence was—that very strange and peculiar species of necessity to which Hume has drawn attention in the phenomena of cause and effect.’’8 As a consequence, the whole edifice of the ‘‘Kritik of Pure Reason, nay, German philosophy as a whole, has absolute foundation in the whence or why of necessary connexion,’’9 and on this crux of the issue Stirling finds Kant not only to have failed to answer Hume but to have realized, belatedly, the significance of his own failure. The problem that Kant could not resolve was how the operation of the categories accounted for the ‘‘necessity’’ that Hume could not find in our experience of causality. According to Stirling, Kant’s

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category of cause could not be effectively imposed on the world by the mind without the phenomena having already suggested to the categories the ways in which ‘‘real’’ cases of causation are to be distinguished from mere regular succession. Two different kinds of constant conjunction—the causal kind and that which is simply a matter of regular contiguity—would never be able to be distinguished from one another if the categories themselves impose the order of causality on the world, because in order to impose the category of cause on some but not all of these cases there must already be something in the phenomena that directs the categories in establishing one as properly causal and the other as not. That which is supposed to be supplied only by the categories in the construction of the world must already be evidenced in the phenomena, which therefore contain already the necessity that only the categories were supposed to provide: Kant is found to be suspended here between his two perceptions of the state of the case. He perceives, first, that sense as sense is always contingent. But then he perceives, second, that if a sensation A and another sensation B are to be subsumed under the category and converted into an antecedent and a consequent, they must of themselves have already given us reason to assume for them precisely that quality—precisely that relation! This latter perception we suppose to have come late to Kant; and it is precisely in consequence of this perception that we attribute the cold sweats to him which attend that endless tangle of the Second Analogy where we see only bewildered attempts to renew courage in himself by the constant refrain, Necessity of synthesis cannot be due to sense, and must be due to understanding! But the renewed courage must ever fail again . . .10

The only way out of this quandary would be ‘‘to conceive that each category, quite unknown to me, without any consciousness on my part, might unerringly scent a case of its own’’11 but then the whole purpose of the categories is defeated: ‘‘the single purpose they are there for, what they are alone to do, is to give necessity; and this necessity, which they alone are to give, which they alone are to explain, already exists!’’12 Stirling can see no conclusion but that ‘‘the vast transcendental machinery is a signal failure’’13 and that Kant’s ‘‘position is no more and no better than that of Reid, Beattie, Oswald, and all the rest’’14 who had tried to resist Hume’s analysis. The superiority of the Kantian position, in other words, is entirely undermined, leaving the debate between Humean empiricism and its Scottish opponents of the Common Sense school as intact as ever it had been before the rise of German philosophy.

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Whether or not one accepts Stirling’s argument, its effect is not only to put in doubt that transcendence of the empiricist tradition on which the Kantian-Coleridgean position depends, both in the philosophers’ own works and the modern criticism that derives from them, but also to open up, retrospectively, the possibility that those who rejected the Kantian transcendental were not simply resisting the inevitable tide of modern thought. If Kant has not answered Hume, there is no intellectual justification for abandoning either a Humean empiricism or the philosophy of Common Sense, which had opposed it. The supposed superiority with which, retrospectively, we have endowed the transcendental argument is unjustified and those who, like Dugald Stewart, believed that ‘‘Mr Hume’s own countrymen’’ had provided ‘‘far more luminous refutations of scepticism than the Critique of Pure Reason’’15 were not simply refusing to acknowledge a superior conception of the world when they felt under no compulsion to reject Scottish philosophical traditions in favor of German ones. There is no need, in other words, to regard any writer who continued to develop the British empiricist tradition, or the Common Sense opposition to it, as somehow having failed to come to terms with the requirements of modern thought; nor is there any reason to assume that any writer operating within such philosophical contexts after the supervention of Kantianism is attempting to continue a tradition that had, already, been made historically redundant. The crucial instance of this, of course, is the associationism that, in almost all accounts of Romanticism, is assumed to be the dead weight from which Wordsworth and Coleridge had to release themselves before they could take flight on the wings of the Kantian transcendental. Associationism is the ‘‘mechanical,’’ the atomistic, the reductive version of the workings of the mind, deriving from empiricism, that the Coleridgean ‘‘imagination’’ will supersede, and in superseding will consign to a merely historical relevance to eighteenth-century theories of ‘‘Taste.’’ Almost all presentations of Romanticism that are centered on notions of the ‘‘creative imagination’’ assume that the creativity of the imagination is both describable and achievable only by overcoming the inherent limitations of the associationist version of the mind; in Coleridge’s terms, the operation of the fancy, which is a function of memory and ‘‘must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association,’’ has to be absolutely distinguished from the real nature of the creative imagination, which ‘‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate.’’16 Even James Engell’s The Creative Imagination, which traces so many of the eighteenth-century and empiricist sources of Coleridge’s

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ideas, assumes that although ‘‘in forming his concept of the imagination, Coleridge draws on nearly every other writer who discussed the subject,’’ his work ‘‘states more about the imagination than other Romantics’’ because he ‘‘distills, connects, and adds to the background with which he was so familiar.’’17 Coleridge’s version of the ‘‘imagination,’’ in other words, does for the concept exactly what he says the imagination itself does when it ‘‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create’’: it transforms all past insights into a new reality, requiring not only that we recognize ‘‘Coleridge as at once a culminating and an original figure’’ but as the creator of a conception of the imagination so radically different from all its predecessors that ‘‘we are still somewhere in the mid-course of discovering all that this idea truly means.’’18 The associationist theories that Coleridge transcends with the same leap that the imagination itself transcends the fancy are thus made irrelevant to any effective theory of the imagination, despite the fact that the distinction between imagination and fancy was itself one regularly made by those who, like Dugald Stewart, accepted associationist accounts of art. In his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Stewart argued that in the ‘‘poetical imagination, it is the association of ideas that supplies the materials out of which its combinations are formed’’ and that ‘‘the association of ideas, therefore, although perfectly distinct from the power of imagination, is immediately and essentially subservient to all its exertions’’;19 as a consequence, ‘‘to fancy, we apply the epithets of rich or luxuriant,—to imagination, those of beautiful or sublime.’’20 Rather than being a distinctive criterion of a superior conception of the imagination, the imagination-fancy distinction is one that can comfortably be accepted within an associationist account of art. Equally the insistence on the importance of imagination itself in Coleridge’s thought ignores the fact that it is, as Engell notes, in David Hume’s philosophy, and within Hume’s entirely associationist conception of the mind, that the imagination comes first to play an absolutely central role since, for Hume ‘‘the memory, senses and understanding are therefore all them founded on the imagination.’’21 Neither on the grounds of the centrality of the imagination nor on the basis of the imagination-fancy distinction can Coleridge’s theories be distinguished from empiricist and associationist accounts of the mind. The distinction between the two traditions rests on their very different conceptions of the ends of imaginative activity. In the KantianColeridgean conception, the imagination is the means by which we can gain insight into those transcendental truths that lie beyond the limits of our ordinary experience, what Coleridge describes, in relation to the

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symbol, as ‘‘the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal.’’22 For Coleridge, imagination and memory have to be rigorously distinguished—even if they work, in practice, together—because only imagination can escape the ‘‘fixities’’ of the temporal order in order to reveal the transcendental truths of eternity. Within Hume’s theory, however, imagination and memory are only quantitatively and not qualitatively different:23 memory is simply the imagination in operation when it retains the apparent order and sequence of ideas or emotions in which they previously occurred rather than producing a new order out of alternative forms of associative connection. For Hume, the imagination does not provide us with a higher order of truth. Rather, the lack of ‘‘truth’’ that is typical of Hume’s conception of cause, in which we can only ever know the fact of ‘‘constant conjunction’’ rather than ‘‘necessity,’’ affects all the products of the imagination. ‘‘This deficiency in our ideas,’’ Hume notes, ‘‘is not, indeed, perceiv’d in common life, nor are we sensible, that in the most usual conjunctions of cause and effect we are as ignorant of the ultimate principle, which binds them together, as in the most unusual and extraordinary. But this proceeds merely from an illusion of the imagination; and the question is, how far we ought to yield to these illusions.’’24 The imagination, for Hume, is both absolutely central to our experience of the world—there would, indeed, be no sense of a world as opposed to mere subjective sensations without its operations—and, at the same time, it is the absolute subversion of all our certainties about the world: even ‘‘if the consideration of these instances makes us take a resolution to reject all the trivial suggestions of the fancy, and adhere to the understanding, that is, to the general and more establish’d properties of the imagination; even this resolution, if steadily executed, wou’d be dangerous, and attended with the most fatal consequences’’ because ‘‘the understanding, when it acts alone, and according to its most general principles, entirely subverts itself, and leaves not the lowest degree of evidence in any proposition.’’25 For Coleridge, the imagination is our only route to certainty in the world because it takes us beyond the world of mere objects to those Ideas which lie beyond and inform them; for Hume, the imagination is our only route to the world, but it is a route that completely undermines the very certainty we seek through it. The Kantian-Coleridgean view of the mind transcended the Humean problematic, in other words, only by offering, if Hutchison Stirling was right, what could never be more than a false escape from a version of the imagination that necessarily leaves us in a state of unending doubt, in a condition in which all knowledge and understanding was vitiated

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by the ‘‘illusion of the imagination.’’ Far from the Coleridgean conception of the imagination being a higher version of the imagination than Hume’s, one more engaged with creative reality, it can be seen instead as an ideologically motivated evasion of the fundamental challenge of Hume’s empiricism, an evasion designed to protect those certainties— God, self, truth—from the deconstructive rigor of Hume’s scepticism. Coleridge’s debate with associationism is not so much a debate about its truth or falsehood but about its consequences, since if all thinking and all language is only the workings of association, then, ‘‘The existence of an infinite spirit, of an intelligent and holy will, must on this system be mere articulated motions of the air. For as the function of the human understanding is no other than merely (to appear to itself) to combine and to apply the phaenomena of the association; and as these derive all their reality from the primary sensations; and as the sensations again all their reality from the impressions ab extra; a God not visible, audible or tangible can exist only in the sounds and letters that form his name and attributes.’’26 Since memory is nothing other than imagination, and since imagination can offer us no access to Ideal truths beyond the limits of experience, associationism commits us to the world of time and memory, and therefore commits art to a world of essentially secular meanings rather than to the possibility of transcendental revelation. Definitions of Romanticism based on the arguments of Coleridge will necessarily set aside associationist theories of art, but those arguments have neither a philosophical nor a historical necessity. They neither require that we dismiss associationist theory as fundamental to the development of Romanticism, nor that we deem it any less effective as a stimulus to the production of major literary works. The Kantian-Coleridgean conception of the mind has, for too long, prevented us from seeing just how much of British Romanticism is shaped not by the discoveries of German Idealism but by the consequences of Hume’s skeptical empiricism and its equally radical conception of the imagination.

2 In describing the alternative to Coleridgean transcendentalism as a Humean conception of the imagination based on the principle of association I want to dispose immediately of those versions of literary and intellectual history that assume that associationism is necessarily both materialistic and mechanical. That Coleridge challenged associationism

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in the physiological and materialist form of Hartley’s theories of vibrations does not reduce all associationism to that level. Indeed, it could be argued that in Biographia Literaria Coleridge focuses his attack on Hartley precisely because it makes for an easy target—and one that has almost nothing to say about the imagination—as compared with the much more subtle implications of Hume’s theory. Associationism in Hume makes no suppositions as to the ideality or the materiality of the sources of associations: that an empirical psychology, based on association theory, developed in the work of Priestley and of the elder Mill in the assumption of a materialist ontology did not prevent others from developing the idealist potentialities of Hume’s ontology. Indeed, Archibald Alison, in his Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, published in 1790, which is virtually a codification of the aesthetic theories of Hume’s successors, declares that his theory coincides, in a great degree, with a DOCTRINE that appears very early to have distinguished the PLATONIC school; which is to be traced, perhaps, amid their dark and figurative language, in all the philosophical systems of the East, and which has been maintained in this country by several writers of eminence, such as Lord Shaftesbury, Dr Hutcheson, Dr Akenside, and Dr Spence, but which has been maintained no where so firmly and so philosophically as by Dr Reid in his invaluable work on THE INTELLECTUAL POWERS OF MAN. The doctrine to which I allude is, that matter is not beautiful in itself, but derives its beauty from the expression of MIND.27

For Alison, art may depend fundamentally on the ‘‘the medium of matter,’’ since that is the only way ‘‘in the present condition of our being’’ that we can engage with the world, but by ‘‘analogy and resemblance’’28 and through the operation of association, ‘‘the qualities of matter become necessarily expressive of all the qualities of mind which they signify.’’29 Whether we regard matter as ontologically prior or as no more than a construction out of our ideal sensations makes no difference to the signifying processes that endow the objects of our world with expressiveness of and to the mind; and makes no difference to the centrality of associationist conceptions of the mind’s workings. Thus those who followed Reid in his attack on Hume’s sensationalism might cavil at the terminology of association of ‘‘ideas,’’ but were no less committed to associationist theory, particularly in relation to art. Dugald Stewart, for instance, notes that ‘‘ideas’’ must be understood in a Reidian rather than a Humean sense: I am sensible, indeed, that the expression is by no means unexceptionable, and that, if it be used (as it frequently has been) to comprehend those laws

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by which the succession of all our thoughts and of all our mental operations is regulated, the word idea must be understood in a sense much more extensive than it is commonly employed in. It is very justly remarked by Dr Reid, that ‘‘memory, judgment, reasoning, passions, affections, and purposes; in a word, every operation of the mind, excepting those of sense, is excited occasionally in the train of our thoughts, so that if we make the train of our thoughts to be only a train of ideas, the word idea must be understood to denote all these operations.’’30

Nonetheless he is happy to accept that ‘‘An Essay on the Nature and Principles of Taste, lately published by Mr Alison’’ means that he can ‘‘decline the discussion of a subject which he had treated with so much ingenuity and elegance.’’31 The tradition of Reid was as accommodating to associationism—especially in relation to aesthetic theory—as the traditions of Hume or Hartley. That Coleridge—with a typical gesture of refusal to offer a full explanation because ‘‘it will (if God grant health and permission) be treated of at large and systematically in a work I have many years been preparing’’32—dismissed associationism as inadequate to explain the source of ‘‘the thoughts and images to be associated’’ and as producing ‘‘a dreamworld of phantoms and spectres,’’33 did not stop in their tracks either the ‘‘idealist’’ or ‘‘materialist’’ psychologies based on associationist principles. Indeed, as J. H. Muirhead pointedly demonstrated by excluding Coleridge from his study of The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy,34 Coleridge’s influence on British thought was extremely slow to develop and Muirhead’s own, highly influential study of Coleridge as a Philosopher was designed to recuperate from Coleridge’s incomplete presentation the outlines of a philosophy, which would be seen to be predictive of the Idealism of late nineteenth-century British thought, though it had had little actual influence on its development. Muirhead’s explanation of the ineffectuality of Coleridge’s thinking on his immediate successors is a ‘‘certain unripeness of the time for the acceptance by philosophers’’35 of his ideas. The consequence is that Coleridge’s contribution to nineteenth-century thought can, for Muirhead, only be retrospectively important, since it ‘‘bears witness to the vitality and inherent attractiveness of the voluntaristic form of idealist philosophy’’ that Muirhead believes ‘‘marks the present time.’’36 Muirhead insists that the crucial element in Coleridge’s transformation of associationist theories of taste lies in the fact that for Coleridge ‘‘association depends in a much greater degree on the recurrence of resembling states of feeling than trains of ideas’’37 and that, as Coleridge wrote to Southey in 1803, ‘‘I

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almost think that Ideas never recall Ideas, as far as they are Ideas, any more than Leaves in a forest create each other’s motion—The breeze it is runs thro’ them—it is the Soul, the state of Feeling.’’38 This, however, is simply the development of an insight already contained in Hume’s account of the passions, in which he argues that the association of ideas ‘‘operates in so silent and imperceptible a manner, that we are scarce sensible of it,’’ because in itself it ‘‘produces no emotion.’’ For Hume, the ‘‘relation of ideas’’ works together with ‘‘a relation of the affections,’’ each feeding and supporting the other and leading to ‘‘the transition of affections along the relation of ideas’’:39 Only by identifying associationism with Hartley and refusing to acknowledge the influence of Hume could Coleridge’s conception of the association of ideas as based on ‘‘feeling’’ rather than ‘‘ideas’’ be held as an original contribution to British thought. Is it significant, in this context, that the only reference to Hume in Richard Holmes’s much-praised biography is one that points to Coleridge having derived his key image of the imagination—that of the ‘‘waterboatman’’ insect as an analogy for the workings of the imagination—from Hume’s description of the imagination as ‘‘apt to continue, even when its object fails it, and like a galley put in motion by the oars, carries on its course without any new impulse.’’40 Coleridge’s indebtedness to Hume for his image is a sign of how potent was Hume’s conception of the imagination compared to Hartley’s, and of the extent, perhaps, to which Coleridge’s rejection of Hume is in inverse proportion to Hume’s influence on his theories. Neither was it the case that the Coleridgean account of imagination proved inherently more fitted to the understanding of creativity. Although eighteenth-century accounts of aesthetics from an associationist perspective emphasised ‘‘taste’’ rather than creativity and focused on the experience of the audience rather than that of the artist, early nineteenth-century associationist theories sought to provide their own distinctive account of creativity. A typical example is provided by Arthur Hallam’s defence of Tennyson’s early poetry, which reshaped Alison’s analysis of aesthetic experience into a description of the creative mind. Far from having been made redundant by Coleridge’s conception of the imagination, associationist principles were invoked by Hallam to distinguish between Wordsworth’s works, in which the poet ‘‘is apt to mistake the pleasure he has in knowing a thing to be true, for the pleasure he would have in knowing it to be beautiful,’’ so that he ‘‘will pile his thoughts in a rhetorical battery, that they may convince, instead of letting them glow in the natural course of contemplation, that they may enrapture’’41 and the works of poets ‘‘of sensation rather than reflec-

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tion,’’ poets ‘‘susceptible of the slightest impulse from external nature, [whose] fine organs trembled into emotion at colours, and sounds, and movement, unperceived or unregarded by duller temperaments.’’42 The workings of such poetic minds are a function of processes of association far more subtle and complex than those of most readers, processes ‘‘producing a number of impressions too multiplied, too minute, and too diversified to allow of our tracing them to their causes, because just such was the effect, even so boundless, and so bewildering, produced on their imaginations by the real appearance of Nature.’’43 To properly experience the work of such writers, the reader has to be able to replicate the process of association through which the poet himself composed his poem, and such a recapitulation of the poet’s mental process is possible precisely because, ‘‘the emotions of the poet, during composition, follow a regular law of association.’’ As a consequence, as long as the reader is able ‘‘to clearly apprehend the leading sentiment in the poet’s mind, by their conformity to which the host of suggestions are arranged,’’44 s/he will be able to follow the poet’s associations ‘‘up to the harmonious prospect of the whole, and to perceive the proper dependence of every step on that which preceded it.’’ The process of reading becomes, for Hallam, the process of reenacting the associative processes of the poet’s mind, of identifying sufficiently with the unique associational context of the poet’s thought to make clear the relation of all the parts of the poem. The creativity of the poet, in effect, lies not in ‘‘struggles to idealize and to unify’’ but in giving free reign to the associational activity of the mind: it is the business of the reader then to discover the underlying ‘‘regular law,’’ which unifies the associational development. Associationist theories of the creative imagination, such as Hallam’s, were perfectly confident of their ability to account for all the phenomena invoked by Coleridge or other a priori theorists. In this context, J. S. Mill’s account, in his Autobiography,45 of the depression from which he recovered as a result of discovering Wordsworth’s poetry is often offered as existential proof of the maleficent effects of an education based on the principles of association, as opposed to the beneficent effects of the Coleridgean imagination. There is, however, a profound historical distortion in this use of Mill’s experience, for Mill never accepted Coleridge’s conception of the mind and stuck resolutely to his belief in his father’s associationist principles. In the essay in which he declared Coleridge to be one of the seminal figures of nineteenth-century thought, Mill also declared that ‘‘the truth on this much-debated question lies with the school of Locke and Bentham’’ since there is ‘‘no ground for believing that anything can be the object of our knowledge

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except experience.’’46 In a footnote, he asserted further that the solution of the problems of the operation of the mind was best to be found in ‘‘the Analysis of the Human Mind by the late Mr. Mill.’’ When Ruskin claimed to have (yet again!) demolished the associationist argument in Modern Painters (1860), Alexander Bain, Professor of Philosophy at Aberdeen, was, according to Mill, able to show that Ruskin’s own account of art was entirely compatible with associationist principles: ‘‘Mr Ruskin would probably be much astonished were he to find himself held up as one of the principal apostles of the Association Philosophy in Art. Yet, in one of the most remarkable of his writings, the second volume of ‘Modern Painters,’ he aims at establishing, by a large induction and searching analysis, that all things are beautiful or sublime which powerfully recall, and none but those which recall, one or more of a certain series of elevating and delightful thoughts.’’47 Indeed, by the 1860s, Mill was prepared, with Bain’s assistance, to reissue his father’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind of 1829, confident of its continuing significance because its theories had been justified by the work of empirical psychologists such as Bain. In his Logic, Mill notes that in Bain’s work ‘‘the laws of association have been more comprehensively stated and more largely exemplified than by any previous writer’’ and that Bain provides ‘‘incomparably the most complete analytical exposition of the mental phenomena, on the basis of a legitimate Induction, which has yet been produced.’’48 As Christopher Turk points out in his study of Coleridge and Mill, Mill’s later philosophy, as presented in his Logic, ‘‘is in fact intended primarily as a foundation for associationism,’’49 and is intended to challenge the a priori thinking of Coleridge and his followers by establishing that ‘‘the fundamental conceptions of the mind are not intuitive but have the same source in early and forgotten associations as all our other ideas.’’50 Mill was equally confident of his ability to provide an account, from associationist principles, of all of the key issues to which a priori theorists pointed as the particular strengths of their own position. Thus the emphasis by the a priori school on the mind’s ability to construct new unities from the essentially fixed elements of memory could, according to Mill, be no less successfully explained from a thoroughly empirical and associationist standpoint. Mill focuses on a passage in his father’s work whose metaphors—chemical and perceptual—were to be used to explain in empirical terms the process by which the mind ‘‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate’’: When two or more ideas have often been repeated together, and the association has become very strong, they sometimes spring up in such close combi-

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nation as not to be distinguishable. Some cases of sensation are analogous. For example, when a wheel, on the seven parts of which the seven prismatic colours are respectively painted, is made to revolve rapidly, it appears not of seven colours, but of one uniform colour white . . . Ideas, also, which have been so conjoined that whenever one exists in the mind, the others immediately exist along with it, seem to run into one another, to coalesce as it were, and out many for one idea; which idea, however in reality complex, appears to be no less simple, than any one of those of which it is compounded.51

What may appear to be ‘‘simple’’ ideas are nonetheless the ‘‘coalescence’’ of more primitive elements, elements known analytically but never directly experienced. On this basis the younger Mill believed that it was indeed possible to account for supposedly ‘‘organic’’ works of art simply on the basis of ‘‘extremely complicated mechanical processes,’’ because far from having to construct the world from atomistic fragments that could never be combined except by conjunction, association theory worked with ‘‘wholes,’’ which consisted of lesser and often unobserved units. In challenging Sir William Hamilton’s ‘‘refutation’’ of his father’s arguments, it is on the importance of such ‘‘wholes’’ that Mill develops his case: a very important part of the Laws of Association . . . may be termed the Laws of Obliviscence. If Sir W. Hamilton had sufficiently attended to those laws, he never would have maintained, that if we know the parts before the whole, we must continue to know the parts better than the whole. It is one of the principal Laws of Obliviscence, that when a number of ideas suggest one another by association with such certainty and rapidity as to coalesce together in a group, all those members of the group which remain long without being specially attended to, have a tendency to drop out of consciousness. Our consciousness of them becomes more and more faint and evanescent, until no effort of attention can recall it into distinctness, or at last recall it at all.52

The structure of the ‘‘whole’’ may be retained by the mind even when its parts have decayed from recollection, and from this Mill develops his theory of ‘‘signs’’ as unacknowledged associations that are transmuted almost instantaneously into those higher-order wholes of which alone we are conscious: After reading a chapter of a book, when we lay down the volume do we remember to have been individually conscious of the printed letters and syllables which have passed before us? Could we recall, by any effort of mind,

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the visible aspect presented by them, unless some unusual circumstance has fixed our attention upon it during the perusal? Yet each of these letters and syllables must have been present to us as a sensation for at least a passing moment, or the sense would not have been conveyed to us. But the sense being the only thing in which we are interested . . . we retain no impression of the separate letters and syllables. This instance is the more instructive, inasmuch as, the whole process taking place within our means of observation, we know that our knowledge began with the parts and not with the whole.53

Mill’s analysis of language reveals that for associationists all experience has the character of language, since it consists of a series of individual units—like the letters of words—that operate by an association that goes unnoticed under ordinary circumstances precisely because its business is to point beyond itself to a higher order meaning, one that will, in turn, construct those ‘‘pleasures of beauty and of sublimity’’ that, according to Archibald Alison, are felt when ‘‘our minds, instead of being governed by the character of external objects, are enabled to bestow upon them a character which does not belong to them; and even with the rudest, or the most common appearances of Nature, to connect feelings of a nobler and more interesting kind than any that mere influences of matter can ever convey.’’54 This ‘‘transcendentalism’’—the transcending of the material world by turning it into an expressive system—provides the explanation for those ‘‘intimations’’ of a different order of meaning for which Wordsworth and Coleridge were constantly in search: indeed, in the case of Wordsworth, the search may well have been shaped by the very description of such associative experience by Archibald Alison: There is not one of these features of scenery which is not fitted to awaken us to moral emotion; to lead us, when once the key of our imagination is struck, to trains of fascination and of endless imagery; and in the indulgence of them to make our bosoms either glow with conceptions of mental excellence, or melt in the dreams of moral good. Even upon the man of the most uncultivated taste, the scenes of nature have some inexplicable charm: there is not a chord perhaps of the human heart which may not be awakened by their influence; and I believe there is no man of genuine taste, who has not often felt, in the lone majesty of nature, some unseen spirit to dwell, which in his happier hours touched, as if with magic hand, all the springs of his moral sensibility, and rekindled in his heart those original conceptions of the moral or intellectual excellence of his nature, which it is the melancholy tendency of the vulgar pursuits of life to diminish, if not altogether to destroy.55

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Associationism is no more confined than Coleridgean Idealism to the limits of the material world. Its spiritual discoveries, however, do not point to Coleridge’s eternal Ideas in order to justify that ‘‘sense of something more deeply interfused’’ that Wordsworth celebrates in Tintern Abbey, because that something is interfused in our own nature, it is a something to be recovered as the mind, under the influence of aesthetic experience, redeploys through association elements from the depths of its own memories. The associationist poet was no less convinced than the Idealist that he could account for ‘‘all the mighty world / Of eye and ear, both what they half-create / And what perceive,’’ or that he could discover ‘‘In nature and the language of the sense, . . . [the] soul / Of all my moral being.’’56 The assumption of associationism’s necessarily inferior explanatory power is simply the retrospective justification of modern criticism’s failure to grasp the limits of the Kantian argument, and the literary implications of the Humean imagination.

3 At the end of chapter 7 of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge pours scorn on the ‘‘Arts of Memory,’’ as dependent on nothing more than the psychological and bodily requirements of ordinary physical existence—‘‘a sound health, and above all (as far as relates to passive remembrance) a healthy digestion.’’57 The arts of memory, however, are precisely those that associationist theories promote, since all aesthetic experience derives from the materials held latent in our individual memories. It may be, as Archibald Alison puts it, that ‘‘the emotions of sublimity and beauty are uniformly ascribed, both in popular and in philosophical language, to the imagination’’58 but the imagination envisaged by Alison is the imagination as understood by Hume, an imagination that encompasses the memory rather than being distinguishable from it, an imagination that depends on rather than defies the workings of memory. Thus, for Alison, When any object, either of sublimity or beauty, is presented to the mind, I believe every man is conscious of a train of thought being immediately awakened in his imagination, analogous to the character or expression of the original object. The simple perception of the object, we frequently find, is insufficient to excite these emotions, unless it is accompanied with this operation of the mind, unless, according to common expression, our imagi-

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nation is seized, and our fancy busied in pursuit of all those trains of thought, which are allied to this character or expression.59

This description puts paid to all notions of the ‘‘Arts of Memory’’ being simply passive, since the fancy is ‘‘busied in pursuit of all those trains of thought, which are allied to this character or expression.’’ It nonetheless insists on the centrality of memory to our aesthetic experiences, a centrality not only to our immediate aesthetic experience but also to our reflections on that aesthetic experience, since ‘‘we are never so satiated with delight, as when, in recalling our attention, we are able to trace either the progress or the connexion of those thoughts, which have passed with so much rapidity through our imagination.’’60 Alison’s conception of the imagination corresponds to Hume’s in its presentation of memory as a specific case of imagination. Such a view of the imagination, however, contrasts radically with Coleridge’s, in which memory is a subordinate faculty whose operations display none of the ‘‘activity’’ of the creative imagination. Coleridge’s denigration of ‘‘the arts of memory’’ is, implicitly, an attack on associationist theory. Associationists, however, felt entirely capable of explaining all of the effects of art on the basis of their own ‘‘arts of memory’’—which are also, of course, the arts of an imagination that is not fundamentally distinguished from the operation of memory, insofar as both are different ways of describing the process by which ideas occur in the process of association.61 There are three key issues that flow from this. First, the associationist conception of the imagination’s workings is essentially narrative: the real nature of the aesthetic experience is not the unique object that we engage with but the successive memories that the object evokes in us and the narrative of their succession. To describe our experience of a work of literature, or to describe the inner workings of a work of literature, is a process of narrative reconstruction by which we explain the connections that bind together the sequence of memories inspired in the author or in our own responses to the work of art. The narrative expectation that is implicit in the associationist account of aesthetic experience makes it naturally responsive to explicitly narrative literary forms. Those moments of imaginative stasis that the Kantian/Coleridgean tradition—like much modern criticism—sees as fundamental to imaginative activity are experienced, within an associationist context, as inspirations to a narrative rather than the denial of narrative. Indeed associationist theories tend to regard all aesthetic experiences, including paintings and music, as implied narratives, whether narratives of the artist’s or of the spectator’s consciousness. Coleridge develops the opposite

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point of view when he treats narrative itself as symbolic, and therefore as defying the temporality we ordinarily associate with narrative order: his model of such nontemporal narrative is the Bible, in which the temporality of successive events is transformed by a higher order significance within which the events are inscribed: ‘‘In the Bible every agent appears and acts as a self-subsisting individual: each has a life of its own, and yet all are one life. The elements of necessity and free-will are reconciled in the higher power of an omnipresent Providence, that predestinates the whole in the moral freedom of the integral parts. Of this the Bible never suffers us to lose sight. The root is never detached from the ground.’’62 In biblical narrative, events do not merely succeed one another; they reveal themselves as a ‘‘translucence’’ through which the eternal, the infinite, the nonnarratable, can be perceived. Despite the freedom of the agents as actors in history, the pattern of the narrative is ‘‘predestinate’’ in the whole of which the individual agents form a part. The associationist aesthetic experience, on the other hand, is an experience of organized but never predictable connections, connections that may be very different even in relation to the same aesthetic object. It is a narrative of which we can make retrospective sense but that, in each aesthetic experience, forms a unique and temporary pattern out of the relationship between our present and our past experiences. Instead of a sense of ‘‘predestinate’’ certainty, associationist aesthetics promotes a profound sense of contingency, of the value of the apparently accidental and incidental. Thus the unity of emotion that works of art are designed to produce—‘‘the transition of affections along the relation of ideas’’63 that means our associative connections are founded on a train of emotions—is balanced by the almost infinite diversity of potentially associable ideas, which any particular reader/spectator may have. Francis Jeffrey, in his account of Alison’s theories in the Edinburgh Review, points to exactly this consequence of association theory: Take, for example, the scenery so beautifully, and yet imperfectly, described by Mr Scott, on the borders of Loch Katrine. The images which it is calculated to suggest, will agree, perhaps, in being ideas of seclusion—of a life set free from the restraints of the world, and hidden from its observation—of sympathy with the simple joys and animating toils of its natives—and of awe and veneration for the power which has left the traces of its might on the cliffs and mountains: but the particular train of images, by the help of which those general impressions may be moulded into distinct objects of emotion,

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is evidently altogether loose and undetermined, and must depend on the taste, dispositions and information of every different beholder.64

Such radical diversity of associative trains turns every aesthetic experience into a narrative that is in part the narrative of the intellectual and emotional history of the individual reader, just as every work of art is built upon the narrative of the associative connections in the artist’s mind. The consequence, inimical to Coleridge as to the modern critical tradition that looks back to him as origin, is a profound democratization of aesthetics: it is the form of associative experience itself, not its origin in a specific aesthetic object, which is significant, and any peasant may have as many and as valid associations as an educated gentleman.65 The narrative emphasis of associationism is bound up with its necessarily retrospective emphasis. Associationist art is always a recollection of the past, and often a recovery of forgotten elements of past experience. Each aesthetic experience necessarily develops by carrying us back into the past, so that as we read forward we simultaneously move back along the track of our reactivated memories. Such a theory, of course, also lays enormous emphasis on objects from the past, which stimulate our associations and so make particular historical scenes both emotionally and aesthetically interesting. Aesthetic experiences that can only be aroused by delving into the past are a direct stimulus to the search for past objects that will be rich in associative potential. Thus Alison emphasises the interaction between our cultural memories, deriving from our acquired knowledge of the past, and objects that are fitted to stimulate those memories into associative trains that allow for aesthetic experience. Within an eighteenth-century context these will tend to be classical memories and classical remains: And what is it that constitutes that emotion of sublime delight, which every man of common sensibility feels upon the first prospect of Rome? It is not the scene of destruction which is before him. It is not the Tiber, diminished in his imagination to a paltry stream, flowing amid the ruins of that magnificence which it once adorned. It is not the triumph of superstition over the wreck of human greatness, and its monuments erected upon the very spot where the first honours of humanity have been gained. It is ancient Rome which fills his imagination. . . . All the labours of his youth, or the studies of his maturer age have acquired, with regard to the history of this great people, open at once before his imagination, and present him with a field of high and solemn imagery, which can never be exhausted. Take from these associations, conceal from him that it is Rome that he sees, and how different would be his emotion!66

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Any objects that focus the memory will, however, provide the same kind of experience, so that, ‘‘national associations have a similar effect, in increasing the emotions of sublimity and beauty, as they very obviously increase the number of images presented to the mind’’;67 equally ‘‘the natives of any country, which possesses a national or characteristic music, need not be reminded how strongly the performance of such airs brings back to them the imagery of their native land; and must often have had occasion to remark how inferior an emotion they excite in those who are strangers to such associations.’’68 Associationist art is deeply complicit with nationalist sentiment, precisely to the extent that the icons of nationalist identification—specific landscapes, historic heroes, etc.—can be harnessed to profound aesthetic effect because of the longstanding density of associations that they invoke. It is from such an aesthetic context that the historical novel, as a prime mode of Romantic expression, develops, since it populates the national landscape with memorable figures and objects that become the potential associative stimuli for future aesthetic experience: ‘‘The awful forms of Gothic superstition, the wild and romantic imagery, which the turbulence of the middle ages, the Crusades, and the institution of chivalry have spread over every country of Europe, arise to the imagination in every scene; accompanied with all those pleasing recollections of prowess, and adventure, and courteous manners, which distinguished those memorable times. With such images in their minds, it is not common nature that appears to surround them. It is nature embellished and made sacred by the memory . . .’’69 For Alison, landscape and mind are mutually interacting, each contributing to the other’s ability to act as a locus of associative recollection that is the very foundation of aesthetic experience. The third important aspect of associationist theory is its social formation. As Annette C. Baier has argued, Hume’s notion of association is profoundly based on the association of persons, and all relations, for Hume, are ‘‘ ‘cousins german’ of ‘the relation of blood’ ’’70 so that ‘‘Humean passions, even pride and curiosity, are fellow-person permeated.’’71 Our associative processes are not private experiences precisely because we are social creatures whose most profound memories are memories of our fellow human beings, and because much of our memory is shaped by a common education. Thus Jeffrey divides the associative elements into three categories: first, those that are ‘‘natural signs’’ because they have been always connected with certain emotions in human experience; secondly, those that are the ‘‘arbitrary or accidental concomitants’’ of certain kinds of feeling, as a result, for instance, of

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education; and, thirdly, associations that ‘‘bear some analogy, or fanciful resemblance, to circumstances or situations with which these emotions are necessarily connected.’’72 The increasing arbitrariness of these connections defines, for Jeffrey, the ways in which artists have to shape their works if they are to gain an audience of common experiences—the more arbitrary the associations, the less likely are they to produce effective associative experiences in their audiences. The most powerful associations are those that seem entirely ‘‘natural’’ to us or which, through training, we have come to share with a large proportion of our fellow creatures. As Alison expresses it: The time when nature began to appear . . . in another view than as something useful to human life, was, when [we] were engaged in the study of classical literature . . . The beautiful forms of ancient mythology with which the fancy of the poets peopled every element, are now ready to appear in [our] minds upon the prospect of every scene. In most men, at least, the first appearance of poetical imagination is at school, when their imagination begins to be warmed by the descriptions of ancient poetry, and when they have acquired a new sense, as it were, with which they can behold the face of nature.73

Associations are the bond of our common existence: the associations with which our memories are peopled are precisely the associations that we have acquired in our interaction with other people, so that every aesthetic experience is also a reassertion of our sense of a shared identity.

4 We should take seriously Stirling’s injunction: Kant has not answered Hume and it is the Humean as much as, if not more than, the Kantian imagination that resonates through British Romantic art, its profound skepticism of the imagination producing exactly that contradiction between the necessity of imagination and its equally necessary falsehood that haunts all romantic art. The Kantian/Coleridgean conception of the imagination is one which seeks—or, indeed, already assumes—the possibility of certainty, of our direct awareness of an ultimate truth—in the end, of the eternal truth of the Logos incarnated in the historical—and symbolic—being of Christ. Humean associationism presents a very different and much more anguished conception of the imagination since, for Hume, the imagination is both the foundation of all our experience

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and, at the same time, its inevitable dissolution. Only through the workings of the imagination can we discover a stable world—‘‘I am naturally led to regard the world, as something real and durable, and as preserving its existence, even when it is no longer present to my perception’’74—but that stable world is, in the end, a ‘‘fiction’’: ‘‘The smooth passage of the imagination along the ideas of the resembling perceptions makes us ascribe to them a perfect identity. The interrupted manner of their appearance makes us consider them as so many resembling, but still distinct beings, which appear after certain intervals. The perplexity arising from this contradiction produces a propension to unite these broken appearance by the fiction of a continu’d existence.’’75 The real that can only be discovered in and through the imagination is, in exactly the same constructive act, dissolved into what we know can only be a ‘‘fiction,’’ a series of associations held together, like the mind, in ‘‘a heap or collection of different perceptions, and supposed, tho’ falsely, to be endow’d with a perfect simplicity and identity.’’76 The true suppositions of the imagination—the world is real and available to me—and the false suppositions—the world is simply a heap of falsely connected perceptions—are both equally compelling. ‘‘This deficiency in our ideas,’’ Hume notes, ‘‘is not, indeed, perceiv’d in common life, nor are we sensible, that in the most usual conjunctions of cause and effect we are as ignorant of the ultimate principle, which binds them together, as in the most unusual and extraordinary. But this proceeds merely from an illusion of the imagination; and the question is, how far we ought to yield to these illusions.’’77 The Humean imagination, unlike the Kantian/Coleridgean one, continually subverts rather than affirms its own truth: even ‘‘if the consideration of these instances makes us take a resolution to reject all the trivial suggestions of the fancy, and adhere to the understanding, that is, to the general and more establish’d properties of the imagination; even this resolution, if steadily executed, wou’d be dangerous, and attended with the most fatal consequences’’ because ‘‘the understanding, when it acts alone, and according to its most general principles, entirely subverts itself, and leave not the lowest degree of evidence in any proposition.’’78 From this contradiction we can only escape by submitting ourselves again to an illusion, to ‘‘that singular and seemingly trivial property of the fancy, by which we enter with difficulty into remote views of things.’’79 At least three key issues of Romantic art—the relation of mind to landscape, the imaginative value of the past, and the value of our shared social emotions—together with that profound self-doubt about the workings of the imagination, are deeply connected to associationist the-

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ories of the mind, and to those ‘‘arts of memory’’ that associationist theories invoke. The work of art, in associationist terms, loops from the present through the past (of writer/reader, community/nation) in order to recollect memories that will become infused with present experiences to produce an immediate and original experience that will in turn inspire its own associative connections, contributing to the fund of memories upon which association draws. What this ‘‘loop’’ through the past produces is a Romanticism very different from the ‘‘symbolist’’ conception of Romanticism that modern critics identify with Coleridge; what it produces is a Romanticism that is responsive to a much greater variety of the writings of the Romantic period than the ‘‘Romantic ideology’’ of the Kantian-Coleridgean schema. When Keats listened to Hazlitt,80 what he heard was the echo of Hume: ‘‘the fancy cannot cheat so well/ As she is famed to do,’’ because its foundations are in a past whose reality—‘‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream?’’—can never be guaranteed precisely because of the avoidable ‘‘illusion of the imagination.’’ British Romanticism is not built on the overthrow of British empiricism but on the working-out of its most profound consequences, those in which the imagination generates our only world while, at the same time, subverting any certainty we might have as to its reality.

NOTES 1. James Hutchison Stirling, The Secret of Hegel: Being the Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form, and Matter (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1990 [1865]). 2. James Hutchison Stirling, ‘‘‘Kant Has Not Answered Hume,’’ Mind 9 and 10, no. 36, 37 (1884–85): 531–47, 45–72. 3. Ibid., 9:531. 4. Cynthia Chase, ed., Romanticism (London: Routledge, 1993), 8. 5. McGann, 32. 6. Stirling, ‘‘Kant Has Not Answered Hume,’’ 9:531. 7. Ibid., 10:47. 8. Ibid., 10:48. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 10:59. 11. Ibid., 10:60. 12. Ibid., 10:65. 13. Ibid., 10:70. 14. Ibid., 10:71. 15. Stewart, Works, 1:445. 16. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1:301–5. 17. Engell, 328. 18. Ibid., 366.

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19. Stewart, Works, 2:259. 20. Ibid., 2:260–61. 21. Hume, Treatise, 265. 22. S. T. Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 30. 23. See Jan Wilbanks, Hume’s Theory of Imagination (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1968): ‘‘We must never lose sight of the fact that the materials of the imagination are, in Hume’s view, the same as those of all other types of thinking; that the having of ideas (or images) is something which is common to memory, imagination, and reason. It is not something peculiar to imaginative activity. . . . Hume holds that if one is imagining then one is having ideas; he does not hold that if one is having ideas then one is necessarily imagining,’’ 63. 24. Hume, Treatise, 267. 25. Ibid. 26. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1:120–21. 27. Alison, 2:417–18. 28. Ibid., 2:418. 29. Ibid. 30. Stewart, Works, 2:257. 31. Ibid., 2:321. 32. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1:136. 33. Ibid. 34. J. H. Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1931). 35. J. H. Muirhead, Coleridge as a Philosopher (London: Allen and Unwin, 1930), 259. 36. Ibid., 117. 37. Ibid., 199. 38. S. T. Coleridge, Collected Letters, 6 vols. ed. F. L. Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–1966), 2: 961. 39. Hume, Treatise, 305–6. 40. Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Visions (London: Harper Collins, 1998), 70. The quotation from Hume is from Treatise, 198. 41. A. H. Hallam, ‘‘On Some Characteristics of Modern Poetry,’’ [1831] in Victorian Scrutinies, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London: Athlone Press, 1972), 86. 42. Ibid., 87. 43. Ibid., 88. 44. Ibid., 89. 45. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. J. M. Johnson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 145. 46. John Stuart Mill, ‘‘Coleridge,’’ in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. J. M. Robson and D. D. Dryer, introd. by F. E. L. Priestley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 128. 47. John Stuart Mill, ‘‘Bain’s Psychology,’’ in Essays on Philosophy and the Classics, ed. J. M. Robson, introd. by F. E. Sparshott (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 363–64. 48. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected

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View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, ed. J. M. Robson and R. F. McRae (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 853n. 49. Christopher Turk, Coleridge and Mill (Aldershot: Avebury, 1988), 75. 50. Ibid. 51. James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 2 vols. (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1829), 1:90 in Collected Works, 7 vols. (London and Bristol: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1999). 52. John Stuart Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, ed, J. M. Robson, introd. by Alan Ryan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 257. 53. Ibid. 54. Alison, 2:450. 55. Ibid., 2:428–29. 56. William Wordsworth, ‘‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,’’ 108–12 in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 119. 57. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1:128. 58. Alison, 2:17. 59. Ibid., 2:18. 60. Ibid. 61. ‘‘And as an idea of the memory, by losing its force and vivacity, may degenerate to such a degree, as to be taken for an idea of the imagination; so on the other hand an idea of the imagination may acquire such a force and vivacity, as to pass for an idea of the memory, and counterfeit its effects on the belief and judgment,’’ Hume, Treatise, 86. 62. Coleridge, Lay Sermons, 31–32. 63. Hume, Treatise, 306. 64. Francis Jeffrey, ‘‘Review of Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste,’’ Edinburgh Review, no. 35 (1811): 28. 65. See Alison: ‘‘Even the peasant, whose knowledge of former times extend but to a few generations, has yet in his village some monuments of the deeds or virtues of his forefathers; and cherishes with a fond veneration the memorial of those good old times to which his imagination returns with delight, and of which he loves to recount the simple tales that tradition has brought him,’’ Essays on Taste, 1:37–38. 66. Alison, 1:37. 67. Ibid., 1:33. 68. Ibid., 1:34. 69. Ibid., 1:49. 70. Annette C. Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 48. 71. Ibid., 52. 72. Jeffrey, 9. 73. Alison, 1:49. 74. Hume, Treatise, 197. 75. Ibid., 205. 76. Ibid., 207. 77. Ibid., 267. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid., 268. 80. For a discussion of Hazlitt’s relation to associationism and Keats’s use of it, see Uttara Natarajan, Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense: Criticism, Morals, and the Metaphysics of Power (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 52ff.

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Robert Burns and Scottish Common Sense Philosophy Nigel Leask I’ve sent you here by Johnie Simson, Twa sage Philosophers to glimpse on! Smith, wi’ his sympathetic feeling, An’ Reid, to common sense appealing. Philosophers have fought an’ wrangled, An’ meikle Greek an’ Latin mangled, Till, with their Logic-jargon tir’d, An’ in the depth of science mir’d, To common sense they now appeal, What wives an’ wabsters see an’ feel . . . [Robert Burns, ‘‘Letter To James Tennant of Glenconner’’ (1786), 2.7–16]1

BURNS’S

LINES TESTIFY TO THE WIDE DISSEMINATION OF ADAM

Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Thomas Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764) in late eighteenth century Scotland. It is paradoxical that the poet described by Henry Mackenzie as a ‘‘heaven taught ploughman’’2 should on his own declaration turn out to be an authority on Smith and Reid, notwithstanding his avocation as a humble tenant farmer. And the same might be said of the wider social circle encompassed within the verse epistle: Tennant of Glenconner, the recipient of the two books, was a miller at Ochiltree, while Johnie Simson, bearer of the books and Burns’s covering letter, was a dancing teacher in the same village. And yet in the end the poet’s philosophical literacy has been taken to confirm the epithet of ‘‘heaven taught’’ rather than to question it; George Davie, influentially, has written that Burns’s insight was to perceive the common ground in the otherwise disparate philosophies of Smith and Reid, ‘‘that in their different ways they upheld the standpoint of the plain man 64

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against that of the pundits.’’3 This associates Burns with a dominant interpretation of Reidean ‘‘Common Sense’’ philosophy as antirational, counterenlightenment, intuitionist, which has proved enormously influential in subsequent understandings of Scottish culture.4 Yet ‘‘Tennant of Glenconner’’ itself suggests some caution in ascribing to Burns a blind faith in ‘‘what wives and wabsters see and feel’’ at least as the basis of a philosophical system. This understanding of Common Sense philosophy underpins its dismissal by Immanuel Kant as ‘‘an appeal to the opinion of the multitude, of whose applause the philosopher is ashamed, while the popular charlatan glories and boasts in it.’’5 Kant may not have read Reid’s book itself, only Joseph Priestley’s Examination of Dr Reid’s Inquiry, Dr Beattie’s Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, and Dr Oswald’s Appeal to Common Sense in Behalf of Religion (1774),6 although Manfred Kuehn has challenged the prevailing view that Kant knew little about Common Sense philosophy.7 Priestley’s attack telescoped Reid’s rigorous and skeptical philosophy of Common Sense together with the cruder versions of his Aberdonian followers Beattie and Oswald. The English philosopher complained that ‘‘[Common Sense philosophy] admits of no appeal to reason, properly considered, which any person might be at liberty to examine and discuss; but on the contrary, every man is taught to think himself authorized to pronounce decisively upon every question according to his present feeling, and persuasion; under the notion of its being something original, instinctive, ultimate, and incontrovertible.’’8 Priestley alleged that Scottish Common Sense shut the door on philosophy properly so called and replaced it with ‘‘mere prejudice,’’ which, he hinted darkly, bore the trace of either the vulgar enthusiasm of the Calvinist doctrine of ‘‘inner light,’’ or else (its ideological antithesis) a Jacobite appeal to ‘‘exploded doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance.’’9 In fact what Reid’s Inquiry had argued in attacking the ‘‘ideal system’’ of Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, was that ideas and impressions were mere hypotheses, based on a false analogy between thought and mechanical motion, and that ‘‘every operation of the senses, in its very nature, implies judgement or belief, as well as simple appearances.’’10 Via an analysis of sense perceptions, Reid argued that such judgements, like axioms in mathematics, are not subject to rational analysis because ‘‘they are part of our constitution . . . they make up what is called the ‘‘common sense’’ of mankind.’’11 Claiming to be the truer follower of Bacon’s inductive method, Reid bases his attack on Hume’s ‘‘ideal’’ hypothesis upon what he termed the incontrovertible ‘‘phaenomena of human nature,’’ suggesting at the same time that his opponents’

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attempts to argue from a hypothesis against facts was contrary to the rules of true philosophy. Although Reid believed that all men did possess common sense—and this is the opening for Davie’s understanding of ‘‘democratic intellect’’—it is not equivalent to vulgar ‘‘opinion,’’ but ‘‘rather . . . stands for the commonly held beliefs of rational men.’’12 Ralph Jessop clarifies this complex issue in arguing that ‘‘Reid has, as it were, two voices, one which starts and shouts with the vulgar and another which speaks and reasons with the philosopher.’’ Jessop quotes Reid’s own statement that ‘‘if it is a good rule, to think with philosophers and speak with the vulgar, it must be right to speak with the vulgar when we think with them, and not to shock them by philosophical paradoxes, which, when put into common language, express only the common sense of mankind.’’13 I will have more to say about Reid later in this chapter, but for the moment return to the continuation of the lines quoted above from Burns’s ‘‘Letter to James Tennant’’: But, hark ye, friend, I charge you strictly, Peruse them [ie.Smith and Reid], an’ return them quickly; For now I’m grown sae cursed douse, I pray an’ ponder butt the house, My shins, my lane, I sit there roastin, Perusing Bunyan, Brown and Boston; Till by an’ by, if I haud on, I’ll grunt a real Gospel groan . . . Sae shortly you shall see me bright, A burning an’ a shining light. [2.17–24; 29–30]

If the miller of Ochiltree is not prompt in returning the books of philosophy, the poet admonishes him, he will turn into a Calvinist enthusiast, having nothing else on his shelf but the devotional works of Bunyan, John Brown, and Thomas Boston; ‘‘I’ll grunt a real gospel groan’’ [2.24]. This passage I think casts rather an ironic light on line 15–16’s account of Reid’s philosophy; ‘‘To common sense they now appeal, / What wives and wabsters see an feel.’’ In the popular culture of Burns’s Ayrshire and South West Scotland, the heartland of Presbyterian enthusiasm, belief in the evidence of one’s senses, untutored by reason, may be an insufficient guarantor of truth. Burns writes here as a ‘‘New Light’’ Presbyterian, open to the influence of enlightenment reason.14 Although (if we accept the ironic reading) Burns may even for a moment appear to be gently endorsing Priestley and Kant’s satire on

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Reidean Common Sense as an appeal to vulgar prejudice, his very act of disseminating the philosophical works of Reid and Smith (the subject of ‘‘Letter to Tennant’’) around his plebeian social circle suggests a different understanding of democratic intellect as popular enlightenment. Perhaps we should also consider the genre of Burns’s poem, the vernacularized Horatian epistle, lest we forget that Burns is dispatching Adam Smith as well as Thomas Reid to the miller of Ochiltree. For the epistle illuminates Smithian ethics as well as Reidean common sense— and after all Burns was the poet who had famously written the Smithean lines, in ‘‘To a Louse,’’ ‘‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!’’ (2.43–4).15 Smith’s Glasgow lectures on moral philosophy, as well as the Theory of Moral Sentiments, set out to show how ‘‘the principles of morality and natural justice [were] based on a meticulous examination of the process of social interaction.’’16 Burns’s ‘‘Louse‘‘’’ undoubtedly reveals an acceptance of Smith’s idea of the ‘‘internal monitor,’’ of a socially derived sense of propriety as the guardian of the good life, but the poem’s satire on social ostentation also displays a complete rejection of Smith’s normative moral emphasis in enforcing the social status quo by encouraging the poor to ‘‘esteem’’ the rich. In contrast, the epistle’s familiar address to Tennant reveals the importance of mutual intellectual exchange, criticism, and democratic respect that, for Burns, underpinned social sympathy. The ‘‘Letter to Tennant’’ is perhaps playing off Reid’s notion of common sense as innate judgement with the skepticism and materialism of Smith’s notion of sympathy. Burns never met either Reid or Smith, despite the fact that the author of The Wealth of Nations was Commissioner for Customs and approved his appointment to the excise in 1788. But he did have a good acquaintance with fellow Ayrshireman Dugald Stewart, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University from 1785 to 1810. Although more significant as a pedagogue than an original thinker, Stewart was Reid’s principal disciple and systematizer of Common Sense philosophy; Nicholas Phillipson describes him as ‘‘the most influential philosophy teacher in the West outside Germany.’’17 In his short biographical memoir of Burns, Stewart remembered how he had first met the poet in 1786 at his house at Catrine in the company of Lord Daer, subsequently one of the leaders of the radical Scottish Friends of the People. ‘‘[Burns’s] manners were then, as they continued ever afterwards, simple, manly, and independent; strongly expressive of conscious genius and worth; but without anything that indicated forwardness, arrogance, or vanity.’’18

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Stewart did not share Mackenzie’s belief that Burns was ‘‘heaven taught,’’ but saw him rather as a shining exemplar of Scotland’s ‘‘provincial enlightenment.’’ Detailing the boyhood education that had left Burns with (limited) knowledge of Latin and French, as well as arithmetic and ‘‘practical geometry’’; he described how the poet ‘‘had belonged to a small club of such of the inhabitants [of Mauchline] as had a taste for books, when they used to converse and debate on any interesting questions that occurred to them in the course of their reading. His manner of speaking in public had evidently the marks of some practice in extempore elocution.’’19 We catch another glimpse here of the plebeian intellectual network embodied in the ‘‘Epistle to Tennant of Glenconner.’’ Stewart concluded his account by recalling his last meeting with Burns at Drunsheugh in the winter of 1788–89 in a company that included the associationist philosopher Archibald Alison, ‘‘a present which Alison sent him afterwards of his Essay on Taste, drew from Burns a letter of acknowledgement, which I remember to have read with some degree of surprise at the distinct conception he appeared to have formed, of the several principles of the doctrine of association.’’20 This letter, which survives, dispels all doubts about Burns’s informed knowledge of contemporary philosophy and aesthetics. After Burns’s early death in 1796, his reputation tarnished by his being known as a radical and an alcoholic, a subscription volume of his poetry and correspondence (to be prefaced with his biography) was projected by his friends John Syme and Alexander Cunningham to raise money for his impoverished widow and family. They initially hoped that the biography would be written by Dugald Stewart, although a Scottish Liverpudlian physician named James Currie was from the start a more realistic, if less distinguished, prospect.21 Along with John Millar and James Mackintosh, Stewart had been an intellectual champion of the beleaguered Scottish Whigs who had fastened their standard to the pro-French Revolutionary party. Stewart’s political liberalism, which was shared by his mentor Thomas Reid (who had attended Friends of Liberty meetings in 1791 and was forced into a humiliating recantation of his radical sympathies at the age of 83), demonstrates the inadmissibility of connecting Common Sense philosophy with Burkean conservatism in the 1790s context.22 By 1796 Stewart’s political reputation was seriously compromised; in 1789 he had travelled to France to witness the proceedings of the States General, and on the publication of his Elements of the Philosophy of Human Nature in 1792 had been forced to recant his eulogistic remarks on Condorcet, a philosopher widely held to be responsible for the September Massacres.23

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An unpublished letter from Stewart to Currie dated May 21, 1798, makes it clear that the philosopher was suffering the effects of what he described as ‘‘coldness and estrangement’’ from former friends and colleagues in Edinburgh University who disapproved of his political principles. Robert Burns was too much of a hot chestnut to be touched by a man of Stewart’s public standing, or indeed for that matter by any liberal-leaning Scot resident in Scotland anxious of his reputation. Stewart commended Currie’s courage in tackling the project, given that ‘‘there is some similarity in the situation of [us] both’’ (his own words) insofar as both concealed political skeletons in the cupboard.24 Stewart here referred to Currie’s bestselling pamphlet of 1793 A Letter to Mr Pitt (written under the pseudonym of ‘‘Jasper Wilson’’) that had attacked the government’s war policy without dissimulating its Paineite and prorevolutionary sympathies.25 Stewart offered Currie his notes on Burns and all possible assistance (including the memoir quoted above), although he nervously requested that his name should not appear in the volume, and asked to read Currie’s proof sheets before publication. Stewart’s excuse for declining the Burns biography was that his literary energies were currently dedicated to writing lives of Professors William Robertson and Thomas Reid, both considerably safer subjects than Burns in the political climate of 1798. 26 But he was nevertheless supportive of the project. When Currie’s four volume edition of Burns’s poetry and correspondence, prefaced by a life of the poet and an essay on the Scottish peasantry, was published in 1800, Stewart wrote him a eulogistic letter ‘‘the thorough and faithful picture you have given of Burns is an important accession to our stock of literary Biography, and the incidental reflections you have contrived to interweave with the narrative, cannot fail to be of essential utility to the very different descriptions of persons who are likely to be your readers.’’27 When, in July 1800, S. T. Coleridge described Currie’s essay as ‘‘a masterly specimen of philosophical biography’’28 he may have intended the epithet ‘‘philosophical’’ to mean its rational achievement in dispelling the ‘‘vulgar wonder’’ attached to a peasant poet (he would later change his mind as we will see below). However much we might choose to see Currie as involved in the sort of ‘‘regulative’’ process recently discussed by Jon Mee in his book Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation, nonetheless the ‘‘wonder’’ and ‘‘curiosity’’ of Burnsian genius, rather than being ‘‘explained away,’’ were in part cathected back into the peasant class from which he arose, anatomized in Currie’s prefatory ‘‘Observations on the Manners of the Scottish Peasantry.’’29 Far from

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representing a ‘‘nine days wonder,’’ Burns’s genius was taken to incarnate what Currie’s mentor Dugald Stewart had hailed as the progressive spirit of the age, the triumph of popular enlightenment over ignorance and enthusiasm. Quite apart from his qualifications as an Anglo-Scot in presenting ‘‘some touches of national character and national manners’’ to English readers in introducing the life of Burns, Currie could claim expertise in writing the poet’s life as a professional observer and manager of the poor. He is the sort of bourgeois intellectual who might have been invented by Michel Foucault if he had not actually existed: a leading light of the Liverpool campaign for the Abolition of Slavery and Repeal of the Test Acts, Currie was a prominent member of the city’s Committee for Managing the Poor, worked for much of his career as a physician in the Liverpool Dispensary, a charitable hospitable for the poor, and was later instrumental in establishing both the Liverpool Fever hospital and Lunatic Asylum. Currie’s civic activism and philanthropic energy were characteristic of his Liverpool coterie, dissenting intellectuals and merchants like William Roscoe, William Rathbone, Edward Rushton, and William Shepherd. 30 Philip Connell writes of the Roscoe circle that ‘‘their Anglicized, bourgeois version of Scottish commercial humanism attempted to sustain the moral and cultural legitimacy of nineteenthcentury industrial conditions, in the face of widespread poverty and social dislocation, by extending the potential benefits of polite learning to the labouring classes in an intellectual hierarchy of cultural diffusion and emulation.’’31 The term ‘‘commercial humanism’’ here intentionally states its difference from the civic humanist paradigms of much eighteenth-century political thought, and derives from an alternative Scottish Enlightenment discourse that John Robertson and J.G.A. Pocock have described as ‘‘civil jurisprudence.’’ ‘‘In the jurisprudential perspective,’’ writes Robertson, ‘‘society, not the political community, was the universal element; the possession of rights, not the pursuit of virtue, was the condition of association between men; and liberty was consequentially understood as the private, juristic freedom ‘from’ authority, rather than as the public, political liberty ‘to’ participate.’’32 This is spelled out by Currie in a discussion of education in a letter of 1791, ‘‘My notion of education . . . is like my idea of a national government: that it should be chiefly negative or preventative, so to speak, extending to as small an abridgement of liberty as possible, but absolute on the points on which it interferes.’’33 Despite his admiration for the works of Tom Paine, Currie cited the

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principal influence on his social thought as the ‘‘science of politics’’ outlined by Dugald Stewart in chapter 4, section 8 of Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1793) entitled ‘‘The Use and Abuse of General Principles in Politics.’’34 In the year of its publication, Currie recommended Stewart’s book to his friends as the most valuable attack on Burkean prescription to have emerged from the whole revolution controversy.35 In 1794 Currie wrote admiringly to Stewart ‘‘I am altogether a pupil of the school of philosophy in which you take such a lead,’’ and that the Elements was ‘‘calculated to recall the world from the path that leads to chaos and darkness, and to make the enquiries concerning mind and its attributes, run in a parallel direction with that charted out for natural philosophy by Bacon.’’36 Currie clearly approved of Stewart’s anti-Burkean critique of revolutions not as the product of political innovation so much as ‘‘bigoted attachment to antiquated forms’’ of government, at the same time recommending a ‘‘gradual and prudent accommodation of established institutions to the varying opinions, manners, and circumstances of mankind.’’37 Stewart’s science of politics was founded on the ‘‘economical system,’’ which (following Smith’s Wealth of Nations) he described as ‘‘the result of the wisdom of nature, and not of human contrivance,’’38 and preferring ‘‘the common sense of mankind’’ to ‘‘the false theories of statesmen.’’39(Currie usefully glossed this idea in the Jasper Wilson letter when he compares the predictable trajectory of merchants with the whims of politicians; ‘‘the freaks of the mischievous monkey are indeed wild and capricious, but the actions of the industrious beaver are uniform and exact.’’)40 Philip Connell writes that ‘‘for Stewart and his Whig students, political economy offered a way of sustaining a spirit of moderate reformism in the reactionary intellectual atmosphere after 1789, by disassociating specific constitutional questions from the legitimating methodological grounds of political science.’’41 Although the ‘‘science of politics’’ was, crucially, articulated in opposition to Burkean prescription, at moments it can easily be confused with conservative attacks on the political rationalism of the left. Because of his classically liberal belief in the ‘‘wisdom of nature,’’ Stewart was opposed to utopian political schemes such as Godwin’s, on the grounds that ‘‘it is much more necessary to abolish old institutions, than to introduce new ones.’’42 The science of politics looked forward to progressive futurity, rather than back to the dark ages of despotism, entails and commercial monopolies. Donald Winch has argued that Stewart departed from the skepticism of his teachers, Hume and Smith in his perfectibilitarian optimism re-

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garding the beneficial effects of commercial intercourse, and, a related effect, the diffusion of knowledge by the printing press.43 If Ferguson, Hume, and Smith had worried about the deleterious effects of commercial society on public spirit, it was Stewart’s faith—largely influenced by his teacher Thomas Reid—that the power of enlightened opinion would more than substitute for public virtue. Enlightened social intercourse ‘‘cannot fail to operate in undermining local and national prejudices, and in imparting to the whole species the intellectual acquirements of each particular community.’’44Although there is a lingering idealisation of the gemeinschaft of traditional Scottish society in Currie’s ‘‘Observations,’’ Stewart’s remarks nonetheless anticipate his bid to assimilate Burns’s Scottish particularism into a more comprehensive and cosmopolitan British and imperial identity. Echoing Reid, Stewart pinned his hopes on what would come to be called ‘‘the spirit of the age’’ rather than the ‘‘efforts of original genius’’ in improving society; ‘‘not merely the force of a single mind, but the intellectual power of the age in which he lives.’’45 Philip Connell writes that ‘‘Stewart’s progressive Whiggism was profoundly antipathetic to that ‘‘originality of genius’’ which has commonly been regarded as a central, defining characteristic of the Romantic artist, but which he would clearly have regarded as the product of undisciplined intellectual primitivism.’’46 Stewart’s suspicion of lone genius, his concentration on the invisible chain linking the individual with the collective mind of the age, strongly foreshadow Currie’s circumscription of Burns’s genius in the 1800 Life. Like his friend William Roscoe’s cultural biography of Lorenzo Medici, Currie’s portrait of Burns is both the image of an individual, and a representative figure of the collective ‘‘intellectual power’’ of the Scottish peasantry in an age of monumental social transition.47 Common Sense becomes the basis for a historical theory of social progress, rather than simply underpinning an intuitionist epistemology, as it is normally understood. As we will see, this notion of genius both informed and was challenged by Wordsworth and Coleridge in the preface to Lyrical Ballads and Biographia Literaria. Dugald Stewart’s brief account of Burns’s intellectual formation in the conversation societies of provincial Scotland was expanded in Currie’s Life of Burns into a dissertation on popular enlightenment and the influence of reading clubs. Praising the clubs’ concern with practical science and mechanics, Currie cast some doubt on the wisdom of their subscription to the principles of Addisonian politeness, instantiated in the purchase of Mackenzie’s periodicals the Mirror and Lounger by Burns’s Tarbolton Batchelors Club. ‘‘Delicacy of taste,’’ he continued,

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quoting Hume’s essay on the subject, is the proper preserve of men of ‘‘opulence and leisure,’’ its purpose to ‘‘correct that morbid sensibility . . . that delicacy of passion, which is the bane of the temperament of genius.’’ Taste is an upper class prerogative, however; when cultivated among the lower sort, it ‘‘may make necessary labours irksome or disgusting, and should it render the cultivator of the soil unhappy in his situation, it presents no means by which the situation might be improved.’’48 Contemplating the unhappy fate of Burns here leads Currie to forget his progressive principle of social meliorism, apparently endorsing the existence of ‘‘Mute inglorious Miltons’’ in a society that lacked a ‘‘carrie`re ouverte aux talents,’’ to cite William Empson’s famous essay on Gray’s Elegy.49 Taste and literature do not offer practical rewards and ‘‘can scarcely be pursued with advantage by the peasant in his short intervals of leisure.’’ Rather than Homer or Shakespeare, the aspiring peasant would do better to employ his spare time with ‘‘the penmanship of Butterworth or the arithmetic of Cocker.’’50 Currie’s remarks— anticipating the Mechanics Institute movement—here overlook Burns’s important letter to Sir John Sinclair published in the Statistical Account of Scotland, republished in Currie’s second volume, which described his role in assisting his patron Robert Riddell to establish the Nithsdale Circulating Library among the tenant farmers and laborers of Dumfriesshire. ‘‘Giving [the lower classes] a turn for reading and reflection, is giving them a source of innocent and laudable amusement,’’ wrote Burns, ‘‘and besides raises them to a more dignified degree of rationality.’’ Among the ‘‘trash’’ of contemporary novels, he reported that the Library contained Blair’s Sermons, Hume and Robertson’s Histories, Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, Don Quixote, as well as the same ‘‘polite periodicals’’ condemned by Currie. Burns (who signed himself ‘‘A Peasant’’) concluded his letter with the thought that ‘‘A peasant who can read, and enjoy such books, is certainly a much superior being to his neighbour, who perhaps stalks beside his team, very little removed, except in shape, from the brutes he drives.’’51 As we saw in discussing the ‘‘Letter to Tennant of Glenconner,’’ popular enlightenment is the crucial condition of Burnsian ‘‘common sense,’’ and as such quite distinct from either blind intuitionism or vulgar prejudice. Currie did to some extent qualify his strictures on popular access to ‘‘works of taste’’ in his subsequent remarks when he admitted the popularity of works of imagination among Scottish book clubs; ‘‘every human being is the judge of his own happiness,’’ he added, but with the proviso that literature should make the poor content with their lot

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rather than ‘‘seek[ing] to rise above it.’’52 In the remainder of his inserted dissertation, he discussed the general effect of reading and conversation clubs in improving the culture of the Scottish peasantry. (It is notable that the ‘‘Mauchline Conversation Club,’’ successor to Burns’s Tarbolton Batchelors, appears on the subscription list of the 1800 edition, so Currie may have been deliberately speaking to the gallery.) Conversation clubs are preferred to solitary reading, on the grounds that ‘‘the collision of opinions’’ is the most effective form of ‘‘abbreviated instruction’’ for the hard-pressed peasant. Public discussion, in the strictly regulated forum of clubs like the Tarbolton Batchelor’s (the club’s constitution, drawn up by Burns, is published as an appendix to Currie’s ‘‘Life’’) is of particular importance in preventing ‘‘those illusions of imagination, by which genius being bewildered, science is often debased, and error propagated through successive generations.’’ Such clubs ‘‘where the mind may unbend from its usual cares in the discussions of literature or science, afford the most pleasing, the most useful, and most rational of gratifications.’’53 Both the provision of parochial education and the working class conversation clubs that constitute the plebeian public sphere of Scotland’s provincial enlightenment go some way to explaining why Burns’s genius is precisely not ‘‘heaven-taught.’’ Currie offers a very full explanation of the not-so ‘‘invisible chains’’ that linked the poet’s genius to his intellectual environment, enabling the ‘‘early command of words and of expression which enable him to pour forth his thoughts in language not unworthy of his genius,’’ upon his arrival in Edinburgh in 1787. It was a matter for regret, however, that the regulation of Burns’s mind and manners in the provincial ‘‘conversation societies’’ had not continued in the period of his fame, in order to ‘‘fortify his principles of virtue by the purification of his taste.’’54 Currie’s argument was subsequently disseminated by Francis Jeffrey, perhaps Dugald Stewart’s most influential pupil, in his 1808 Edinburgh Review article on Cromek’s Reliques of Burns. Jeffrey opened with the challenging assertion that Burns ‘‘will never be rightly estimated as a poet, till that vulgar wonder be entirely repressed which was raised on his having been a ploughman.’’55 Although Jeffrey takes issue with Burns’s jacobinical insistence upon his plebeian ‘‘independence,’’ his lowly social status has exempted him from that ‘‘burden of the past’’ afflicting poets privileged with an elite literary education. Jeffrey glosses Currie in arguing that ‘‘it is impossible to read the productions of Burns, along with his history, without forming a higher idea of the intelligence, taste, and accomplishments of the peasantry, than most of those in the higher ranks are disposed to entertain.’’ ‘‘[Burns’s] epistles

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to brother poets in the rank of farmers and shopkeepers in the adjoining villages,’’ Jeffrey continued, ‘‘the existence of a book-society and debating club among persons of that description . . . —all contribute to show, that not only the good sense, and enlightened morality, but literature, and talents for speculation, are far more generally diffused in society than is generally imagined,’’ especially in Scotland.56 Jeffrey’s influential Whig view of Burns as the avatar of popular enlightenment was already being challenged by a rival discourse of Romantic genius, increasingly evident in the writings of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the years after 1802. Its most memorable assertion, however, was delivered by another plebeian Scottish wunderkind, Thomas Carlyle (himself, as Ralph Jessop has persuasively shown, profoundly influenced by Common Sense philosophy),57 in his 1828 review of Lockhart’s Life of Burns. ‘‘The Peasant Poet bears himself,’’ Carlyle pronounced, ‘‘like a King in exile: he is cast among the low, and feels himself equal to the highest; yet he claims no rank, that none may be disputed to him.’’ Carlyle decisively rejected the Whig/Common Sense interpretation of Burnsian genius, with its rational ‘‘explanation’’ and materialist habit of contextualisation: ‘‘Is not every genius an impossibility till he appears? Why do we call him new and original, if we saw where his marble was lying, and what fabric he would rear from it? It is not the material but the workman that is wanting . . . A Scottish peasant’s life was the meanest and rudest of all lives, till Burns became a poet in it, and a poet of it; found it a man’s life, and therefore significant to men.’’58 Carlyle’s view—and to be fair to him, he knew better than either Currie or Jeffrey the realities of life as a Scottish peasant—still holds powerful sway in accounts of Burns’s genius to the present day.

CURRIE, REID, AND THE ERRORS OF GENIUS ‘‘Here is a revolting account of a man of exquisite genius, and confessedly of many high moral qualities, sunk into the lowest depths of vice and misery!’’59 Such was Wordsworth’s vehement reaction to Currie’s biography of Burns in 1816, a judgement that has been endorsed by many Burns scholars, early and late. But what exactly underlies this visceral reaction to Currie and Wordsworth’s rather transparent employment of Currie as a whipping boy to attack the Scottish literary establishment? I have written elsewhere about the cultural politics of Anglo-Scottish relations that informed Currie’s account of Burns and will pause only briefly to recapitulate by considering the biographer’s

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own description of the matter in a letter to Syme dated February 8, 1797: ‘‘To speak my mind to you fully, it appears to me that [Burns’s] misfortunes arose chiefly from his errors. This it is unnecessary and, indeed, improper to say; but his biographer must keep it in mind, to prevent him from running into those bitter invectives against Scotland, &c., which the extraordinary attractions and melancholy fate of the poet naturally provoke.’’60 Having argued above that Currie’s analysis of Burns’s genius followed Stewart’s philosophy in promoting Scottish popular enlightenment and thereby saving Scottish amour propre, I turn here to examine a more negative aspect of Currie’s biography that sought to ‘‘blame the victim’’ by examining Burns’s s fatal flaws, the immediate trigger for Wordsworth’s defensive remarks in 1816. In so doing Currie also drew upon Common Sense philosophy, although now returning to the fountain-head in Thomas Reid’s ethics, which he polemically engaged with the English necessitarianism of David Hartley and Joseph Priestley. As with so many other philosophical polemics of the eighteenth century, one can discern, in the background, the long shadow of David Hume. Currie’s serial article on Thomas Reid’s philosophy of ethics, Essays on the Active Powers of Man (published 1788) appeared the same year in the Analytical Review, the leading organ of rational dissent. Currie here writes as an active partisan of the Scottish Common Sense philosopher, whose work, he was glad to report six years later, was ‘‘gaining ground in England, though till very lately it seems not to have been understood.’’61 As an expatriate Scottish Presbyterian who practiced medicine in Liverpool, Currie was a frequent visitor to nearby Warrington Dissenting Academy, campaigned with the English Unitarians against the Test Acts, and was personally acquainted with Joseph Priestley, whom he described as ‘‘a great man, and a most agreeable one.’’62 Although Currie was more open to Hartley’s associationism than was Reid, he shared his suspicions concerning deterministic theories of mind, possibly because they were linked for many Scottish literati with the gloomy Calvinist theology of earlier generations. This suspicion extended to theories that supported Divine Revelation and the ‘‘annihilation’’ of self in God, as was the case with both Hartleyan necessitarianism, and its refinement (shorn of the physiology of vibrations) in Priestley’s Theory of the Mind, on the Principle of Association (1775). To many enlightened Scots there did not seem a huge difference between Hume’s and Priestley’s associationism, despite the latter’s disavowal of any skeptical in-

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tentions. The links certainly seemed obvious to James Boswell, writing in his journal for January 3, 1776: My state of mind today was still affected by Hartley and Priestley’s metaphysics, and was continually trying to perceive my faculties operating as machinery. My animal spirits were so light now that such sort of thinking did not distress me as it has done when I was more atrabilious [melancholy]. I felt an easy indifference as to what was my mental system. I liked present consciousness. Man’s continuation of existence is a flux of ideas in the same body, like the flux of a river in the same channel . . . There must be something, which we understand by a spirit or a soul, which is permanent. And yet I own that except the sense or perception of identity, I cannot say that there is any sameness in my soul now and in my soul twenty years ago, or surely none thirty years ago.63

Despite the transient thrill of toying with skepticism, a week later Boswell was delighted to read a refutation of Priestley’s book in the Monthly Review, and mentioned a conversation with Dr. Reid about the ‘‘inconsistency and extravagance’’ of such a metaphysics as a principle of action. ‘‘Thinking metaphysically destroys the principles of morality; and indeed when a man analyses virtues and vices as a chemist does material substances, they lose their value as well as their odiousness.’’64 Elsewhere Boswell described Reid as ‘‘a sollid [sic] clear lively writer, and has releived [sic] me from the universal Scepticism into which David Hume led me, and from which I absolutely could not escape.’’65 For Currie, writing in 1788, Reid’s Active Powers offered a further check to the abyss of determinism and materialism, which he discerned behind the pious mask of Priestleyan ethics. His review essay itself provides an excellent introduction to the philosophical issues at stake in the querelle between Scottish Common Sense and the English doctrine of necessity.66 I have already mentioned above some of the epistemological issues at stake here, but it is also important to add that Reid condemned Priestleyan philosophy for being based on an erroneous ‘‘physical analogy’’ with mechanics; ‘‘we have deceived ourselves in reasoning on the operations of the intellect, by employing analogies from material objects which are in their nature inapplicable.’’67 Just as the working of the mind could be analysed via the laws of association, necessitarian ethics were based on a determinate chain of motives that could be calculated with as much certainty as the laws of motion. To a necessitarian like Priestley, an act of free will was an impossibility to the extent that it was (following Hume) an effect without a cause. Against this Reid urged that motives (effectively habits, desires or subliminal determi-

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nants to action) were subordinate to acts of conscious will, and were therefore not causally determined; ‘‘motives suppose liberty in the agent, or they have no influence at all. Rational beings, in proportion as they are wise and good, act according to the best motives . . . a free action is not an effect without a cause, since it is caused by a being who had power and will to produce it.’’68 Reid’s voluntarism develops the moral sense philosophy of Francis Hutcheson, the notion of active power challenging the determinism both of Hume’s philosophy of the passions and Priestley’s doctrine of necessity. As he argued in his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), ‘‘Hume leaves no power to the mind in framing its ideas and impressions; and no wonder, since he holds that we have no idea of power; and the mind is nothing but that succession of impressions and ideas of which we are intimately conscious.’’69 Via Reid, Currie arrived at a thoroughly orthodox voluntarism in refuting Hume and Priestley, albeit one supported by a formidable philosophical apparatus; ‘‘those who steadily pursue some end in life, though they must often exert selfdenial, are much happier on the whole than those who have no end at all but to gratify the present prevailing inclination.’’70 As glossed by Currie, this anticipates the Kant-influenced ethics of Coleridge’s The Friend; ‘‘without a sense of duty, a man may be prudent, but he cannot be virtuous.’’71 Nonetheless (and we should recall Currie’s role here as a mediator of Scottish intellect to an English readership) he did not believe that Reid’s philosophical pupils, Beattie and Oswald, had done him any favors in popularizing his carefully constructed critique of Humean ‘‘representationalism’’ and necessitarianism. Currie grumbled that they ‘‘extended his principles too far, and, dethroning reason, set up an idol in its stead, to decide on all questions of difficulty, under the name of Common Sense.’’72 It was little wonder (and Currie consciously addresses English dissenters) that Priestley’s Examination of Dr Reid’s Philosophy had pledged to ‘‘put a stop to this sudden torrent of nonsense and abuse, that is pouring down upon us from the North . . . opposing the farther encroachments of this bold invader.’’ But in stirring up the radical Scotophobia of the 1760s and played the Wilkesite card by associating Scottish philosophy with ‘‘passive obedience and non-resistance,’’ Priestley was misrepresenting the politics of Scottish Common Sense.73 However understandable its reaction to the dogmatism of Beattie and Oswald, Currie found Priestley’s Examination to be flawed by ‘‘an asperity of remark which the occasion neither justified nor provoked.’’74

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He accordingly sought to rehabilitate Reid’s Common Sense philosophy—and with it the metaphysics of the North—in the eyes of the readers of the Analytical Review, for the most part English rational dissenters and partisans of Priestleyan necessity, and, we should remember, the intellectual context of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the following decade. Nevertheless, he added ruefully, ‘‘while these two pious men [i.e., Priestley and Reid] waste their time and labour in fruitless combat, and only expose each other’s weaknesses, the daring sceptic looks on with a smile, and draws conclusions, which strike at the root of all religion, natural and revealed.’’75 At one point in his essay, Currie drew upon his professional expertise by suggesting that an analysis of the phenomenon of madness might cast some light on the liberty/necessity debate; ‘‘In the extreme of this deplorable disease all self-command is lost. Nevertheless the maniac has a will, and ‘has the power of doing what he will,’ which is all that is admitted to any of us by the strictest necessitarian. But something more than this belongs to a moral agent, and it is this something, which constitutes the subject of debate.’’76 A similar notion of moral agency as distinct from ‘‘organic’’ motivation informs Currie’s psychopathology of Robert Burns in 1800. The philosophical core of his argument lies in his account of the failure of the poet’s will: The fatal defect in [Burns’s] character lay in the comparative weakness of his volition, that superior faculty of the mind, which governing the conduct according to the dictates of the understanding, alone entitles it to be denominated rational; which is the parent of fortitude, patience, and self-denial; which by regulating and combining human exertions, may be said to have effected all that is great in the works of man, in literature, in science, or on the face of nature. The occupations of a poet are not calculated to strengthen the governing powers of the mind, or to weaken that sensibility which requires perpetual control, since it gives birth to the vehemence of passion, as well as to the higher powers of imagination.77

Currie’s argument virtually glosses his 1788 comments on Reid’s Active Powers of Man in the Analytical Review. He again seeks to exorcise a particularly Scottish pathology of mind that he associates with the determinism and mental impotence of David Hume, the mindset that had by turns elated and depressed Hume’s landlord James Boswell; ‘‘the mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.’’78 As we have seen, Reid criticized Humean determinism ‘‘for leaving no power to the mind . . . the mind

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is nothing but that succession of impressions and ideas of which we are intimately conscious.’’79 This is strongly brought out in Currie’s description of Burns’s ever-changing moods, what Byron might have called the poet’s ‘‘mobility’’: ‘‘His dark and haughty countenance easily relaxed into a look of goodwill, or pity, or of tenderness; and as the various emotions succeeded each other in his mind, assumed with equal ease the expression of the broadest humour, of the most extravagant mirth, of the deepest melancholy, or of the most sublime excitement.’’80 Burns’s protean, mobile character stretches the biographer’s descriptive vocabulary to its utmost limits; the poet is kind, brave, sincere, compassionate, but he is also proud, irascible, and vindictive by turns.81 Burns has aggravated his nervous condition by misapplying the ‘‘stimulant regime’’ of alcohol and radical politics; endowed with all the talents, intellect, and passion of the Scottish peasantry, he has failed in the voluntaristic regulation of his own over-energetic sensibility and fallen prey to a fatal melancholy. By means of this Reidian critique of Scotland’s national bard, Currie offers up Burns as a scapegoat to purge the spectre of Hume and what Susan Manning has described as his paratactic, federated model of the mind, from the constitution of Scotland within the Union.82 A message is sent to English necessitarians like Priestley and his followers who have built their philosophical edifice on a foundation of sand. Currie’s ‘‘Life of Burns’’ recasts Scottish genius in a new, voluntaristic form, sacrificing the poet to the body of his poetry. Despite the moral flaws of its creator, Burns’s poetry of ‘‘common sense’’ is endowed with the power to stimulate the jaded taste of a polite but deracinated English public, desensitised by false philosophical hypotheses and empty drawing-room verse. Currie’s critique of Burns broadens into a moral diatribe on the dangers attendant upon genius in general, particularly literary genius. Burns’s particular weakness is common in those endowed with an unusual degree of sensibility, and is therefore to be expected in poets. Yet Burns’s is not necessarily a poet’s flaw; the truly great like Homer and Shakespeare ‘‘excelled the rest of the species in understanding as well as in imagination.’’83 Currie the physician offers a remedy in the exercise of vocational or professional habits, severe studies, self-discipline; ‘‘regular and constant occupations . . . in which the power of the understanding are exercised, will diminish the force of external impressions, and keep the imagination under restraint.’’84 He nevertheless suggests that literary is subordinate to practical genius; ‘‘the talents necessary to the construction of an Iliad, under different discipline and application, might have led armies to victory, or kingdoms to prosperity.’’85 Else-

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where in the Life he imagined Robert Burns as a statesman ‘‘fitted to take a lead in the British House of Commons,’’ his ‘‘improved’’ pronunciation adding force to his eloquence.86 Given the spasmodic agency of imagination, inactivity and indolence are dangerous for men of genius, even those who, unlike Burns, are privileged with independent means. Currie’s remarks on Burns engendered a discussion of genius, which would exercise Romantic critics like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, D’’Israeli, and Carlyle over the following decades. As mentioned in Gavin Budge’s introduction to the present volume, there has been an uncritical tendency to attribute the voluntarism, antiempiricism and, in Coleridge’s terms, ‘‘ideal realism’’ of canonical Romantic poets to the influence of German idealism, ignoring the difficulties that dog attempts to pinpoint the mechanics of transmission, except in well-documented cases like Coleridge, De Quincey, and Carlyle. But one might add that to ignore the pervasive influence of Common Sense philosophy in Britain during the early nineteenth century is to participate in a widespread relegation of Scotland to the ‘‘borders of Romanticism.’’ As the editors of the eponymous recent volume put it, ‘‘Scotland, neither English nor foreign, stands for an inauthentic Romanticism, defined by a mystified—purely ideological—commitment to history and folklore.’’87 Not enough work has been done on the influence of Scottish thought on the English Romantic poets. Daniel Sanjev Roberts has in part redressed this situation by pointing out that Wordsworth and Coleridge read Currie’s ‘‘Life of Burns’’ in August and September 1800, the very period when they began drafting the preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads.88 One might add that studies of Burns’s influence on Wordsworth have largely ignored the fact that, as mediated by Currie, Burns represented the poetic incarnation of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, although space forbids any more extensive analysis here of that influence, important and unacknowledged as it is.89 One immediate link leaps off the page in comparing the difference between Wordsworth’s advertisement to the 1798 first edition of Lyrical Ballads, and the 1800 preface, written immediately after reading Currie’s ‘‘Observations . . . on the Scottish Peasantry.’’ Whereas the former declares the linguistic model for its poetic ‘‘experiments’’ to be ‘‘the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society,’’90 the latter specifies ‘‘low and rustic life’’91 as the social locus of ‘‘the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation,’’92 before providing a very detailed critical and philosophical rationale for that specification. Roberts insightfully suggests that beyond this turn to the language of

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rustic life, Wordsworth’s idea of the poet’s ‘‘natural’’ sensibility is worked out in tension with Currie’s portrayal of Burns’s ‘‘diseased’’ sensibility as a ‘‘hypochondriac,’’ or, one might say, as afflicted by the existential gloom of Humean skepticism.93 The polemical task of the preface is to make good its claim that ‘‘the human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants,’’94 an excitement that Currie had analysed as fatal to Burns’s genius, as well as vitiating modern literature. War, urbanization, the material advance of civilization, all these features of modern life have ‘‘unfitt[ed] [the mind] for voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.’’The preface is far from proposing to counteract this by returning to a tranquil pastoral idiom associated with political quiescence, but rather by imitating ‘‘a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation’’ (my italics). This ‘‘real’’ and ‘‘permanent’’ language’’ is associated with ‘‘low and rustic life’’; moreover—and the preface might almost at this point be paraphrasing Reid’s critique of Hume’s ‘‘ideal system’’ it is ‘‘a far more permanent and a far more philosophical language than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets.’’95 At the same time, in making this Reidean point about rustic language, Wordsworth’s preface takes its distance from Reid’s disciple Dugald Stewart’s advocacy of ‘‘poetic diction’’ in Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1793); ‘‘there arises gradually in every language a poetical diction, which differs widely from the common diction of prose . . . the charm of poetical diction must increase to a certain degree, as polite literature advances.’’96 Wordsworth’s radical notion of linguistic or social ‘‘propriety’’—the bedrock of his ‘‘common sense poetics’’—is far closer to that of Robert Burns himself than to Dugald Stewart or James Currie. True, the poet of Wordsworth’s preface is distinguished by ‘‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,’’ but (as Jon Mee argues) such ‘‘over-powering sensibility’’ possesses its own form of internal regulation to the extent that it ‘‘takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.’’97 In 1802 Wordsworth made more of this point, suggesting that ‘‘the Poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptitude to think and feel without immediate external excitement.’’98 Legitimate poetic excitement is thus the product of sympathetic reflection rather than an ‘‘outrageous stimulation’’ of the external senses; ‘‘the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.’’99 Presumably the poet starts by

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imitating the ‘‘real language of men in a state of vivid sensation’’ but ends up, by an act of sympathetic contemplation, in creating an autonomous form of poetic excitement. As Jon Klancher comments, ‘‘the 1800 Preface claims no naı¨ve mimesis. What will be represented in the Lyrical Ballads is not the ‘‘real’’ but a ‘‘real language’’ all but inaccessible to the middle-class mind.’’100 But the preface is ensnared in the paradox of needing to explain ‘‘common sense’’ to a polite readership for whom it is no longer a self-evident ‘‘phenomenon of the human mind.’’ In the 1802 additions to the preface (shifting the 1800 preface’s ‘‘common sense’’ further away from focus on rustic life), Wordsworth offered an even more affirmative definition of the poet. This at once discarded Currie’s positive, and exemplary, figure of Burns as ‘‘peasant poet,’’ but also his negative critique of the ‘‘weakness of volition’’ afflicting poetic genius in general. Wordsworth’s poet is now a man ‘‘endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him. . . .’’101 Wordsworth’s remarks begin to look forward to Coleridge’s account of genius in Biographia Literaria, ridiculing the epistemology and poetics of Wordsworthian rural life and Scottish Common Sense alike, and substituting his own canonical notion of ‘‘lingua communis’’ as the model for ‘‘conversational’’ poetry.102 Tellingly Coleridge explicitly raises the spectre of Burns in objecting to the 1800 preface’s theory, only to perform a rite of exorcism designed to return a critically deluded Wordsworth to the English poetic mainstream. Recovering the rubric of Mackenzie’s ‘‘heaventaught ploughman’’ (and anticipating Carlyle’s apotheosis of Burnsian genius in his 1828 essay quoted above), Coleridge insinuates that Wordsworth has erred by mistaking Burns, an exceptional, for an exemplary, denizen of rural life ‘‘[We] find even in situations the most favourable, according to Mr Wordsworth, for the formation of a pure and poetic language; in situations which ensure familiarity with the grandest objects of the imagination; but one BURNS, among the shepherds of Scotland, and not a single poet of humble life among those of the English lakes and mountains; I conclude, that POETIC GENIUS is not only a very delicate but a very rare plant.’’103

NOTES 1. Robert Burns, Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, 3 vols., ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 1:90, 225.

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2. In The Lounger, 97 (December 9, 1786), Donald Low, ed., Robert Burns: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 70. 3. George Davie, The Scottish Enlightenment and Other Essays, foreword by James Kelman (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1991), 24. 4. See for example James Kelman, ‘‘A Reading from the Work of Noam Chomsky and the Scottish Tradition in the Philosophy of Common Sense,’’ in ‘‘And the Judges Said . . . ’’ Essays (London: Vintage, 2003), 140–86. For Kelman, Common Sense philosophy supports his attack on meritocracy (quoting Chomsky) as ‘‘a social malady to be overcome much as slavery had to be eliminated at an earlier stage of human history’’ (‘‘Chomsky and the Scottish Tradition,’’ 185). As my chapter makes clear, this was certainly not how Robert Burns understood the meaning of Common Sense. 5. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, ed. L.W. Beck (New York, 1950), 7. 6. P. F. Sell, ‘‘Priestley’s Polemic Against Reid,’’ The Price-Priestley Newsletter 3 (1979): 41–52. 7. Manfred Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800: A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s, 1987), 167–70. 8. Joseph Priestley, Examination of Dr Reid’s Inquiry, Dr Beattie’s Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, and Dr Oswald’s Appeal to Common Sense in Behalf of Religion (London: Johnson, 1774), 121. 9. Ibid., 200. 10. Thomas Reid, An Inquiry Into the Human Mind, on Principles of Common Sense (Edinburgh: Kincaid and Bell, 1764), 533. 11. Ibid., 534. 12. Sell,‘’Priestley, Polemic,’’ 45. 13. Jessop, Carlyle and Scottish Thought, 76. 14. Liam McIlvanney, Burns the Radical: Poetry and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Phantassie, E. Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2002), 123–44. 15. Burns owned a copy of the sixth edition of Smith’s Moral Sentiments (1790), now held in Glasgow University Library, but he had clearly possessed an earlier edition of the book by 1786. Kinsley speculates that a copy may have been among his father’s books. Poems and Songs, 3:1021. 16. Nicholas Phillipson, ‘‘The Pursuit of Virtue in Scottish University Education: Dugald Stewart and Scottish Moral Philosophy in the Enlightenment,’’ in Universities, Society and the Future, ed. N. Phillipson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), 92. 17. Ibid., 85. 18. James Currie, The Works of Robert Burns; with An Account of His Life, and A Criticism on His Writings. To Which Are Prefixed, Some Observations on the Character and Condition of the Scottish Peasantry, 4 vols. (Liverpool, London, Edinburgh, 1800), 1:140. 19. Ibid., 1:147. 20. Ibid., 1:152. 21. R. D. Thornton, James Currie, The Entire Stranger and Robert Burns (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1963), 336–39. 22. In a letter of July/August 1791 to Dugald Stewart, Reid wrote ‘‘I have been very long perswaded, that a Nation, to be free, needs onely know the Rights of Man. I have lived to see this Knowledge spread far beyond my most sanguine hopes, and produce glorious effects. God grant it may spread more and more & that those who taste

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the Sweets of Liberty may not turn giddy but make a wise and sobre Use of it.’’ In January 1793 he recommended that Stewart read Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (The Correspondence of Thomas Reid, ed. Paul Wood [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002], 223, 231). On Reid’s politics, see also William C. Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow 1735–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 68. 23. Biancamaria Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The Edinburgh Review, 1802–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 11. 24. Dugald Stewart, Stewart to Currie, May 21, Envelope 15, MS 10/C-196 c, Currie/Burns Letters, Mitchell Library, Glasgow (1798). 25. James Currie, A Letter, Commercial and Political, Addressed to the Rt Hon William Pitt; in Which the Real Interests of Britain, in the Present Crisis, Are Considered, and Some Observations Are Offered on the General State of Europe, by Jasper Wilson, Esq., corrected and enlarged (London: Robinson, 1793). 26. Stewart had already completed a memoir of Adam Smith, read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on January 21 and March 18, 1793. All three biographies were published in 1811 as Biographical Memoirs of Adam Smith, William Robertson, and Thomas Reid. See Dugald Stewart, ‘‘Account of Adam Smith,’’ ed. I. S. Ross, in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W.P.D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce, by Adam Smith, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 265–66. 27. Dugald Stewart, Stewart to Currie, September 6, Envelope 15, MS 10/C-196 c, Currie/Burns Letters, Mitchell Library, Glasgow (1800). 28. S. T. Coleridge, ‘‘To Thomas Poole, 24th July 1800,’’ in Collected Letters, 6 vols. ed. E. L. Griggs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–66), 1:278. 29. Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 30. See Thornton, James Currie, for an account of the Liverpool milieu. 31. Philip Connell, Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘‘Culture’’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 105. 32. John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985), 12. See also Robertson’s ‘‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition,’’ in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 137–78 and J. G. A. Pocock, ‘‘Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers: A Study of the Relations Between the Civic Humanist and the Civil Jurisprudential Interpretation of Eighteenth- Century Social Thought,’’ in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 33. William Wallace Currie, Memoir of the Life, Writing and Correspondence of James Currie, M. D., 2 vols. (London, 1831), 2: 177. 34. Stewart, Works, 2:219–51, 231. 35. William Wallace Currie, Memoir, 2:150. 36. Ibid., 1:319. 37. Stewart, Works, 2:229. 38. Ibid., 2:232. 39. Ibid., 2:235. 40. James Currie, Letter to Pitt, 20. 41. Connell, Romanticism, 74.

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42. Stewart, Works, 2:240. 43. Donald Winch, ‘‘The System of the North: Dugald Stewart and His Pupils,’’ in That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History, by Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, and John Burrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 40–43 44. Stewart, Works, 2:242. 45. Stewart, Works, 2:246. In the Inquiry, Reid blamed the ‘‘ideal hypothesis,’’ which had misled Locke, Berkeley and Hume, and suggested that ‘‘it is genius, not the want of it, that adulterates philosophy, and fills it with error and false theory’’ because ‘‘a creative imagination disdains the mean office of digging for a foundation’’ in the constitution of the mind itself (Thomas Reid, Inquiry, 13). 46. Connell, op. cit., 73. 47. William Roscoe, The Life of Lorenzo De’ Medici, Called The Magnificent, 2nd ed., corrected, 2 vols. (London, 1796). 48. James Currie, Works of Robert Burn, 1:113. 49. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Hogarth Press 1986), 4. 50. James Currie, Works of Robert Burn, 1:114. 51. Robert Burns, ‘‘Burns to Sir John Sinclair, August/Sept 1791,’’ in Robert Burns: The Complete Letters, ed. James Mackay (Alloway, 1987), 586–87. 52. James Currie, Works of Robert Burn, 1:114. 53. Ibid., 1:119. 54. Ibid., 1:121. 55. Low, 178. 56. Ibid., 194. 57. Jessop, Carlyle and Scottish Thought. By his own admission, Jessop fails to do justice to Dugald Stewart as an important mediator of Reid’s philosophy, as well as Reid’s moral theory, which, as we will see in the next section, was such an important influence on James Currie (Jessop, Carlyle and Scottish Thought, xiv.) 58. Low, 360. 59. William Wordsworth, Prose Works, 3 vols., ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 3:119. 60. William Wallace Currie, Memoir, 1:281. 61. Ibid., 2:319. 62. Ibid., 1:136. 63. James Boswell, Boswell’s Edinburgh Journals, 1767–86, ed. Hugh M. Milne (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 2001), 227. 64. Ibid., 230. 65. Susan Manning, Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 127. 66. In his essay ‘‘The Social Significance of the Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense,’’ George Davie sums up the social issues at stake in contrasting the superficially similar doctrines of Reid and Stewart and what he calls the Priestleyan ‘‘radicals’’: ‘‘the latter worked out their programme of democracy in terms of a one-world philosophy of man which, in anticipation of some forms of modern behaviourism and pragmatism, was unsympathetic alike to introspection and to the natural, common sense a priori accessible via introspection.’’ By contrast the Thomas Reid school (in which he includes the poet Robert Burns), apostles of Davie’s ‘‘democratic intellect,’’ sought to integrate the ‘‘touch of the operative’’ with the ocular ‘‘overview’’ of the philosopher, an aspira-

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tion that was quite incompatible with utilitarian social engineering’’ (Scottish Enlightenment, 63, 62, 22.) 67. James Currie, ‘‘Review of Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man,’’ Analytical Review 1 and 2 (1788):1:147. 68. James Currie, ‘‘Review of Reid,’’ 2:266, 269. 69. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Edinburgh: Bell and Robinson, 1785), 189. 70. James Currie, ‘‘Review of Reid,’’ 2:527. 71. Ibid., 2:528. 72. Ibid., 2:556. 73. Priestley, Examination of Dr Reid, 200, 201. 74. James Currie, ‘‘Review of Reid,’’ 2:556. 75. Ibid., 2:269. 76. Ibid., 2:270. 77. James Currie, Works of Robert Burn, 1:236. 78. Hume, Treatise, 253. 79. Thomas Reid, Intellectual Powers, 189. 80. James Currie, Works of Robert Burn, 1:233. 81. Ibid., 1:35. 82. Manning, Fragments of Union, 32–52. 83. James Currie, Works of Robert Burn, 1:241. 84. Ibid., 1:238. 85. Ibid., 1:242. 86. Ibid., 1:26. 87. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen, eds., Scotland at the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1. 88. Daniel Sanjev Roberts, ‘‘Literature, Medical Science and Politics, 1795–1800: Lyrical Ballads and Currie’s Life of Burns,’’ in A Natural Delineation of the Passions: The Historic Moment of Lyrical Ballads, ed. Cedric Barfoot (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), 115–28. 89. John O. Hayden, William Wordsworth and the Mind of Man: Wordsworth and Eighteenth-Century Psychology (New York: Bibli O’Phile, 1992), 32–33. 90. William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 1991), 7. 91. Ibid., 245. 92. Ibid., 241. 93. Roberts, ‘‘Literature,’’ 115. 94. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 248. 95. Ibid., 245. 96. Stewart, Works, 2:330. 97. Mee, Romanticism, 219. 98. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 261. 99. Ibid., 266. 100. Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 139. 101. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 255–56. 102. Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (London: Macmillan, 1988), 68–74. 103. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2: 132.

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Elizabeth Hamilton’s Letters on Education: Common Sense Alternatives to Skepticism and Their Aesthetic Consequences Fiona Price

WHILE

THE LAST DECADES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY SAW A

revival of scholarly interest in the conservative novels of the 1790s postFrench Revolution debate, critical commentators continued to accept at face value the conservative writers’ propagandist rejection of theory. Gary Kelly is representative here, commenting that: ‘‘the plot of these conservative satiric romances simply consists of a series of encounters between theory and practice, or theory and ‘reality,’ with practice and reality repeatedly exposing the inadequacy of mere theory to human experience.’’1 The implication of such readings is that conservative novels attacked radical ‘‘theory’’ without having any sophisticated philosophical underpinnings of their own.2 A challenge to this trend was offered by David Simpson’s Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (1993), which historicized the conservative rejection of theory.3 Simpson demonstrates how the Scottish Common Sense philosophy of Thomas Reid, George Campbell, and James Beattie contested, first, the skepticism of David Hume, and, later, the work of William Godwin. Positioning themselves in opposition to the supposed theoretical ‘‘castle-building’’ of skepticism, proponents of Reid’s thought claimed that theirs was the Common Sense position. Hence, in many cases, a Scottish Common Sense tradition formed the (later obscured) intellectual background to conservative criticisms of the ‘‘New Philosophy.’’ Simpson’s observations can be usefully extended: as this chapter explores, for conservative novelists such as Elizabeth Hamilton, Scottish Common Sense philosophy was not only connected with the rejection of ‘‘metaphysicks,’’ atheism, and immorality, but was also used to form constructive replies to radicalism. In the process, Reid’s approach was used to make an important advance on Romantic aesthetics. The New Philosophers were seen by their opponents as vic88

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tims of arbitrary or fanciful patterns of association. If revolution was to be avoided, an alternative form of taste was necessary: Common Sense philosophy seemed to offer such an alternative. For Elizabeth Hamilton, in particular, the heated debate with radicalism and the New Philosophy led to an interest in taste of considerable significance to Romantic aesthetics. Although the importance of Scottish Common Sense philosophy has been recognized,4 its complex influence remains little understood. This is in part because the term ‘‘common sense,’’ used by radicals and conservatives alike, itself needs clarification. The difficulty emerges in Julie Choi’s article ‘‘Feminine Authority? Common Sense and the Question of Voice in the Novel.’’ After mentioning Reid and the Scottish tradition, Choi identifies ‘‘common sense’’ with a notion of shared human reason and, more particularly, with a female appropriation of the rational during the 1790s.5 Hinting at the political flexibility of the term, Choi makes ‘‘an appeal to the work of Mitzi Myers who, as others have, stresses the similarities in the agendas of such ‘diverse’ women writers as Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft’’: ‘‘It is precisely because women have joined in the enterprise of enlightenment through the ‘common’ access to Reason in the spirit of Reid and his numerous but now largely forgotten followers, that Wollstonecraft can issue her Vindication of the Rights of Woman.’’6 The Common Sense influence on Wollstonecraft noted by Choi is a result of her association with Dr. Richard Price. In Wollstonecraft’s own estimation Price ‘‘influenced the future events of her life’’ more than anyone else whom she met while she was at Newington Green, and Price was interested in Reid’s work.7 In the second edition of his Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals Price mentions Reid in a footnote when discussing the use of the word ‘‘idea.’’8 As Peter Baumann notes, David Hume had suggested that the human mind ‘‘does not have direct access to the objects of knowledge and thought but only indirect access, via mental intermediaries . . . ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas.’ ’’9 Thomas Reid, on the other hand, posited that all talk of ‘‘ideas’’ was an illegitimate philosophical hypothesis.10 He suggested that we had direct knowledge of the external world and that we largely obtain accurate knowledge of the external world by our cognitive faculties. Richard Price’s remarks here suggest that he shared with Reid the belief in direct knowledge of the external world, a view also important in understanding Wollstonecraft’s polemical writing. Her trust in ‘‘ ‘common’ access to Reason,’’ was related to Reid’s argument about the need to trust in the correctness of our habitual judgements about the

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external world; her distrust of the sophistries of language stemmed from a fear that unclear language use could obscure those judgements. As Choi’s example of Wollstonecraft suggests, the appeal to a ‘‘common’’ reason was a radical tactic. More conservative writers made a rather different use of Common Sense philosophy. This is particularly evident in the work of Elizabeth Hamilton. Critical commentary on Hamilton’s work usually concentrates on her conservative contributions to the post-French Revolution debate, where Hamilton drew on the discourse of Common Sense to attack radicalism. However, it would be simplistic to position Hamilton as the ‘‘proper lady’’ in opposition to Wollstonecraft as professional writer and radical. Although positioned differently politically, both were engaged with the philosophical question of our relationship to the external world, and both asked what consequences this relationship might have for the individual and society. In particular, Hamilton’s later work uses Common Sense philosophy in an attempt to find workable answers to the questions about (self-) government raised by the political arguments of the 1790s. Responding to radicalism, Hamilton had been led to ask how the arbitrary associations she saw as characteristic of the New Philosophy might be avoided. The answer, she came to feel, was a particular form of education that would allow the taste and the imagination to flourish. Education had long been a key concern for both Wollstonecraft and Hamilton. As Barbauld’s 1800 essay ‘‘On Prejudice’’ demonstrates, there was general concern in late eighteenth-century Britain about the irrational or erroneous ideas that a child might receive during his formative years.11 In the increasingly volatile climate of the 1790s, both radicals and conservatives realized the importance of education to their competing social visions. While conservatives, broadly speaking, emphasised the importance of adhering to established frameworks, in terms of both politics and education, radical thinkers stressed the need for individuals to reason for themselves. Unlike Barbauld, then, who had suggested ‘‘prejudice’’ was unavoidable, radicals like Wollstonecraft argued that it could be contested: much of Wollstonecraft’s work explores the possibility of developing mental independence. Yet for all this intellectual boldness, Wollstonecraft struggled in her attempts to visualize a prejudice-free environment that would allow the proper operation of common reason. Hence, in her 1797 essay ‘‘On Poetry, and our Relish for the Beauties of Nature,’’ she can only imagine truly original thought taking place in a presocial space. ‘‘In a more advanced state of civilization,’’ on the other hand, the poet’s ‘‘images do not arise from sensations; they are copies,’’ while the audience sees nature through the

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‘‘camera’’ of the poet’s words.12 Wollstonecraft’s account suggests her belief that, even if common reason is theoretically available to everyone, it is virtually impossible to remove social prejudice and see clearly for oneself. In contrast, Hamilton had the Common Sense belief that we do have direct access to the external world and that the accuracy of our judgements is dependent on the quality of our observation. For her, proponents of skeptical and radical thought had been carried away by the inaccuracy of fashionable dogma. In her early novels this inaccurate mode of thought, characterized by fanciful associations, is persistently opposed to an alternative approach that relies on acute powers of observation and, Hamilton suggests, greater mental activity. In her later work, she becomes far more focused on the way in which such habits of mental activity, concentration, and observation might be cultivated in order to give the individual a defense against fashion and the New Philosophy. To a significant extent, Hamilton figured this process in terms of aesthetics: through proper education arbitrary fanciful associations would be removed and a more accurate taste would be cultivated. Developed in response to radicalism, Hamilton’s alternative models of aesthetic interaction parallel the distinction made in Romantic thought between the arbitrary associations of fancy and the more active agency of the imagination. Hamilton shares a sense of the social importance of imagination with Coleridge and Wordsworth, but her thinking on aesthetics develops in a far more determinedly practical direction. Since she sees the arbitrary associations of fancy as a social danger, she believes it is vital that as many people as possible develop taste and imagination. According to Hamilton, properly cultivated taste benefits not just the upper classes, but also the whole of society. Emphasising the practical at the expense of the supposedly fanciful ‘‘castle-building’’ of skepticism was a popular Common Sense tactic. According to Thomas Reid in the Inquiry, Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739) ‘‘built a system of scepticism, which leaves no ground to believe any one thing rather than its contrary.’’13 With a hint of the religiosity typical of Common Sense philosophy, Reid explained the disastrous results of such skepticism: ‘‘Absolute scepticism is not more destructive of the faith of a Christian, than of the science of a philosopher, and of the prudence of a man of common understanding. I am persuaded, that the unjust live by faith as well as the just; that, if all belief could be laid aside, piety, patriotism, friendship, parental affection, and private virtue would appear as ridiculous as knight-errantry.’’14 Reid’s anxieties concerning skepticism were commonly applied by

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conservative satirists to the ‘‘New Philosophy,’’ which they associated with atheism, revolutionary principles, and a generally inaccurate view of the world that they characterized in terms of the devalorized genre of romance.15 Reid had argued that ‘‘the natural faculties, by which we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious’’ and consequently hoped to promote ‘‘a view of the human understanding’’ different from that provided by ‘‘Des Cartes, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley,’’ and the most notorious target of Reid’s attack, ‘‘Hume.’’16 One of the greatest differences between Hume and the Common Sense philosophers occurred in their treatment of memory and the association of ideas. The association of ideas had long been accepted as part of the way the human mind worked, but philosophers differed as to whether they saw it as destructive or as part of the system of cognition. Locke, for example, had considered associations as disorderly accidents, and Hutcheson followed him in this distrust.17 Hume, on the other hand, did not view association with suspicion but instead saw it as a general principle of cognition. He argued that the imaginative power of association leads us to imagine that we see cause and effect in the external world, while all we can really perceive is contiguity and succession.18 In making this claim, Hume used association to undermine several of the principles that Reid was to insist were self-evident. Thus for the Common Sense philosophers, Hume’s skeptical use of association added to the long-term philosophical uncertainty about the benefits of the process to make it particularly problematic. In response, Common Sense philosophers suggested that the association of ideas need not mislead the mind about the nature of the external world, as long as the associative process remained based on the intuitively known principles of common sense. According to George Campbell, ‘‘[m]oral evidence is founded on the principles we have from consciousness and Common Sense, improved by experience,’’19 and the key to ‘‘experience’’ is ‘‘retention and association.’’20 In Campbell’s account, for ‘‘this kind of reasoning in its earliest or simplest form, little or no reflection is necessary’’: ‘‘Every man will be ready to tell you, that he needs no other witnesses than his eyes, to satisfy him that objects are not in contact with his body, but are at different distances from him as well as from one another. So passive is the mind in this matter. . . .’’21 Such ‘‘passive’’ reasoning is particularly evident in childhood. Campbell himself puts his argument in the context of the developing mind: ‘‘It is true, indeed, that the conclusions in the first way, by which also in infancy we learn language, are commonly more to be regarded as infallible, than those effected in the second.’’22

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Campbell’s suggestion that our conclusions are more fallible after infancy has implications for educational discourse: in ‘‘the second’’ stage of his development the child may need guidance in forming accurate associations.23 Taking the direction implied in Campbell’s remarks, Elizabeth Hamilton went on from counterrevolutionary propaganda to question how both children and adults might be brought to develop useful associations. Her approach demonstrates, contrary to Kelly’s assumptions, a conservative and Common Sense rejection of skepticism combined not only with an emphasis on the ‘‘real’’ but with considerable theoretical complexity. As Martin Kallich notes, ‘‘[i]n her Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education (1801) Miss Hamilton recognizes the importance of the principles of association in the education of youth.’’24 Elizabeth Hamilton’s interest in association was long-standing. Her Memoirs reveal that when she was a young woman she read Kames’s Elements of Criticism (1762), a work using the theory of the association of ideas to support the tenets of neoclassical criticism.25 However, her own entry into philosophical controversy occurred with the publication of her first novel, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796).26 In 1786 her brother Charles had returned from India to complete his translation of the Hedaya and six years later, after a period of gradually worsening health, he died. Inspired by her brother’s Orientalism, Elizabeth began work on the Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. This satiric critique of Eastern and Western values contains a lengthy parody of ‘‘Philosophers[s],’’ who, instead of being men ‘‘deep in knowledge either moral or natural,’’ are ignorant individuals, ‘‘entertain[ing] a high idea of their own superiority, from having the temerity to reject whatever has the sanction of experience, and Common Sense.’’27 These philosophers, disdaining ‘‘the slow process of experiment,’’ and glorying in ‘‘contradicting Common Sense,’’ are supported in their investigations by Sir Caprice. Caprice claims to lay great store by taste, but merely follows a random succession of whims.28 This is in contrast to the natural philosopher, Doctor Severan, about whom Delomond reflects, ‘‘is not the very basis of science, a sincere and disinterested love of truth?’’29 The Doctor voices one of Hamilton’s central arguments: to those who take pleasure in investigating the phenomena that fall under their observation, either mental or material, it is not sufficient to say that things are so, they must develop the causes in which they have originated. As there are few substances found in a natural state, whose constituent parts cannot be separated from each other, by the methods used in chemistry, so

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there are few predominant dispositions of the mind, which may not be analysed and traced through their origin and progress by any one who will give himself the trouble to pursue the necessary process.30

The Doctor’s language recalls Reid’s criticisms of the indulgence of fanciful hypotheses by philosophers such as Hume, which Reid argued had retarded the development of a true science of the mind: ‘‘Wise men now agree, or ought to agree in this, that there is but one way to the knowledge of nature’s works; the way of observation and experiment.’’31 What is proposed by the Doctor here, then, is not a naı¨ve belief in ‘‘reality,’’ but a rigorous form of empiricism. On the other hand, in contrast to Severan’s scientific belief in the powers of observation, neither the skeptical philosophers or the fashionable ladies ‘‘take pleasure in investigating the phenomena that fall under their observation.’’ The former theorize ahead of data and the latter, Miss Ardent remarks, allow their ‘‘observations, like those of a monkey’’ to ‘‘go no further than the ornaments of the person.’’32 In each case, the ability to assess the environment accurately has been compromised, and the result, for both groups, is not only a loss of judgement, but a neglect of duty. The fashionable ladies mock other, more genuinely virtuous, women; more seriously, the philosophers’ discussion of whether there are any such things as crime or ‘‘permanent identity’’ result in a man being sent to the gallows.33 Here Hamilton’s explicit parallel between fashionable women and modern philosophers is a response to Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft had argued that the weakness of blindly following fashion belongs to those entrenched in the existing order, women, of course, but, more significantly, priests and soldiers. These are ‘‘inspired by romantic notions of honour, a kind of morality founded on the fashion of the age’’ while the majority of soldiers are pushed forward, ‘‘they scarcely know or care why, with headlong fury.’’34 Hamilton moderates this, arguing that the radical philosophers join those, like poorly educated women and soldiers, who possess dangerously weak powers of observation, combined with an inability to concentrate. Her rhetoric suggests that not only the upper ranks and their unthinking supporters, but also the radicals who seek to discredit them, are affected by intellectual weakness. Ultimately Hume’s suggestion that we imagine cause and effect is turned against him; in Hamilton’s account it is the skeptics who fancifully refuse the obvious connection. This link between fashion, inaccurate observation and skepticism is developed even further in Hamilton’s next work, Memoirs of Modern Phi-

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losophers (1800).35 The book’s attack on revolutionary philosophy attracted attention. The novel was described by the Monthly Mirror as ‘‘an attempt to expose the absurdities of the modern school of philosophy, by shewing the effect of its precepts upon the conduct of its teachers and disciples.’’36 The reviewer supposed that the defeat of such philosophy had taken place ‘‘but the author of these Memoirs seems anxious to ‘make assurance double sure,’ by a repetition of the blow.’’37 The book’s violence, although, as the reviewer suggests, rather belated, ensured that Hamilton would remain well known for her parody of Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Memoirs of the Author of ‘‘The Rights of Woman’’(1798), and Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796).38 However, the work also contained some indications of Hamilton’s later interest in the social effects of taste as a force that would counteract the irrational associations of both fashion and the modern philosophy. Adding an additional dimension to Wollstonecraft’s suspicion of the intellectual processes of the military, in the Memoirs Hamilton depicts the habits of Captain Delmond, her heroine’s father. An officer usually involved in the fashionable pursuits of the militia, his temporary isolation leads him to read not only romances, but philosophical works that put him ‘‘in complete possession of all that ever has, and probably all that ever will be, said against the Christian faith.’’39 He educates his daughter, Julia, along similar lines, relying on her ‘‘honour’’ (which Wollstonecraft would have disapproved of) but also upon ‘‘the pains he took to form her taste.’’40 Yet, despite Delmond’s faith in his educational approach, Julia’s selections from the circulating library are not judicious: ‘‘Had a due allowance for the power of imagination in young minds entered into Capt. Delmond’s calculation, he would perhaps have been less sanguine. In fact, though Julia read with pleasure books of philosophy, history, and travels to her father, she found a pleasure still more poignant in devouring the pages of a novel or romance in her own apartment.’’41 Julia’s suspicious habit of preferring privacy during her novel reading suggests the eroticism of a taste based solely on imagination.42 Uncorrected by judgment, ‘‘imagination’’ means that Julia, ‘‘instead of deducing inferences from facts, was now solely occupied in the invention of extravagant and chimerical situations.’’43 Without religious faith, Hamilton suggests, Julia departs from the Common Sense practice of referring her beliefs to the perceptual signs that are to be interpreted by observation. Consequently she is lured both by the fanciful hypotheses of fashionable metaphysics and by the equally ungrounded fictions of

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romance. Only partially like her namesake, the heroine of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle He´loı¨se (1761), her chimerical, unfixed taste leads to her sexual vulnerability and eventual death. Hamilton was not, however, content with merely attacking skepticism or the intellectual vacancy she connected with it—she wished to counter its influence by arguing for a more rational version of taste. To do so she developed a theory of education that relied upon the association of ideas. Her growing interest in the educational uses of association was visible in her next work, the Letters on Education. There Hamilton echoed Reid’s emphasis on the need to ground knowledge on the intuitively known principles of common sense, insisting that ‘‘rules are less necessary than principles.’’44 In his Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764), Reid had written that while mechanics, astronomy, and optics had rules that could ‘‘universally obtain,’’45 rules for the mind would not work. Reid nevertheless maintained a belief in ‘‘certain principles,’’ ‘‘which the constitution of our nature leads us to believe, and which we are under a necessity to take for granted in the common concerns of life, without being able to give a reason for them; these are what we call the principles of Common Sense; and what is manifestly contrary to them, is what we call absurd.’’46 Using Common Sense, Reid attempted to provide a philosophical alternative to skepticism; in contrast, the alternative Hamilton wished to supply was educational. In her novels, Hamilton made the case for the harmful effects of a skeptical or ‘‘systematizing’’ education. In contrast to such systems, in her pedagogic writings Hamilton argued that the flexibility of principles rather than rules was necessary, if psychology was to be successfully applied to the developing mind. To exemplify this, she gave the example of an agricultural improver who, instead of systematically and indiscriminately employing the methods of the Devonshire farmer on the Grampian Hills, used general principles and applied them according to particular circumstance.47 Hamilton’s comparison implicitly places the skeptical philosophers in relation to Repton and Brown, whose theories of landscape management neglected the local and particular in favor of generalization. Like the over-zealous agriculturist, Hamilton implied, the systematic philosopher does not inquire into particular circumstances. She, on the other hand, wished to use the principles of associationist psychology to ensure the stability of the social group. In her educational writing, Hamilton argued that associationism could be used to generate correct taste, ultimately transforming the whole community.

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COMMON SENSE PEDAGOGY: LETTERS ON EDUCATION AND THE COTTAGERS OF GLENBURNIE Politically twentieth-century commentators have often presented taste as essentially conservative, a position implicitly articulated by Pierre Bourdieu. Considering the relation between culture and politics in Distinction (1979) Bourdieu refers to Marx and Engels’s notion of a society in which ‘‘there are no painters but at most people who engage in painting among other things.’’ He finds that, despite such ‘‘apparent generosity,’’ ‘‘the indulgent populism which credits the common people with innate knowledge of politics equally helps to disguise and so consecrate the ‘concentration in a few individuals’ of the capacity to produce discourse about the social world, and through this the capacity for consciously changing that world.’’48 Similarly the tendency has been to present the eighteenth-century discourse of taste as both exclusive and conservative. Not only was taste a discourse then even more frankly connected with the ability to wield political power, but, according to Cottom, it was solely available to the higher orders; ‘‘only members of the aristocracy . . . can afford to look upon the world with this detachment.’’49 Noted by writers such as Bohls, Fabricant, and Kramnick, the exclusive nature of taste has long been a critical commonplace.50 Such commentators indicate that, in the eighteenth century, the groups who could lay claim to taste were constantly under negotiation; however, the process they describe seldom includes any one below the middle ranks of society. Nevertheless for one participant in the ‘‘war of ideas’’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the case was different. Elizabeth Hamilton went beyond asserting that it was, in theory, possible for the poor to have some of the necessary innate requirements—instead she recognized that they could and should make judgements of taste. Far from ‘‘consecrat[ing]’’ the right to comment in a few individuals, Hamilton insisted that the health of the nation required the masses to understand and correctly manipulate the codes of taste. Based on her Common Sense belief in accurate observation and the associations she saw growing from it, Hamilton implied that this new taste would provide vital protection against skepticism and fashion. In this suspicion of fashion Hamilton was part of a larger Romantic trend. Writers including Wordsworth and Baillie feared fashion and its arbitrary and fanciful associations, and, distinguishing between different forms of aesthetic experience, attempted to find an alternative. This frequently involved reemphasising the aesthetic importance of ‘‘those

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works which most strongly characterize human nature in the middle and lower ranks.’’51 However, Hamilton was not only interested in the effects of such ‘‘works’’ but in developing a more tasteful general population. Elizabeth Hamilton begins her Letters on Education by emphasising the general applicability of her message. As she notes, making ‘‘fine ladies and finished gentlemen forms no part of [her] plan’’; instead she is concerned with ‘‘the cultivation of the faculties that are common to the whole human race.’’52 Admittedly here her concern seems directed toward the more fashionable part of society. Nonetheless the egalitarian implications are clearly present. Indeed Hamilton demonstrated her commitment to the broad application of her message in the most literal way by being willing to simplify the philosophical content of her work—in response to suggestions that it was too difficult she adjusted the second edition. Hamilton’s determination to highlight the widespread importance of an education in taste is explained by her belief in its moral efficacy. Taste is, she says, ‘‘seen as connected with the moral principle, and appears, not indeed as an additional faculty bestowed on a few fortunate individuals, but as an operation of the mind, to which all the faculties. . . . and all the affections and sympathies. . . . are alike essential.’’53 As such, she placed taste in opposition to fashion as a safeguard against skepticism and radicalism, a potential guarantee of national stability if possessed by the maximum number of people possible. In line with this commitment to the spread of taste, in Hamilton’s account both fashion and correct taste are not innate, but based on mental habits: both are a result of the association of ideas, which can operate beneficially to reinforce intuitively known principles of common sense, or perniciously to obscure them. Fashion is a result of attaching incorrect associations of grandeur to the objects possessed by the wealthy. The associations are necessarily temporary, as she suggests with reference to clothing: ‘‘When the same form of dress descends to the vulgar, the change that takes place in our associations strips it of its adventitious lustre, and affixes to the very same object, which had before called forth our admiration, ideas of meanness and contempt.’’54 Fashion depends on arbitrary or ill-thought-through associations, inevitably linked to a weakness in terms of observation and reason. And in this, Hamilton suggests even more bluntly, fashion is tellingly like skepticism. Those who convert to ‘‘absurd and chimerical doctrines’’ (that is, skeptics) are fooled by sophistry: ‘‘Sophistry is an attempt to give an appearance of connexion between ideas that are not necessarily

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connected. By those who cannot reason, sophistry will never be detected; and, consequently, those who cannot reason will ever be in danger of being led into error.’’55 As with followers of fashion, a lack of reason leading to poor associations is accompanied by a deficiency in attention. As Hamilton suggests in A Series of Popular Essays the attention can be given a ‘‘peculiar direction,’’ allowing the individual to develop ‘‘the power of imagination and [to] produce the emotion of taste.’’56 Without this mental activity, or development of attention, however, the imagination is undirected and forms combinations that ‘‘when the passions do not interfere, be like the dreams of children, made up of incongruous assemblages of external objects.’’57 In other words, for fashionable women and philosophers, a lack of attention leads to poor associations. Hamilton’s emphasis on the important role played by the quality of associations in developing the mind was shared by the physician and educationist John Abercrombie, who was also influenced by Common Sense philosophy.58 For Abercrombie, this implied the centrality of self-discipline to the educational process: When we turn our serious attention to the economy of the mind, we perceive that it is capable of a variety of processes, of the most remarkable and important nature. We find also, that we can exert a voluntary power over those processes, by which we control, direct, and regulate them at our will,—and that, when we do not exert this power, the mind is left to the influence of external impressions, or casual trains of association, often unprofitable, and often frivolous. We thus discover that the mind is the subject of culture and discipline, which, when duly exercised, must produce the most important results on our condition as rational and moral beings; and that the exercise of them involves a responsibility of the most solemn kind, which no man can possibly put away from him. Youth is the season peculiarly adapted for this great undertaking, while the attention is not yet engrossed by the distractions of active life, and while those injurious habits have not yet been formed, which are so often fatal to the health of the mind.59

When the passions do interfere with mental development, however, as they did for Julia, the case is still more dangerous, since they ‘‘as Reid well observes, are the most cunning sophists we meet with.’’60 To support her position, Hamilton also cites Isaac Watts’s opinion that both dogmatism and skepticism arise from ‘‘impatience of study, and want of diligent attention in the search of truth.’’61 ‘‘Who,’’ asks Hamil-

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ton remorselessly, ‘‘more dogmatical and peremptory than the skeptic in his system of belief?’’62 Nonetheless, Hamilton insists correct taste is still possible: ‘‘Notwithstanding the influence which fashion has over our opinions, taste has still a very important part to act; and if true taste (of which judgment is a necessary constituent) were properly cultivated, all the evils arising from the powerful influence of fashion would be completely done away.’’63 This rational taste, according to Hamilton, ‘‘rejects whatever is incongruous.’’ Like Archibald Alison, she suggests that ‘‘inanimate objects can be so disposed as to produce an individual emotion.’’64 The person who possesses the correct associations with such objects (and therefore necessarily has the powers of observation and attention she thinks are valuable) will be able to arrange the ‘‘decorations of the human form’’ to achieve ‘‘the same [congruous] effect.’’ Implicitly, this process is connected with virtue when Hamilton remarks: ‘‘Where purity, modesty, and virtue, dwell in the heart, it is the very acme of bad taste to assume the dress of the wanton.’’65 Despite the obvious wider significance of her remarks, in Letters on Education Hamilton primarily addresses mothers instructing their daughters. Indeed her arguments regarding both taste and skepticism are part of her case for ‘‘cultivating the reasoning powers (especially as they regard our sex).’’66 Attacking those that suggest ‘‘women who have cultivated the higher powers of the mind’’ are often the ‘‘most negligent of the peculiar duties of their sex and station,’’ Hamilton insists on the Common Sense pairing of both reason and observation: ‘‘I answer [the enemies of female cultivation], that this blameable neglect of duties arises not from their being capable of reasoning, but from their being incapable of observation—and this, because their attention has never been sufficiently exercised on the objects of perception.’’67 From Hamilton’s Common Sense viewpoint, it is necessary to concentrate on, and to consider carefully, what we perceive. Directed by the will, ‘‘attention’’ improves the quality of one’s perceptions, enabling the formation of correct associations and the development of reason, in the same way as in Reid’s philosophy sustained attention develops perceptual acuity, so that sailors, for example, can sight other ships from perceptual indications that would be invisible to a landlubber.68 Elsewhere Hamilton argues that this need for ‘‘attention’’ is not confined to women. She traces the same phenomenon and the same projected cure throughout society. In A Series of Popular Essays she argues that ‘‘constant employment, if it be of a kind that demands attention,

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must necessarily impede the exercise of imagination, as idleness must, on the contrary, promote its exercise.’’69 She continues with the suggestion that, ‘‘as, among the various avocations of busy life, there are some which make comparatively little demand upon the attention, and as imagination will ever, in such instances, be found extremely active,’’ a solution is necessary.70 Uncultivated imagination, it seems, is not only a threat to the rich, idle, or unemployed but to anyone in a tedious and mechanical occupation. Properly cultivated taste is the antidote. Hamilton is more specific about the need to extend taste to the country at large in the preface to her next novel, The Cottagers of Glenburnie. There she praises those who consider ‘‘[n]ational happiness as the aggregate of the sum of individual happiness, and individual virtue.’’71 For these, ‘‘[e]very improvement in the arts, which tends to give additional grace to the elegant enjoyments of the wealthy . . . is . . . a subject of heartfelt gratulation’’ but: ‘‘They forget not that the pleasures of the heart, and of the understanding as well as those of the senses, were intended by Providence to be in some degree enjoyed by all; and therefore, that in the pleasures of the heart and the understanding, all are entitled to participate.’’72 Given this, it is significant that in A Series of Popular Essays she writes that to possess taste one’s attention must combine ‘‘affections of the heart and the understanding.’’73 Taste is vital in promoting the happiness of all citizens. This is because, according to Hamilton, a taste that produces associations with inanimate objects fills the tasteful observer with ‘‘the same affections as are inspired by the proper objects of his love’’ and ensures that he will have an enhanced moral sense toward his family. In turn, his developed responsibility leads to him only buying those objects that are tasteful because genuinely useful. As Hamilton expresses it, ‘‘ideas of utility, or of propriety, fitness, symmetry, and congruity’’ are connected to taste. The tasteful person (who is, in her account, necessarily considerate) considers the actual benefits an object will confer.74 He will not cultivate an ‘‘air of fashion, which . . . awes simple country people into an imitation of the vices . . . of politeness.’’ Instead, avoiding such mental dependence, he will become a responsible member of the community. Hamilton’s The Cottagers of Glenburnie provided a fictional model of this process. In its eagerness to offer supposedly workable solutions to social difficulties, The Cottagers contrasts with radical works of the previous decades, such as Caleb Williams (1794) and Maria (1798). Whereas these works often examined the ways in which the suffering of individuals was produced by larger social systems and institutions,

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The Cottagers emphasises the individual’s ability to improve his or her position. The work begins by describing the visit of its unconventional heroine, the spinster and former servant, Mrs. Mason, to Glenburnie. Mrs. Mason initially lodges with Mrs. MacClarty, whose name means ‘‘dirty.’’ Mrs. MacClarty has a house that is both unattractive and disregarded. As might be expected from the arguments in Popular Essays, this lack of taste is reflected in the neglectful attitudes of its occupants. The MacClartys value objects for their associations with rank, for, as Hamilton puts it in Letters, their ‘‘adventitious lustre.’’ In the novel, the son of Mrs. MacClarty is a primary representative of bad taste, being, like Julia, overly imaginative and ultimately irresponsible toward those for whom he should care. In search of novelty, Sandie’s imagination is caught by a nearby fair to which the country people are flocking, and he inconsiderately takes the family horse to travel to it. While there, his ‘‘castle-building’’ leads him to joins the army (an incident that recalls both Wollstonecraft’s criticism of the irrationality of the army and Coleridge’s own personal experience). However, unaccustomed to discipline, he runs away from his regiment almost immediately. The episode has disastrous results when Sandie returns to witness the death of his father, a death that is partly the result of his own actions.75 Sandie MacClarty is a failure both as a citizen and as an oldest son; his lack of discipline threatens both the domestic unit and the state. In making Sandie MacClarty a soldier, Hamilton chooses a direct way of demonstrating the dangers of incorrect association to the nation. However, she refuses to see subordination as the cause of bad taste, as Wollstonecraft had done. When she portrays Sandie becoming a soldier, then deserting, it is not his low status within the army that is Hamilton’s focus. Instead the point is clearly made that Sandie’s indolence and poor taste are developed before he ever joins up. Although his visit to the fair and subsequent enlistment loosely connects the army with the scene of dissipation, it is clearly his own wilful carelessness in disobeying his father and getting drunk, which indirectly leads to his father’s death.76 In fact, Hamilton suggests that, far from the army corrupting the country people, where the locals are poorly educated and without taste, it is they who present a potential threat to the defence of the nation. Paralleling Sandie’s trip to the fair are the landlord’s picturesque travels. Absent for much of the novel, while his village is in dire need of repair, he only returns after the cottagers have made their own ‘‘improvements.’’ His experience as a fashionable traveller enables him to

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comment on the beauty of the village, yet he himself has benefited no one. Like Sandie, then, he shows irresponsibility and a restless searching after novelty. He is capable of observation, but his observations lack judgment. Hamilton’s problems with the picturesque can be traced to the emphasis upon the superficial in William Gilpin’s aesthetic theory. For Gilpin, picturesque travel ignores the ‘‘difficulty of assigning causes,’’ and is a ‘‘searching after effects.’’77 According to this definition, then, the picturesque ignores the knowledge of the human mind that, for Hamilton, makes taste a moral faculty. Picturesque travel, like fashion, involves the traveller in the pleasure of the ‘‘pursuit of his object—the expectation of new scenes continually opening, and arising to his view.’’78 In other words, like any fashion (including those in philosophy) it involves pleasure in change for its own sake. As Hamilton would put it, it is ‘‘made up of incongruous assemblages of external objects’’; it is essentially the produce of the uncultivated imagination or fancy.79 In contrast to both the MacClartys and the absentee landlord, those who have good taste value utility more than the apparent prestige of modishness. This is emphasised in the second half of Mrs. Mason’s stay in Glenburnie, when parallels are set up between her unsuccessful attempts at teaching the MacClartys earlier in the novel and her success with the Morisons. An unsuccessful tradesman, Mr. Morison is a victim of false taste who has lost his money by chasing after prestige. Educated by Mrs. Mason, however, Morison learns how to improve his situation by attention to the genuine comfort of his family. Convinced of these values, he then disseminates them by becoming a schoolteacher. The result is an improvement in comfort and beauty for the whole village. In this latter part of the novel the clear glass of the shining cottage windows, presumably the result of the school children’s labors, forms a clear symbol of Hamilton’s Common Sense insistence on the power of observation of the external world as a source for correct associations. These clear windows contrast with the mud Mrs. MacClarty’s child smeared on freshly cleaned windowpanes earlier in the novel.80 Earlier the infant’s actions had suggested how misplaced ideas about taste and status are attended by a lack of affection or care for the convenience for others. In contrast, in the latter part of the novel taste, utility and affection go hand in hand. As the metaphor of the windows suggests, Hamilton was able to distinguish between taste and fashion because of her Scottish Common Sense belief that intuitively known principles form the basis of correct judgments about the world, which can therefore be distinguished from

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adventitious associations. For her, the skeptics’ doubt about the rational basis of our belief in a world external to our associations is as self-inflicted as the mud deliberately smeared on the windows of the MacClarty’s cottage; willful determination to ignore our intuitive responses to the external world leads to the folly and corruption of fashion. On the other hand, just as the school children later so easily clean the windows, a correctly educated individual will have a straightforward belief in the reliability of his judgements. As this imagery suggests, Hamilton believed that a correctly trained mind could justifiably presume what de Bolla calls ‘‘an unproblematic one-to-one translatability between qualities of objects in the world and internal sensations.’’81 And the key to this belief was supplied by another aspect of Common Sense philosophy, the emphasis on divine order. Hamilton was careful to recognize that God gave man the gift of enjoyment in the material world: ‘‘ ‘The eye is never satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing’; and he who implanted these desires, has he not mercifully provided for their gratification?’’82 Hamilton shares this emphasis on proportion with Reid; however, she also argues for a kind of theological utilitarianism. Even when she considered worship itself she insisted on proportion; awe, she argued, should only be felt as far as it is useful. In The Cottagers of Glenburnie, when Mrs. Mason is sitting on a rock beside a waterfall, she is ‘‘arrested by admiration at the many beauties of the scene’’: The good woman’s heart glowed with rapture: but it did not vainly glow, as does the heart, or the imagination of many a pretender to superior taste; for the rapture of her heart was fraught with gratitude. She saw the God of nature in his works, and blessed the goodness which, even in the hour of creation, ordained that they should not only contribute to the use, but add to the enjoyments of the human race.’’83 Mrs. Mason experiences rapture but her encounter has utility rather than being disproportionate to its object. As she would do in the Popular Essays, Hamilton indicates here that the sublime experience of worship should not be connected with the terror of ‘‘unappeasable wrath and unlimitable puissance,’’ but should be measured.84 Hamilton’s emphasis on divine order, fitness, and proportion led her to argue that (common) nature is superior to (elitist) art. Having placed aesthetic matters in a divine context of well-proportioned fulfilment, she suggests that artworks designed by men for the glory of the rich and powerful are insignificant: ‘‘What are all the works of man, what all the pomp and splendour of monarchs, compared with the grandeur of such a scene? But the sights that are designed by man, as proofs of his cre-

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ative skill, are only to be seen by the rich and great; while the glorious works of God are exhibited to all. Pursuing this thought a little farther, it occurred to Mrs Mason, that all that is rare, is in general useless; and that all that is most truly valuable is given in common, and placed within the reach of the poor and lowly.’’85 The ‘‘rare’’ art objects are those possessed by the upper ranks and consequently fashionable. The natural objects that gave Mrs. Mason so much pleasure, on the other hand, are ‘‘truly valuable,’’ that is, both useful and, by extension, tasteful.86 In policing the boundary between taste and fashion Hamilton was responding to an important trend in Romantic thought. The eighteenth century had been plagued by the fear of the luxury generated by consumerism, but the final decades saw a shift in focus: anxiety was now frequently directed at fashion. Like luxury, fashion was thought to undermine the distinction between the ranks, as those lower down the social scale strived for prestige. However, it was also connected with change: as those lower down the social scale gained the attributes of fashion, such attributes became seen as vulgar by the upper ranks, and new objects and attitudes were selected as prestigious. The changing values given to objects by the apparently arbitrary economics of fashion were both socially and philosophically unsettling, suggesting the difficulty of coming to any accurate conclusions about the worth of external objects. The eighteenth century abounds with attempts to find a more permanent scale of values, an alternative to the fluctuations caused by fashion. Frequently, as for Hamilton, this involved an attempt to separate aesthetic judgement from commerciality. As a result, this search for an alternative often had democratizing implications. Comparison suggests that this democratic aesthetic was most fully realised in Hamilton’s work. A decade before the publication of The Cottagers of Glenburie the search for an alternative to fashion was evident in the work of Hamilton’s friend, Joanna Baillie. In her ‘‘Introductory Discourse to Plays on the Passions’’ (1798), Baillie argues that curiosity about others is our leading characteristic. Improperly developed and ill-supported by reason, however, this only seems to lead to curiosity about externals, ‘‘observations on the dress and appearance of men,’’ which we might interpret as engagement with the arbitrary sign system of fashion.87 Baillie proposes an alternative; our curiosity comes from a God-given desire to know ourselves and properly directed can be morally beneficial. However, in this account our knowledge has to be culled from the correct source—high quality literature, and, in particular, the drama, as

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it is here that the development of human nature can best be traced. And this knowledge, gained from close observation, implicitly has the permanence that fashion lacks: in each case certain causes produce certain effects. In addition, such information is not available in ‘‘sentimental novels,’’ where attempts have been made ‘‘to interest us in the delicacies, embarrassments, and artificial distresses of the more refined part of society.’’88 Instead, in a maneuver that recalls Wordsworth’s later remarks, Baillie implies that such knowledge is more readily available in ‘‘those works which most strongly characterize human nature in the middling and lower classes of society, where it is to be discovered by stronger and more unequivocal marks’’: ‘‘The one is a dressed and beautiful pleasure-ground, in which we are enchanted for a while, amongst the delicate and unknown plants of artful cultivation; the other is a rough forest of our native land; the oak, the elm, the hazel, and the bramble are there; and amidst the endless varieties of its paths we can wander for ever.’’89 While Baillie here is talking about art, the implication remains that the ‘‘refined part of society’’ has become the equivalent to the cultivated products of consumerism; like the pleasure garden, they no longer show their original characteristics. The comparison suggests that the lower ranks have retained both their natural value and their Britishness. However, a closer examination shows that in this passage Baillie focuses on those works of art which describe the lower ranks, rather than on the individuals themselves. Joanna Baillie’s language is echoed by William Wordsworth’s in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads.90 Wordsworth separates texts and readers into two groups: on the one hand, there are works and readers defined by a ‘‘degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’’; there is revolution, urbanization, and growing consumerism. On the other, there are those works and readers connected with a supposedly more permanent and natural set of associations, works, and readers, in other words, who possess something similar to Hamilton’s taste. And for Wordsworth, more like Hamilton than Baillie in this respect, the emphasis is not only on human psychology, but on the proper interaction between the mind and the natural world. Again this correct interaction seems less available to the upper classes, hence Wordsworth’s attempt in the advertisement to ascertain ‘‘how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.’’ However, his wording is telling: the language of the common man may be suitable for poetry since it displays human nature more

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clearly, but the taste of the lower classes or their imaginative development seems less of a priority. Joanna Baillie, Wordsworth, and Hamilton all oppose the fashionable and cultivated to the more tasteful ‘‘natural,’’ as a way of providing a more permanent set of values to shape the human mind. However, Wordsworth’s and Baillie’s comments on artificial refinement bear a distinctly different emphasis from Hamilton’s. Notably, whereas the remarks of the others take the lower ranks as a (potential) source of artistic material, Hamilton’s novel situates them as actively tasteful, and provides them with an aesthetic guide. For Hamilton the lower ranks should not merely be the objects of taste, but the possessors of it. The difference relates to Hamilton’s more extensive use of Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Hamilton emphasizes the authority of common experience, as opposed to the experience of the exceptional individual. She agrees with Reid and his followers that authoritative judgements about the external world can be arrived at on the basis of sensory data, general experience, and common agreement, but, crucially, she also extends the epistemological importance of these principles of common sense to cover the area of aesthetics. This results in the privileging of nature over art and of human emotion over elitist knowledge. This ‘‘common sense,’’ has, in Hamilton’s account, to be cultivated, a paradox that she shares with other thinkers in the Common Sense tradition.91 Distinctive to Hamilton, however, is the application of both Common Sense philosophy and the association of ideas to a fully fledged pedagogic theory of social improvement. Understanding the influence of Scottish Common Sense philosophy upon Hamilton makes it possible to see her later writing as more than ‘‘serious’’ or ‘‘abstruse,’’ as Butler has it. Her work was not merely a conservative reaction to the radicalism of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, but also an attempt to find solutions to the social problems raised during the 1790s.92 Hamilton’s work calls for a reevaluation of the prevalent critical notion that Scottish Common Sense philosophical responses to radicalism were in any way ‘‘simple’’ rejections of theory.

NOTES 1. Gary Kelly, ‘‘Jane Austen and the 1790s,’’ in Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1986), 289. For a related paper on Hamilton and Common Sense philosophy, focusing on Elizabeth Hamilton’s A Series of Popular Essays, see my article, ‘‘De-

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mocratizing Taste: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and Elizabeth Hamilton,’’ Romanticism 8 (2002): 179–96. 2. This reluctance to examine the philosophical background of conservatism is the case even in a study as ambitious as Gary Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution, 1790– 1827 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 3. David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt Against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 4. Marilyn Butler, ‘‘Irish Culture and Scottish Enlightenment: Maria Edgeworth’s Histories of the Future,’’ in Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History 1750– 1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 158–80. 5. Julie Choi, ‘‘Feminine Authority? Common Sense and the Question of Voice in the Novel,’’ New Literary History 27 (1996): 643–45. 6. Ibid., 648. 7. Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Memoirs of the Author of ‘‘The Rights of Woman,’’ ed. Richard Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 215. 8. Richard Price, A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, ed. D. D. Raphael (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 39, fn. See Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Edinburgh: Bell and Robinson, 1785), 9–35. 9. Peter Baumann, ‘‘The Scottish Pragmatist? The Dilemma of Common Sense and the Pragmatist Way Out,’’ Reid Studies 2 (1999): 48. 10. Thomas Reid, Works, 7th ed., ed. William Hamilton (Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart, 1872), 140. 11. Anna Letitia Barbauld, ‘‘On Prejudice,’’ in Works, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1773), 1:321–27. 12. Mary Wollstonecraft, Complete Works, 7 vols., ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering, 1989), 7:9–10. 13. Reid, Works, 95. 14. Ibid. 15. For an account of the fluctuating status of romance in the period, and its various uses, see Jacqueline Labbe, The Romantic Paradox: Love, Violence and the Uses of Romance, 1760–1830 (London: Macmillan, 2000). 16. Reid, Works, 95. 17. Martin Kallich, The Association of Ideas and Critical Theory in Eighteenth-Century England (The Hague: Mouton, 1970); Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design, ed. Peter Kivy, International Archives of the History of Ideas Series Minor (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973 [1725]), 75; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 20–24. Hobbes was followed by Hume and Hartley. 18. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 130–42. 19. George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 2 vols. (London; Edinburgh: Strahan and Cadell; Creech, 1776), 1:43. 20. Ibid., 2:48. 21. Ibid., 2:49. 22. Ibid. 23. Thomas Campbell’s emphasis on correct linguistic usage as a safeguard against

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fallacious reasoning was shared by Elizabeth Hamilton; indeed, concerns about the transparency or otherwise of language were extremely common in the period. See Elizabeth Hamilton, Letters on Education (Bath: Crutwell for Robinson, 1801), 71–72. 24. Kallich, Association of Ideas, 199. 25. Elizabeth Benger, Memoirs of the Late Mrs Elizabeth Hamilton, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1818), 1:221. 26. Elizabeth Hamilton, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, ed. Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999). 27. Ibid., 257. 28. Ibid., 248. 29. Ibid., 208. 30. Ibid., 214. 31. Reid, Works, 97. 32. Hamilton, Hindoo Rajah, 227. 33. Ibid., 226, 252–53. 34. Mary Wollstonecraft, Political Writings: A Vindication of the Rights of Men: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 91. 35. Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, ed. Claire Grogan (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2000). 36. Anonymous, review of Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, by Elizabeth Hamilton, Monthly Mirror/JAS 10 (1800): 34, Cw3 Corvey Women Writers 1796–1834, July 1999, Sheffield Hallam University, February 25, 2000, http://www.shu.ac.uk/corvey/CW3/ ContribPage.cfm?Contrib⳱58. 37. Ibid., 34. 38. Eleanor Ty, ‘‘Female Philosophy Refunctioned: Elizabeth Hamilton’s Parodic Novel,’’ Ariel 22 (1991): 111–29. 39. Hamilton, Modern Philosophers, 126. 40. Ibid., 85. 41. Ibid., 85–86. 42. The sexual threat that reading represented to women with a ‘‘roving imagination’’ was suggested by Franc¸ois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fe´ne´lon, in his influential Treatise on the Education of Daughters: ‘‘young women, without instruction or application, have always a roving imagination . . . Those who have somewhat more vivacity, pique themselves on a superior knowledge, and read, with avidity, every book which flatters their vanity; they become enamoured of novels, plays, and ‘‘Tales of Wonder,’’ in which love and licentiousness predominate.’’ In Vivien Jones, ed., Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (London: Routledge, 1990), 104. 43. Hamilton, Modern Philosophers, 86. 44. Hamilton, Education, v. Also published as Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Bath: Crutwell for Robinson, 1801). 45. Reid, Works, 99–100. 46. Ibid., 108. 47. Hamilton, Education, vi–vii. 48. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 397. 49. Daniel Cottom, The Civilized Imagination: A Study of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3, 11.

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50. Elizabeth A. Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–22; Carole Fabricant, ‘‘The Aesthetics and Politics of Landscape in the Eighteenth Century,’’ in Studies in EighteenthCentury British Art and Aesthetics, ed. Ralph Cohen (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 49–77; Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: PrintCapitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 56–7, 69, 77. 51. Joanna Baillie, Plays on the Passions, ed. Peter Duthie (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001), 79. 52. Hamilton, Education, 10. 53. Elizabeth Hamilton, A Series of Popular Essays, Illustrative of Principles Essentially Connected with the Improvement of the Understanding, the Imagination, and the Heart, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Edinburgh; London: Manners and Miller; Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, Cadell and Davies, 1815 [1813]), 1:184–85. This corresponds with Hamilton’s emphasis upon the general nature of human abilities (Hamilton, Education, 3, 10). 54. Hamilton, Education, 304. 55. Ibid., 346. 56. Hamilton, Popular Essays, 1:155. 57. Ibid., 1:160. 58. John Abercrombie, Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers and the Investigation of Truth, 13th ed. (London: Murray, 1849), 19–29. 59. John Abercrombie, The Culture and Discipline of the Mind, Addressed to the Young (Edinburgh: Whyte, 1839), 5–6. 60. Hamilton, Education, 346. 61. Ibid., 229. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 304. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 305. 66. Ibid., 347. 67. Ibid. 68. Reid, Works, 185. 69. Hamilton, Popular Essays, 1:165. 70. Ibid. 71. Elizabeth Hamilton, The Cottagers of Glenburnie: A Tale for the Farmer’s Ingle-Nook (Edinburgh: Ballantyne for Manners and Miller and Cheyne; Cadell, Davies and Miller, 1808), x. 72. Ibid., x–xi. 73. Hamilton, Popular Essays, 1:191. 74. Ibid., 1:232. 75. Hamilton, The Cottagers, 209–47. 76. Ibid., 195–247. 77. William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; On Sketching Landscape: With a Poem, on Landscape Painting. To These Are Now Added Two Essays, Giving an Account of the Principles and Mode in Which the Author Executed His Own Drawings (London: Cadell and Davies, 1808), 41 in Gavin Budge, Aesthetics and the Picturesque, 1795–1840, 6 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2001), vol. 1. 78. Ibid., 41.

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79. Hamilton, Popular Essays, 1:160. 80. Hamilton, The Cottagers, 140. 81. Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 45. 82. Hamilton, The Cottagers, 194. 83. Ibid., 193–94. 84. Hamilton, Popular Essays, 1:203. 85. Hamilton, The Cottagers, 194. 86. Significantly in this Hamilton disagrees with the eighteenth-century aesthetician Archibald Alison. Having argued that ‘‘the qualities of matter become necessarily expressive to us of all the qualities of mind they signify,’’ Alison adds that they may be the signs of the ‘‘POWERS or capacities of mind. It is thus, that all the works of human Art or Design, are directly significant to us of the wisdom, the invention, the taste, or the benevolence of the artist; and the works of Nature, of the power, the wisdom, and the beneficence of the Divine Artist’’; Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), 5th ed., 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Willison for Constable; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817), 2:418. 87. Baillie, Plays on the Passions, 68–69. 88. Ibid., 79. 89. Ibid. 90. William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 1991), 7. The similarities may have been more than coincidental. In his introduction to the facsimile edition of Baillie’s plays, Jonathan Wordsworth cites evidence that Coleridge and ‘‘Wordsworth had access to a copy of Baillie at Alfoxden at the height of the Lyrical Ballads period’’ (no page number). He finds that ‘‘[t]he thinking behind Lyrical Ballads and its later preface depends most obviously on Hugh Blair, whose Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1785) Coleridge took out of the Bristol Library in January 1798’’ (no page number). 91. Reid, Works, 185. 92. Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 111.

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The Law of Contract in Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House Alex Dick We inherit an old Gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant. The moated ramparts, the embattled towers, and the trophied halls, are magnificent and venerable, but useless. The interior apartments, now converted into rooms of convenience, are cheerful and commodious, though their approaches are winding and difficult.

THIS EVOCATIVE DESCRIPTION OF A GOTHIC CASTLE IS FROM THE eighteenth century, but it is not found in any letter, novel, or travel brochure. It appears in William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, first published in 1764. Blackstone is, of course, not describing any particular castle, but rather the law itself, more specifically, the application of age-old customs of right and obligation to modern commercial and legal practice. Handed down from the days of Magna Carta, the precepts of legal recourse, like the ‘‘moated ramparts’’ and ‘‘embattled towers’’ of medieval baronies perhaps hold little relevance to the minutia of modern legal expediency. But once renovated, the archaic laws, customs, privileges, and rights become relevant and useful. That Blackstone would employ such an elaborate metaphor here is fitting because the figurative quality of the legal process is frequently at issue in the Commentaries. No crime or right is the precisely same as any other, Blackstone says, so the law must have recourse to ‘‘fictions and expedients’’ to establish standards of liability. The implementation of these fictions, like the refitting of an old mansion, modernizes and creates the legal system. But in another way, Blackstone is not being metaphorical at all. The passage above is taken from the end of a long series of chapters on the rights, crimes, and legal procedures attendant on real property. The Gothic castle illustrates how ‘‘the methods prescribed for the recovery of landed and other permanent property’’ in ancient cus112

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tom avoid the impasses of legal contingencies. The laws of real property are the case in point for the way necessary fictions become law. From the point of view of legal process, Blackstone’s image may seem obvious, even trite. From the point of view of epistemology, however, it is compellingly ambiguous. Blackstone is remarkably candid about language and metaphor in law to the extent that he admits to the fundamentally arbitrary rhetoric of legal judgment. But he also recognizes that what we know to be arbitrary connections—that Lord so-and-so owns such-and-such estate—represents the ground for the obligations necessary for the very existence of property. The epistemological clincher in the ‘‘fictional reality’’ of imagined obligations is the contract. While a promise-to-pay or a will is an arbitrary designation of future ownership, it has real implications. Like Blackstone’s metaphor, the contract provides an outline for the legal parameters of a particular act. It also illustrates the relation between individual rights and communal obligations. The problem is, how do these two contractual entities relate to each other? To what extent do simple promises amount to total ethical or social commitment? In what follows I want to examine the epistemology of late eighteenth-century contract theory. My focus, however, will not be Blackstone’s Commentaries, which, in spite of its compelling honesty about the fictional quality of property, obligation, and legal process, has little to say on contracts. I will instead orient my discussion around a later work of fiction that takes Blackstone’s image of the Gothic castle as its central motif: Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House. In a nutshell, this novel is about contracts, not just promises and agreements, but property rights, wills, entailments, marriages, families, commissions, initiations, friendships, and many other forms of social obligation. But Smith’s interest in the vicissitudes of contractual obligation goes well beyond the demands of plot. I would like to argue that The Old Manor House can be read as an extended commentary on the epistemological conundrum of the contract suggested but not developed by Blackstone. The novel is not simply concerned with the legal question of whether certain forms of contractual obligation are legitimate while others are not, but the philosophical question of what actually makes contracts obligatory in the first place. Given this broader epistemological scope, the novel’s engagement with the law of contract reaches beyond Blackstone to the empirical thought of David Hume and Thomas Reid. Finally, given Charlotte Smith’s interest in the Revolutionary debates of Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and others during the 1790s, debates that also hinge on the question of contractual legitimacy, I propose a political

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reading of The Old Manor House that takes the contract as the fundamental though problematic linchpin of civil society.

1 The Old Manor House is Smith’s second ‘‘revolutionary’’ novel. It follows Desmond, Smith’s epistolary novel of illicit love during the early years of the French Revolution, and is exactly contemporary with The Emigrants, her reflective long poem on French e´migre´s fleeing the Terror.1 Set around the time of the American Revolution, the events of The Old Manor House are frequently argued to parallel the overthrow of the ancien re´gime and English responses to it. At the heart of the novel is the ancient home of the aristocratic Rayland family, Rayland being a bastardized English homonym for ‘‘Roi land’’ or kingdom. As the novel opens, the estate is in the hands of the last descendent, the curmudgeonly Mrs. Rayland. Her only relatives, the Somerive family, live nearby; the younger son, Orlando, is a favorite of Mrs. Rayland. With Mrs. Rayland reside her housekeeper, Mrs. Lennard, and her ward, Monimia. Monimia and Orlando fall in love, against the wishes of everyone else. Critical commentary on The Old Manor House tends to focus on the first two volumes and its political connotations.2 The rest of the novel, shows that Smith’s interests extend beyond revolutionary allegory. Because of the profligacy of his elder brother Philip, Orlando takes a commission in the army to support his family. He soon finds himself in the midst of the American War. He is taken prisoner during a skirmish with American rebels and when the troop is attacked by Iroquois, he is initiated into the band. On his return to England, Orlando discovers that he has been presumed dead, that his father has died of grief, that his family has gone to London, that Mrs. Rayland too has died, that Monimia has been apprenticed to a seamstress, that Mrs. Lennard has married the unscrupulous lawyer, Mr. Roker, and that Mrs. Rayland’s will is in dispute. On her death, Orlando is assumed to be the named heir. When Roker reads the will, however, the family learns that the house and estate are to be left to the local bishop for charitable purposes, with the Rokers acting as managers. Realizing that the will may have been replaced by a later one declaring Orlando to be the heir, Philip goes ‘‘to law directly, because, he said, if there was such a will, he was . . . heirat-law, and the old woman’s too.’’3 The central thread of Smith’s plot interweaves with the complex

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patchwork of land laws that had plagued the English legal system for 700 years.4 As Smith presents the situation, Mrs. Rayland is obliged, morally, if not legally, to leave her estate to the eldest surviving son of her family, in this case Philip Somerive. But Mrs. Rayland also seems to have the right to choose whomever she wants to be her heir. This was, in legal terms, more or less true. Historians of English land law recognize that while a consistent standard of preserving family ownership of estates was regarded as desirable, it was not consistently endorsed. Perpetual entailments were regarded with suspicion by seventeenth-century judges as much as by nineteenth-century economists. Instead statutes and legal precedents over the centuries allowed complex systems of uses, trusts, and settlements to ensure that continuity of land ownership would not override the interests of other family members, tenants, and smaller leaseholders, and ultimately the state. Indeed it has been suggested that it was through the manipulation of laws governing such related matters as the rules governing marriage settlements and the length of entailments that the gentry and minor aristocracy came to prominence in Britain in the late seventeenth century. Many of the laws passed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were specifically designed to prevent the abuse of land ownership such as by selling (or ‘‘alienating’’) it willy-nilly or by disenfranchising other members of the family, particularly women. In short, the continuous ownership of large family estates was regarded as a good thing, though the abuse of such privileges through primogeniture or entailment was not. In Wealth of Nations, for instance, Adam Smith reveals his dubiety concerning the ‘‘custom’’ of primogeniture: ‘‘of all institutions it is the fittest to support the pride of family distinctions. . . . In every other respect, nothing can be more contrary to the real interests of a numerous family, than a right which, in order to enrich one beggars all the rest of the children.’’5 Smith also believed that the customary principles of entailment ‘‘are founded upon the most absurd of all suppositions, the supposition that every successive generation of men have not an equal right to the earth, and to all that it possesses; but that the property of the present generation should be restrained and regulated according to the fancy of those who died perhaps five hundred years ago.’’ Classical economists, like McCulloch and Mill, also contended that perpetual entailments were liable to serious abuse, though this did not mean that they did not appreciate the ‘‘benefits’’ of large landed estates passed down through eldest sons. On the contrary, as William Miller shows, McCulloch argued that primogeniture meant that large estates

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would not be broken up, increasing the risk of alienation and hence poverty for the tenants. The organization of aristocratic children according to right promoted self-discipline and inspired social responsibility. There were also efforts to regulate the inheritance of land via registrations of families and their holdings, a practice that began in the sixteenth century and was not completed to any satisfactory degree until 1925. The history of English land law, then, is really the history of attempts to rationalize the principles of succession and right from customary foundations and through legal practice—very much, in fact, as Blackstone conceived it. The ongoing concern with the problematic status of the laws of landed property points to a broader concern with contracts more generally, a concern that was particularly at issue during the second half of the eighteenth century. Customary forms of succession such as primogeniture and entailment carried on in the British legal tradition, through Blackstone and others, via what was called ‘‘consideration,’’ the traditional obligations corresponding to certain duties or professions. Consideration also affected laws of contract. A physician, for instance, was legally bound to help the sick because that is what physicians ought to do. The idea of an ‘‘heir-at-law,’’ based on the custom of primogeniture, also falls under consideration, though, as has been shown, the legitimacy of this custom could only be enforced through complex legal maneuvering. Consideration, like entailment more specifically, was regarded as a deterrent to commerce and enterprise; if, for instance, a merchant promised to supply a quantity of goods, his payment could be rendered only on the basis of the goods themselves and not on the basis of the promised amount. Workers were not paid on negotiated terms, but on the basis of the work having been performed. Debt, of course, was still at issue, but the terms of such obligations were not organized around formal arrangements of time, but around the amounts credited and the social standing of the contractors. Starting in the 1760s, judges started to challenge the principle of ‘‘consideration’’ as the ground for contractual legitimacy, finding instead for claims for the legitimacy of obligations as declared and in most cases signed rather than customarily assumed. At issue in the decisions is the apparatus that confirms such ‘‘free’’ negotiations, and this puts the epistemological status of the agreement in question. The contract became free from feudal custom, positing the grounds for contractual efficacy in the fidelity implicit in an existing written agreement. In one case, the Lord Chancellor Mansfield argued that legal proof for that efficacy rests on the court’s access to and examination of the documents

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that establish and bind the contract rather than the testimony of the participant’s intentions or states of mind.6 This emphasis on the binding nature of the medium of the contract, written as opposed to oral, has a complicating effect on the grounds of contractual legitimacy. In short, a contract is legally binding because it exists as much now as it did when it was established regardless of changes in the situations of the participants. As a written document, the contract as made cannot change. Smith’s story thus points beyond the historical difficulty of determining succession of landed property toward a dispute about epistemological questions regarding the nature of contracts, settlements, and entails. What makes a contract, promise, or entailment legally binding? Is it the written declaration of bequest or agreement or is it the customary rights and privileges of the claimants or family? What is interesting about Smith’s perspective on this, however, is that the question remains largely unanswered in any definitive way. In the end, there is no trial. The coup de theatre is the former Mrs. Lennard’s confession to Orlando that the will naming him heir does indeed exist and that it is hidden in the house. While Orlando’s claim may be the last one, it is also only one of many arbitrary possibilities of the future ownership of the estate to be determined by whoever happens to be named in writing before Mrs. Rayland dies. But Orlando is also the heir-at-law: the estate is entailed to him, and under right of consideration he is legally entitled to it. In a sense, then, Smith avoids having to deal with the legal ambiguity that her novel is also about. And yet, what it points to as well is the practical difficulty of resolving the entailment question because of the epistemological questions it asks but cannot resolve. Before turning to a closer reading of how Smith tackles these questions, I want to explore how these questions were posed and debated in the empirical philosophy of her time.

2 The persistence of entailment points to a significant ambiguity in the history of contracts in that although the courts favored the emerging ideology of technical obligation over consideration, the conventional circumstances under which those obligations are made (writing, speech) did not prevent older forms of customary obligation remaining legal both in principle and in practice. This has important philosophical and moral implications; at this point, then, I want to consider the philosophical and political parameters of those debates in order to show

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through a more detailed reading of The Old Manor House the extent to which Smith is invested not just in the legal conundrum of entailments and other forms of contract but also in the epistemology of the contract. A number of scholars have shown that the various perspectives on language and law afforded by speech-act theory (which is very much invested in the idea of the contract) and systems theory are very useful for the study of the novel as a site of legal and political debate. I would like to suggest here, however, that a theoretical commentary on the verbal and contractual nature of law is already apparent in the British empirical tradition with which most novelists of the period—including Charlotte Smith—would have been familiar. The most significant contention over the epistemological status of contractual obligation was that between David Hume and Thomas Reid. In the Treatise on Human Nature, Hume argues that there is no rational proof that uttering a promise entails obligation; contracts are merely vehicles for delineating the substance of negotiation. Society is the product of a necessary agreement, what Hume calls ‘‘convention,’’ to respect the property over others and balance ‘‘love of gain’’ and ‘‘natural affection.’’7 Convention has nothing to do with promising. Because a promise is only ‘‘a certain form of words,’’ Hume argues, it ‘‘is not naturally intelligible’’.8 It may be necessary to utter formulas of obligation or approbation. But a conventional agreement to respect property is not of the nature of a promise . . . but only of a general sense of common interest; which sense all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules. I observe, that it will be for my interest to leave another in the possession of his goods, provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me. He is sensible of a like interest in the regulation of his conduct. When this common sense of interest is mutually express’d and is known to both, it produces a suitable resolution and behaviour. And this may properly be call’d a convention or agreement betwixt us, tho’ without the imposition of a promise; since the actions of each of us have a reference to those of the other, and are perform’d on the supposition, that something is to be perform’d on the other part.9

Conventional obligation makes agreement easy, but the principles of obligation are fanciful and symbolic: ‘‘In order to aid the imagination in conceiving the transference of property, we take the sensible object and actually transfer its possession to the person on whom we wou’d bestow the property. The suppos’d resemblance of the actions, and the presence of this sensible delivery, deceive the mind, and make it fancy, that

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it conceives the mysterious transition of the property.’’10 Laws come into being through the similarity and contiguity of specific acts. Convention, then, is the epistemological ground of consideration. Hume’s remarks on conventionality go beyond the efficacy of social custom that consideration pleads in the law courts to the figurative nature of verbal acts. The association of convention and promising is, for Hume, the result of reflection. Hume’s ‘‘explication’’ exposes these ‘‘present impressions’’ as ‘‘suppos’d’’ and ‘‘mysterious.’’ It is possible, Hume says in his Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, that a contract that appears effective in one context is not necessarily so in another; the ‘‘words . . . inheritance and contract, stand for ideas infinitely complicated; and to define them exactly a hundred volumes of laws, and a thousand volumes of commentators have not been found sufficient.’’11 In ‘‘Of the Original Contract,’’ Hume argues that there is no standard of obligation implicit in the idea of a promise, no ‘‘tacit contract’’ or ‘‘general will.’’ Our need to form communities is inspired by our ‘‘love of children’’ and ‘‘gratitude to benefactors, pity to the unfortunate’’12 but ‘‘it is reflection only, which engages us to sacrifice such strong passions to the interests of peace and public order.’’13 Society, for Hume, develops out of a need to obey the rights of others; the laws of that society are empirically speaking, fictions: If the reason be asked of that obedience, which we are bound to pay to government, I readily answer, because society could not otherwise subsist: And this answer is clear and intelligible to all mankind. Your answer is, because we should keep our word. But besides, that no body, till trained in a philosophical system, can either comprehend or relish this answer: Besides this, I say, you find yourself embarrassed, when it is asked, why we are bound to keep our word? Nor can you give any answer, but what would, immediately, without any circuit, have accounted for our obligation to allegiance.14

The claim that our word is our bond does not, for Hume, hold in practice. The complexity of the legal system shows that matters of legal arbitration could never be considered more than speculation. ‘‘The necessities of human society, neither in private or public life, will allow of such an accurate enquiry: And there is no virtue or moral duty, but what may, with facility, be refined away, if we indulge in a false philosophy, in sifting and scrutinizing it, by every captious rule of logic, in every light or position, in which it may be placed.’’15 Hume thus shows the difficulty of judging consideration to be due to its nature as a fictional construct.

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Hume’s most important disputant on the contract was Thomas Reid. The differences between Hume’s and Reid’s thoughts on the contract are, at times, quite subtle, but nevertheless apparent on two particular fronts. First, while Hume sees contractual obligation as inherently difficult and paradoxical, Reid judges it to be logical and clear. For Reid, observation of human behavior leads not to skepticism, but to a belief in the fundamental principles of human conduct. Ordinary behavior registers the natural condition of human conduct as the limit of the universal consent of social beings. For Reid the paramount example of the activity of mind is language. Language may include arbitrary names for things, but these ‘‘artificial signs’’ are subtended by the formal structure of linguistic behavior apparent in what Reid calls ‘‘natural signs,’’ the expressive vehicles of action. In Reid’s view, human beings do not learn language simply by mimicking sounds. The human mind is naturally capable of communication. For language to have refined itself above animal desire, the mind must already contain the potential for reason. Constitutive principles of mind work in conjunction with these natural signs to allow the subject to gather lexicons of applicable experiences necessary for practical conversation. Contra Hume, Reid claims that the basic grammar of natural language cannot be reduced to the level of sensory experience or tacit consent. Natural signs are in themselves irreducible to anything but the common occurrence, that is to say, their common sense. Reid’s crucial instance of how these natural signs work is the contract. In ‘‘Of the Nature and Obligation of a Contract,’’ Reid argues that the mind can conceive ideas ‘‘in solitude, without intercourse with any other intelligent being’’ and define them according to categories of ‘‘genus and difference.’’ Reid calls such conceptions ‘‘solitary acts.’’ But in order to participate in society, an individual must express himself through active principles embodied in certain words: when he asks a question for information, when he testifies a fact, when he gives a command to his servant, when he makes a promise, or enters into a contract, these are social acts of mind, and can have no existence without the intervention of some other intelligent being, who acts a part in them. Between the operations of the mind, which, for want of a more proper name, I have called solitary, and those I have called social, there is this very remarkable distinction, that, in the solitary, the expression of them by words, or any other sensible sign, is accidental. They may exist, and be complete, without being expressed, without being known to any other person. But, in the social operations, the expression is essential. They cannot exist without being expressed by words or signs, and known to the other party.16

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Promises and contracts are not abstract representations of social order, but its necessary condition. For Reid, promises prove moral fidelity. If there were no fidelity, there would be no need for promises. Since promises are made, there must be such a thing as fidelity.17 The second important difference between Reid and Hume on contracts is Reid’s commitment to the necessity and permanence of the obligations so stated. Reid does not claim that the efficacy of promises derives from their referential value to some psychic intention. Intention has little to do with what makes a promise, even if in a moral sense the obligations of a promise entail an intention to act accordingly. By definition the utterance ‘‘I promise’’ forms an obligation with someone else. ‘‘A fraudulent person may contract with a fixed purpose of not performing his engagement’’ Reid says. But this purpose makes no change with regard to his obligation. He is as much bound as the honest man, who contracts with a fixed purpose of performing.’’18 The efficacy of contracts derives from the universal understanding that uttering a promise entails obligation and from the enactment of that promise in speech. In his lectures on moral philosophy and jurisprudence given at the University of Glasgow, Reid argues further that legal action is logically inseparable from the common-sense principles underlying his theory of contract.19 When we speak in general terms of civil rights, Reid admits, we are in fact reducing complex social actions into imaginative figures: When we say that a man has a Right to such a house or to such a pretestation from an other, This is no more but a short technical way of expressing what would require many words to express it in the most direct and natural way. It is an artificial way of signifying that certain actions of the person who is said to have the right are within the limits of his duty, and at the same time it signifies certain actions of others towards him to be their duty. Upon the whole therefore Mans [sic] Civil Right is a figure of Speech by which we understand all that the Law of the State allows him to do possess and enjoy and all which the Law obliges others to do for his benefit.20

Importantly Reid recalls here that the linguistic expression of promising is not an arbitrary representation of will, but an irreducible and natural mode of human speech: ‘‘In a Contract or promise the Will or intention does not bind unless it be expressed Nor 2 The expressing an intention without actually contracting Nor 3 Words without intention, Nor 4 Does the want of an intention to perform hinder the Obligation. Not even when the person with whom the Contract is made perceives that it is made without the intention of performance.’’21

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As the contract is aligned to principles of mind, Reid connects his theory of property rights to the principles of Common Sense by suggesting that the operations of natural language are irreducible to reference: ‘‘Right . . . is not a Quality of the thing or of the Person having right. Nor is it any Real Relation between the thing and the Person. Nor is it any connexion [sic] or association between the thing and Person in our Imagination.’’22 Rather the relation between common-sense obligation and economic action lies in their application of natural law: All Laws circumscribe a Mans [sic] actions and confine him within a certain Sphere within which he may exercise his power and act according to his pleasure but he cannot go beyond this Sphere without transgressing the laws and thereby becoming obnoxious to punishment. And this sphere of Action within which if a man confined himself, he was no way obnoxious was called his Right. The Law not onley [sic] circumscribes my Actions and fixes certain limits to them, but it likewise directs & prescribes certain actions to be done by others that respect me & tend to my benefite [sic]. Thus it obliges those who owe me to pay their just debts, & those who have contracted with me to perform their Engagement.23

The law is not a speculative description of human behaviors, but rather the culmination of individual social acts in the expression of general fidelity. The sphere of rights is itself regulated by the natural language of social acts, which is to say that the sphere, like the underlying grammar and verbal and social interaction is irreducible to arbitrary agreement or custom. Reid’s conviction that these principles are irreducible beyond their natural process in the workings of the imagination allows him to state that an imagined mechanism of obligations logically exists. The question of obligation and right is also central to the political debates of the 1790s, the immediate context in which Charlotte Smith composes her novels. As David Simpson suggests, the Revolution debates can be seen as two sides of the same Common Sense coin.24 But the language question is pushed into the background. As the inherence of obligations in society, following Hume, became entrenched in political, economic, and legal theory, Reid’s notion of social acts was overshadowed by the general belief that all language consists of expressions of truth. Edmund Burke, Simpson argues, was influenced by Common Sense philosophy and praises it as the epistemological foundation for his social vision in the Reflections on the Revolution in France. Yet Burke’s interest in language and law demonstrates similar ambiguities to those that emerge

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in the Hume-Reid contention. As Steven Blakemore contends, ‘‘Burke believed that words could create a linguistic world of illusion and fantasy, and he often alluded to the error of confusing word with thing, language and reality.’’ Burke did however conceive of a natural language of politics, what he calls ‘‘the words and spirit of that immortal law.’’25 These make up a manifold set of ‘‘documents’’ called the constitution, in the sense of a code of meaning or a structure of thought. Importantly, however, these documents do not exist in any technical form. They are rather the accumulated customs that make up consideration in its most fundamental and binding sense. It is because they do not exist in any technological sense that the epistemological approach they demand is not that of reading or interpreting, but of greeting or participating. For this reason, Burke warns against scientific and political jargon that does not reflect the order of verbal customs. Considered to be simply the designation of anything and everything without its own determining and coherent order, language becomes the tool, for Burke, of ‘‘corruption and subversion.’’ The threat of the Revolution for Burke is not merely that of violence or anarchy, but the breakdown of the natural system of language and obligation that underlies the constitution. ‘‘Society,’’ Burke famously asserts in his Reflections on the Late Revolution in France, ‘‘is indeed a contract.’’26 Obligations set down in the past over the freedoms and responsibilities of the various sectors of society are morally and legally binding in the present and the future. Echoing Reid’s sphere of law and Blackstone’s gothic castle, Burke argues that acts of contract-making or specific constitutional amendments are morally consistent with an ideal of general obligation because they each express their inviolability. Liberty exists in tandem with obligation: Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in its appointed place. This law is not subject to the will of those, who by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that law. The municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty at their pleasure, and on their speculations of a contingent improvement, wholly to separate and tear asunder the bands of their subordinate community, and to dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles.27

The issue for Burke is not submission, since no technical device for social order exists and would, even if it did exist, be liable to the charge

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of arbitrariness. On the contrary, because no such document exists and because submission to the social order is necessary, the injunction to obey existing rights and privileges transcends an individual claim to ownership or right. Burke’s adversaries in the Revolution debates, Richard Price, Tom Paine, and William Godwin, also promote the idea that general social obligations are both necessary and real. But their opposition to Burke rests on the idea that language reflects immediate facts, not eternal conditions. In his Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (1758), Price argues that the obligations of a promise are the same as an obligation to speak the truth. A promise declares a future action, as opposed to an intention, which is only an affirmation of a present state of mind. Because my present knowledge of events cannot anticipate the future, to resolve to do something does not necessarily entail that I am obliged to do it in the same way that it would if I declared that it will in truth come about. Anyone contradicting such a declaration by not doing that action commits a falsehood, Price contends, ‘‘in much the same manner as he would have done, if he had pretended to know, and had accordingly asserted, that a certain event would happen at a certain time which yet did not happen.’’28 The difference is that when we promise to do such a thing, we also refer to something that is true: ‘‘To promise, then, being to assert a fact dependent on ourselves, with an intention to produce faith in it and reliance upon it, as certainly to happen; the obligation to keep a promise is the same with the obligation to regard truth; and the intention of it cannot be, in the sense some have asserted, to will or create a new obligation; unless it can be pretended that the obligation to veracity is created by the mere breath of men every time they speak, or make any professions.’’29 A promise is a sign of our real obligation, but the sign is not in itself the determinate factor of that obligation. For Price, the mark of obligation in a promise is veracity, not agency. Similarly, in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, William Godwin rebukes the theory that human agency is determined by the appendage of contracted obligation. Promises may be necessary to organize time, but they must, Godwin insists, have no immediate control over my right to make or break such obligations. Social and moral obligations are the substantial meaning of my relations with others, in the form of civil respect or transactions of property. Language may be the way I express these obligations, and, Godwin claims, the refinement of language may even help to bring the common sense of such obligations to their abstract moral perfection. But words in themselves, he insists, have no

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immediate bearing on my duties as such. Yet, as Ian Balfour has shown, Godwin’s notion of moral truth implies a field of social and even verbal acts.30 While the unreliability of words and the arbitrariness of promises play havoc with the ancient privileges of the social contract, so, for Godwin, genuine right is determined by the ‘‘immutable reason’’ of law. Legislation, the source of all real governance, is not a question of proscription, which is as evil as promising. It demands the interpretation of what has been decreed and sanctioned in the universal approbation of God and man as the proper obligations of the individual to society. For Paine, likewise countering Burke’s spectral social contract, ‘‘a constitution is not a thing in name only, but in fact. It has not an ideal, but a real existence; and wherever it cannot be produced in visible form there is none.’’31 Paine claims that no constitutional authority documented in one generation could morally or legally be said to have any binding power over the self-determination of the next. The announcement by the French National Assembly that they are the nation of France, in effect undermining not simply the power but even the existence of whole sectors of society (the aristocracy and the church) and their scripting of a new constitution based on universal principles of individual freedom, was a model for such acts of self-determination. What is interesting about Paine’s formulation of this verbal enactment is that it still registers the universal efficacy of contractual obligation even as it attempts to overturn the idea that such obligation is timeless. Beneath Paine’s and Godwin’s dismissals of the social contract lies a more fundamental level of contractual enactment. The real issue here then is not whether language is representational or not, as there is much in Hume that would suggest that words do have active power even though they are at the same time signs. At stake here is what makes contractual obligation permanent or binding enough to constitute a civil society once Hume’s doctrine of convention or, in legal terms, consideration, has been discredited or overturned. Mansfield’s judgement had already shown that an act of contractual obligation could be intrinsically binding. But what actually made it so: its articulation of a necessary truth, its exemplification of an inherent mental grammar, or its manifestation of a binding social constitution? And the answer, problematically, is all three. The foundation of what Price and Godwin call truth is the ideal condition in which it is uttered at the expense of all other forms of conventional understanding. Yet this condition, most radically for Paine, but also for Hume, entails the relativity of that same truth according to changes in political and social circumstance. The social grammar of permanently binding contractual agree-

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ments is itself based upon the efficacy of print technology, a decidedly empirical truth, yet one through which what is called true appears flimsy and unconvincing. Common sense philosophy and the Revolution debates articulate a new kind of social experience, one not based on the consideration of social custom, but based rather on the intractability of verbal, written, and technological form.

3 I now want to demonstrate how the epistemological question of contractual form makes itself felt in The Old Manor House. There is little evidence to connect Charlotte Smith directly to the Common Sense school or the debates over the question of contractual form. Still as a public figure in the 1790s engaged in public discussions over the French Revolution it would have been hard for Smith to have avoided the underlying questions of contractual and constitutional legitimacy. The contention between Burke and Paine plays a prominent role in the more polemical passages of Desmond, for instance. Through her hero, the irascible expatriot, Desmond, Smith quotes Locke’s critique of Filmer that any allegiance to a power that is contrary to reason and truth is utterly changeable: ‘‘ ‘When fashion,’ says Locke, ‘has once sanctioned what folly or craft began, custom makes it sacred, and it will be thought impudence or madness to contradict or question it’’’.32 ‘‘Mr. Burke,’’ Smith’s fervent hero goes on, ‘‘does not directly assert, whatever disposition he shews to do so, that nothing can be changed or amended in the constitution of England,’’ but nevertheless, according to Desmond, insists that ‘‘since the compact made for all future generations, between the Prince of Orange and the self-elected Parliament,’’ the people of England must submit themselves to even the most unbearable of monarchs, ‘‘to whatever yoke the tyranny of his favourites shall inflict, because they are bound, by the compact of 1688, to alter nothing which the constitution then framed, bids them and their children submit to ad infinitum.’’33 Desmond then defends Tom Paine against the ‘‘angry antagonists’’ who seek to decry his assertion of self-evident truth as an affront to custom, privilege, and good breeding.34 But Desmond’s actions later in the book suggest impetuosity and even violence, especially toward the woman we presume he loves, so that it is hard to think that Smith’s views on the Revolution accord directly with his. The Old Manor House was written two years later, in the period after the initial political fervor had been overturned by the Terror in France,

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and immediately subsequent to Smith working out her ambivalences about the violence of Revolution action in her long poem The Emigrants. Accordingly the later novel is a more reflexive experiment with the underlying questions and implications of those debates and anxieties. It also has a further epistemological reach back to the English roots of the Revolution debates in the reaction to Hume’s skepticism and the legal rejection of consideration. For instance, that The Old Manor House brings to the fore the contract debate is apparent in the opening two chapters. The parallels between the two chapters also demonstrate how Smith blends the two arguments to mount her critique of the contract tout court. Here is the opening of chapter 1: In an old Manor House in one of the most southern counties of England, resided some few years since the last of a family that had for a long series of years possessed it. Mrs. Rayland was the only survivor of the three co-heiresses of Sir Hildebrand Rayland; one of the first of those to whom the title of Baronet had been granted by James the First. The name had been before of great antiquity in the county—and the last baronet having only daughters to share his extensive possessions, these ladies had been educated with such very high ideas of their own importance, that they could never be prevailed upon to lessen, by sharing it with any of those numerous suitors, who for the first forty or fifty years of their lives surrounded them; and Mrs. Barbara the eldest, and Mrs. Catherine the youngest, died single—one at the age of seventy, and the other at that of sixty-eight: by which events the second, Mrs. Grace, saw herself at the advanced age of sixty-nine sole inheritor, without any near relation, or indeed any relation at all whom she chose to consider as entitled to possess it after her death.35

The subject of this paragraph is the interconnected history that underscores Burke’s conception of the social contract. The structure of the paragraph mirrors this interconnectedness, forcing the reader to become party to it. Smith deftly takes the reader backward from the present to the date of the novel’s events (‘‘some few years since’’) and from there to the beginning of Mrs. Rayland’s possession (‘‘for a long series of years’’). She moves back further still to the granting of the baronetcy by James I and into the ‘‘antiquity’’ of the family. She then reverses the narrative direction to the last Baronet and the education of his daughters. The family history is recognized as the product of royal patronage. The preservation of the family inheritance supercedes, in the minds of the Baronet and his daughters, other relational arrangements, especially marriage. Yet this attempt to avoid contract is the consequence of an allegiance to the social contract that their nobility substantiates. Every-

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thing points to the fact that the Raylands are above ‘‘mere’’ practical obligation and are beholden only to a conventional standard. There is a subtle pun in the use of the word ‘‘suitors’’ that looks ahead to the complications that will be unearthed by the many lawyers around the question of the family inheritance later on. The Raylands reject contractual relations for family legacy, itself a contractual entity. The paradoxical tension of that situation is made apparent in the opening of chapter 2, in the descriptions of Mrs. Lennard’s upbringing and her relationship with Mrs. Rayland: The confidential servant, or rather companion and femme de charge, of Mrs. Rayland, was a woman of nearly her own age, of the name of Lennard.— This person, who was as well as her mistress a spinster, had been well educated; and was the daughter of a merchant who lost the fruits of a long course of industry in the fatal year 1720. He died of a broken heart, leaving his two daughters, who had been taught to expect high affluence, to the mercy of the world. Mrs. Rayland, whose pride was gratified in having about her the victim of unsuccessful trade, for which she had always a most profound contempt, received Mrs. Lennard as her own servant. She was however so much superior to her mistress in understanding, that she soon governed her entirely and while the mean pliability of her spirit made her submit to all the contemptuous and unworthy treatment, which the paltry pride of Mrs. Rayland had pleasure in inflicting, she secretly triumphed in the consciousness of superior abilities, and knew that she was in fact the mistress of the supercilious being whose wages she received.36

Recalling the description of the Rayland family history, this passage draws attention to the twists and turns of the contracts there invoked and rejected. Lennard’s upbringing mirrors Mrs. Rayland’s in that both present the complicated difficulties of a family made up only of daughters who expect ‘‘high affluence.’’ The Lennard family’s losses in the South Sea Bubble are a tidy reminder of the weak contractual arrangements that make up the field of social relations and that remain the products of false expectations and paper bargains. Yet part of the point of this paragraph, and indeed of the encounters with trade littered throughout a novel devoted mainly to the gentry, is that contracts like those of the South Sea Bubble are real, in spite of their ostensibly illusory appearance to the empirical mind and their social impropriety to the aristocratic one. While a promissory note or paper bill seems in a literal sense to be utterly worthless, as opposed to the self-evident worth of property, it is precisely by such promissory arrangements that property moves within the economy and thus sustains it. The irony is that

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Mrs. Rayland’s aristocratic pretensions are enveloped by the trade she despises and precisely the responsibilities she avoided by rejecting marriage. Lennard is a ‘‘servant’’ and a ‘‘companion.’’ Mrs. Rayland pays her wages and inflicts her with constant reminders of her fallen position in the world, but Lennard is in matters of practical superiority ‘‘the mistress’’ of the ‘‘being’’ who owns the house. From this environment, Orlando and Monimia emerge as paragons of a new golden age of rebellion and youth, of virtue and truth. However, behind the characterizations of Orlando and Monimia, as Fletcher notes, are two of Smith’s favorite works, Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Otway’s The Orphan. Named after one of the heroic Rayland ancestors as well as after Shakespeare’s disillusioned young rebel, Orlando himself embodies the necessity of the institutional background of social action as much as he does its revolutionary counterpart. As critics have claimed, Monimia cannot lie, and thus appears as a fitting representation of the hopes of the new age of truth. But though illegitimate (from a certain perspective) she is intimated to have been born out of mixture of nobility, clergy, and law. She is a child of the institutions her very virtue is held symbolically to undermine. She is also, like her namesake in Otway, the ultimate victim of the consecration of legal fiction. Indeed even her name is precariously arbitrary. Mrs. Rayland finds it disagreeably fanciful and insists on calling her Mary. What I am suggesting is that Smith’s inscription of the contract into her novel serves to point out the epistemological tension within it, a tension that is at the cornerstone of the Common Sense theory of contractual efficacy and the heart of the legal problems of obligation and succession. It is precisely through the elision of the contract proper and the entrenchment of supposedly universal ideals held up by referential symbols and exemplars that the social contract functions. And yet, it is by being contractual in the first place that such symbolism enmeshes the English citizenry into forms of duty and obligation. The ‘‘trifling incident’’ that sets off this more developed investigation into the contract occurs in the second chapter. Mrs. Rayland, Mrs. Lennard, and Monimia are walking together through the family gallery, admiring, at least on Mrs. Rayland’s part, the portraits of her ancestors, while ‘‘Lennard . . . affected to listen with interest to stories which she had heard repeated for near forty years.’’37 Suddenly a ‘‘violent bounce towards the middle of the gallery’’ interrupts the ritual. When Mrs. Rayland and Mrs. Lennard ask Monimia what has happened, she says she does not know, while trying ‘‘in a sort of scuffle to conceal something with her feet.’’ Mrs. Lennard distracts Mrs. Rayland by suggest-

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ing that it might be a branch or a loose stone, recalling stories of the Rayland ghosts who haunt the gallery to protect their wealth and honor. Pleased with this account, Mrs. Rayland forgets the incident. Mrs. Lennard, however, discovers Monimia trembling beneath a portrait of ‘‘Sir Hildebrand . . . in armour, and on a white horse whose flanks were overshadowed by his stupendous wig, pranced over the great gilt chimney piece, just as he appeared at the head of a county association in 1707.’’38 Monimia, who cannot lie, tells Mrs. Lennard that Orlando ‘‘had thrown up his ball ‘only in play’ to make her jump.’’ Mrs. Lennard berates the girl for concealing ‘‘the truth’’ and gives her a ‘‘violent blow, or what was in her language a good box on the ear, which forcing her head against the stone window frame almost stunned her.’’39 As Monimia sobs on the floor, Orlando comforts her. He is too passionate, however, not to become immediately angry at the old woman: ‘‘Orlando, whose temper was naturally warm, and whose generous spirit revolted from every kind of injustice, felt at once his indignation excited by this act of oppression, and his anger that Mrs. Lennard should arraign him for a childish frolic, and thence take occasion so unworthily to treat an innocent girl; and being too rash to reflect on consequences, he declared that he would go instantly into the parlour, confess to Mrs. Rayland what he had done, and appeal against the tyranny and cruelty of her woman.’’40 The language of this last passage, ‘‘spirit,’’ ‘‘revolted,’’ ‘‘injustice,’’ ‘‘tyranny,’’ ‘‘cruelty,’’ obviously intimates that Smith has something like a Revolutionary allegory in mind. There is also, however, something of an attempt at self-justification here, a show of indignation and confession after the fact, which parallels, in an ironic way, Orlando’s game with Monimia’s concealing the ball, Mrs. Rayland’s self-righteous admiration for her pretentious ancestors, and Mrs. Lennard’s conniving pander to Mrs. Rayland and equally self-righteous berating of her ward. The scene consciously equalizes these otherwise different acts as all part of a general process of justification, all of which refer to an act that Monimia quite rightly says was committed ‘‘only in play.’’ Truth, that is, is spun in a web of verbal acts. And these are finally sewn together as Orlando makes Monimia promise to let him see her, against her otherwise better judgment, and to keep their meetings a secret. She agrees, but only to get him finally to leave: ‘‘Monimia, whose apprehensions every moment increased, and who even fancied she heard the rustle of Mrs. Lennard’s gown upon the private stair-case that led down from the gallery, was ready to promise anything—‘‘Oh! Yes, yes, Or-

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lando!—I promise—do but go now, and we shall not perhaps be so unhappy.’’41 Smith makes the key to her novel not revolution, but contract. Indeed this scene is paradigmatic both of the action and the sensibility of the novel’s incidents. Things happen, agreements are made, acts are performed, but always in the context of rationalizing and explaining what is also, in an almost masochistic way, an arrant and in most cases oppressive fantasy. When Orlando is faced with the prospect of fighting a duel with Sir John Belgrave, who has affronted and insulted Monimia, and whom Orlando has in turn treated disrespectfully, his family and their friends, notably the lascivious and pompous General Tracy, intercede with a series of letters and agreements that preserve the ‘‘honour’’ of both parties while preventing the duel from ever taking place. This is not to say that Smith defends the practice of dueling. The promises and pretensions of honor in the letters concerning the duel are presented as a kind of verbal dueling in themselves. The romantic challenge between Orlando and Sir John Beville is counterpoised to ‘‘the indefatigable clack’’ of the Raylands’ maid Betty, who will go on to prostitute herself to Orlando’s profligate brother Philip. General Tracy’s intercession on behalf of Orlando represents, we are told, an ‘‘opportunity . . . by which he might confer an obligation on the family, which must secure their endless gratitude.’’42 And the terms of the intercession, that Belgrave’s ‘‘honour will suffer nothing by dropping’’ the matter,43 itself suggests the extent of what Smith clearly regarded as the ludicrousness of gentlemanly sport. The point is, however, that the choice between dueling or not dueling is not a choice. Even Orlando’s facing the decision not to duel, regardless of the ‘‘truth’’ of the matter at hand, is regarded as a point of obligation and duty: ‘‘To suffer his father to say to Sir John Belgrave that he was sorry for what had passed, seemed to him to be even more humiliating than to say it himself—he could not bear to owe his safety to his father’s fears; yet it gave him infinite pain to disobey him . . . and the apprehensions of what his mother would feel were still more distressing to him; yet his high spirit could not stoop to apologize for what he knew was wrong, nor to say he was concerned for having acted as he should certainly act again were the same occasion to arise.’’44 Challenging, apologizing, obliging are thus established in the novel as the verbal instruments of the honor system it sets out to expose. But, as in the case of the Common Sense critique of Hume, once it is exposed as utterly conventional, the question remains as to how the system is

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supposed to sustain itself by any other than such fictional and in many cases ludicrous means. In another incident, Orlando exposes what he and Monimia believe to be a ghost haunting the family chapel to be a smuggling operation contrived by the Rayland butler, Patterson, and a local outlaw named Jonas Wilkins. In the way that the scene undermines the lovers’ youthful fantasies, The Old Manor House can be said to join the ranks of the emerging antigothic trend of the 1790s, including, for instance, Austen’s Northanger Abbey, first written in 1795 and owing a considerable debt to Smith.45 But the scene is more complex than that. In the first place, what is revealed to be behind the noises in the chapel is a crime: this is not some honest trade union working against the corruption of an autocracy, but a gang of servants and ruffians taking advantage of the blind arrogance of a stupid old lady. On the other hand, there is a hardiness in the smugglers that even Orlando must admire as opposed to the refined ludicrousness of the hunting, dueling, and dancing of his own class: ‘‘Orlando found, that during the whole winter, in weather when no vessel kept the sea, these adventurous men pursued their voyages, and carried their cargoes through the country, in weather when ‘one’s enemy’s dog’ would hardly be turned from the door.’’46 The novel is, in short, ambivalent in its attitude toward trade and the extent of its importance in the emerging middle-class economy. Jenkins is portrayed as a ruffian and a scoundrel; ‘‘[h]is dark countenance shaded by two immense black eyebrows, his shaggy hair, and the fierce wild expression of his eyes, have a complete idea of one of Shakespeare’s well-painted assassins’’.47 But Orlando must nevertheless engage him to warn himself of their activities by a signal, if only to ensure that he can keep Monimia from further view. When it is suggested to General Tracy that he wear a wig to prevent the wind from blowing out his coiffure, he declares: Aa military man in a wig!—like a turtle-eating cit, or a Stock Exchange broker!—Impossible!’’48 Though the pretentious general is clearly the butt of Smith’s humour here, Orlando himself takes much the same attitude when it is suggested to him that he might enter trade as a wine merchant with his mother’s relations, the Woodfords. And at the end of the novel, when Orlando returns to his family in London from his adventures in America, Woodford is presented as an obsequious and ambitious toady: ‘‘The great man . . . was no longer a wine merchant in the Strand soliciting the custom of the great, but their pompous entertainer, who was enabled by the advantages of a great contract obtained by the favour (and perhaps by yielding to the participation) of one of them, to vie in splendour with his

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patrons . . . the bustle to receive so eminent a personage, with what Woodford thought politeness, . . . appeared to Orlando the most cringing servility he had ever witnessed.’’49 The apparent participation of the noble lord here suggests that what is at stake here is the possibility that the classes will have to intermingle, a threat that Smith’s opening descriptions of Mrs. Rayland and Mrs. Lennard have already intimated. Orlando’s journey to and return from America, while they contain some of Smith’s most evocative natural landscapes, present a nature with which her characters have little or nothing to do. Orlando’s tour of duty is punctuated not so much by battle, as by betrayal and revenge, and he witnesses as much slaughtering of settlers as he does military skirmishes. Having survived an attack on the British troop by their own native guides, whom they had treated poorly, Orlando spends the winter with the Iroquois, learns their language and takes on their dress, manner, and custom, shaved head and all, to the point that he is unrecognized by his family when he returns. During that time, however, his thoughts remain fixated on home and Monimia, and his relations with the Iroquois consist for the most part of ritual bonding and, more frequently, finance and trade. Part of what makes this long episode interesting is the persistence in Orlando of his cultural and imperial difference from the American natives even as he is immersed in their life and culture. Indeed, this is a perceptive view of the bizarre logic of imperial duty. It is as if Orlando’s experience consisted wholly of social acts, but ones in which their ghostliness was always apparent—and indeed, when he returns to England he is repeatedly mistaken for his own spirit. When Orlando finally gets to the Hall, Smith brings together the early episode with the ball with the vague fictional ghostliness of the entire novel: He proceeded along the passage, which was quite dark—and, hardly knowing to what purpose, went through the great hall, and up the principal staircase—He entered the long north gallery, where, in the April days of their juvenile affection, he had nearly betrayed his innocent partiality for Monimia, by throwing the cricket-ball against the window—Hideous spectres seemed to beckon to him from the other end of it, and to menace him from the walls; though he knew that they were the portraits of his family in their black doublets, their armour, or their flowing night-gowns.50

The intermingling of trade and gentry, of the fiction of aristocratic consideration and the social acts of contractual exchange suggest the extent to which bourgeois economic interest lies at the heart of the

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ghostly Burkean constitution. The entanglement of the running of the estate and a smuggling ring, and the participation of the nobility in the trade of their ‘‘satellites’’ obviates how much the old standards and customs, more than revealed as conventional, rely on the sphere of trust and trade—the sphere, that is, of common sense—for the very privileged position in society by which those same gentlemen can claim personal independence. If ‘‘great men’’ live by ‘‘great contracts,’’ what must be preserved at all costs is the illusion that these contracts do not exist. Honor is the repudiation of the social practices that in fact sustain its symbolic viability. Wealth must be regarded as the preserve of the social interest, of what is genuinely rare and beautiful in society, and not as the mundane product of exchange and information. What is priceless, home, love, honor, duty, must never have a price, though to the extent that those very elements of life are part of a social sphere of interaction they must participate in the commercial and legal fictions that sustain them. Not even Orlando, Smith cannily suggests, is exempt from such prejudices: ‘‘Hitherto Monimia had seemed a beautiful and unique gem, of which none but himself had discovered the concealment, or knew the value. He had visited it with fonder idolatry, from alone possessing the knowledge where it was hid. But now half his happiness seemed to be destroyed, since his treasure was discovered.’’51

4 By way of conclusion, I would like to bring Smith’s approach to the epistemology of the contract to bear on the question of gender in her novels and, by extension, to the feminist literature of the 1790s more generally. Behind most of the incidents in the novel is the question of the nature of marriage. The 1753 Hardwicke Act on the legalization of marriage by bans was instituted at a time when marriages were performed across the country through various forms of traditional rituals, not all of which were recognized either by state or official church. The immediate reason for the act was an alarming number of elopements, inspired by the vogue for sentimental love. The Hardwicke Act proposed that only a marriage that had been published three times, and at least three weeks in advance with the full knowledge of the parties’ parents, would be considered legal. Marriage itself consists in the freely given promise to have and to hold at the center of the Anglican ceremony, only now the traditions

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associated with that ceremony had become law. As Smith’s critics and biographers have shown, most if not all of her novels and poems can be read as responses to her own doomed marriage to the philandering gambler, Benjamin Smith, a marriage that had been arranged when she was fifteen, and for which she suffered through thirteen pregnancies, three infant deaths, seven months in debtors prison and a lifetime of legal entanglements, not to mention the writing career by which she supported her family, including her wayward husband. It is no doubt the case that, like many women novelists of her time, Smith drew attention to the difficulties women suffered in and for marriage to charge the official institution with obvious inequities. And yet, there is always a sense in The Old Manor House, that the obligations of marriage, like the social contract, are inevitable. Specific acts of marital union may be rejected, as in Mrs. Rayland’s case, contrived, as in Mrs. Lennard’s, or appear as a form of protest against the social order, as in the Somerive’s, Isabella and Warwick’s, and Orlando and Monimia’s, but the necessity of a legal form for love cannot be denied. That is, they all must marry precisely to maintain the codes of the legal fiction of the sanctioned form of love and affection. Certainly Smith was aware that marriage seldom lived up to the standards of such ideals, even if they were the law of the land. Warwick’s hopeful generosity and impetuous benevolence, Philip Somerive’s philandering, and Betty’s self-prostitution, the Woodford children’s pretentious allegiances to the landed but poor aristocracy, likened in the novel very much to Woodford’s own decision to become an MP, cast an importantly ironical shade over Orlando’s and Monimia’s sentimental affection, and exposing the darker implications of Orlando’s almost violent protectiveness of his wife. One way to consider this seemingly Kafkaesque situation is to realize the extent to which The Old Manor House is a philosophical enquiry into the nature of ‘‘home.’’ This chapter began with the transformation in British law from decision by consideration, social customs like entailments and primogeniture, to decision by legal contract and other modes of stated trust or social action. But the epistemological concern for the formal grounds of these contracts, including Smith’s novel, suggests that this transformation reveals an important continuation, that is, the realization that the sense of obligation necessary to legitimate contracts is based on the recognition of conventional modes of behavior, such as, the sanctity of marriage or the permanence of writing. The novel’s so-called conventional ending—Orlando inherits Rayland House and he and Monimia become the benevolent lords of the manor—is exactly that: the return to a state of grace of a peculiarly

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symbolic form of legal right, entailment, in spite of the constant sense throughout the novel of the ludicrousness at its heart. To be sure, there is no suggestion that Orlando and Monimia will return the estate to the hollow grandeur characteristic of Mrs. Rayland’s time, her parades of aristocratic privilege at the annual servants’ ball being only one example of such obviously revolutionary recollections, as Fletcher notes. But that the novel ends with the happy marriages of all involved, the birth of Orlando’s son ‘‘to whom he gave his own name,’’ and the bequest of a tenantry to one of Orlando’s old troops, the most fervent of those ‘‘who felt the sunshine of prosperity, and prayed for its continuance’’ on the return of the native son, suggests as well an almost cynical sense that though everything has changed, nothing has. The structure of society remains tied to figures of obligation and, to a great extent, servitudes that, in spite of the revolution, are very real indeed. So while the house may represent the decaying institutions of privilege and right that characterized Blackstone’s consideration and Burke’s constitution, so it comes also to represent the preservation of such legal fictions in the midst of progressive change. In this way, The Old Manor House is not a Revolutionary novel at all. It is rather a forerunner of the condition of England novel, which would dominate Victorian fiction a generation or so later. Certainly the legal wrangling and frustration with the law of estates that dominates the action of the latter volume of the novel anticipates the stale atmosphere of Chancery that Dickens depicts in Bleak House. The fact is that the novel takes part in all of these generic traditions: the novel of ideas, the Revolutionary allegory, the Gothic, and the condition of England novel. This inconsistency is one of its most frequently noted critical flaws. But while The Old Manor House plods its way through plot lines and generic conventions, as much as the estate galumphs through the courts, so it intimates the extent to which such rhetorical and technological forms condition social life. Desmond portrays with ironic disparagement the consequences of individual resistance to the farcical conformity of civil society and the principles of family and obligation on which it rests, as is apparent at its conclusion, it also acknowledges that such resistance is compromised by the need for human property, a cynical if clear-minded statement on marriage. The Old Manor House depicts that resistance as itself the outgrowth of an emerging form of bourgeois social organization, which already anticipates the function of the resistant individual within it and thus renders the revolutionary conflict of obligation and freedom a naı¨ve illusion. The larger implication of this is the way The Old Manor House foils our

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own desire for the fiction of the Revolutionary period to embody our liberal inclinations. To say that writers of the 1790s, and particularly women writers, were influenced by the French Revolution is to argue a truism. Just as Edmund Burke disparaged the political upheavals in Paris in terms of sexual violence and praised the British constitution for its domestic harmony, so feminist writers, conservative and radical alike, framed questions of sexual difference, responsibility and oppression in the political terms of liberty, equality, duty, and revolution. Plotting this analogy, however, and acknowledging the twists and turns that the Revolution itself took, has obviated what appear to be the paradoxes of the literary and political fields of the 1790s. How can one support universal liberty and condone the violence in the Paris streets? How can one support women’s right to education and claim that they have specific domestic duties to perform? One of more telling images in the novel is the portrait of the aging woman writer, a ‘‘modern Centlivre’’ whom Orlando meets in London: He was introduced to a little, ill-made woman, with a pale complexion, pitted with the small-pox; two defects which her attachment to literature did not prevent her from taking all possible pains to conceal . . . Though no longer young, she believed herself still an object of affection and admiration; and that the beauties of her mind were irresistible to all men of taste—They were indeed of a singular cast; but as there are collectors of grotesque drawings, and books, no otherwise valuable because they are old; so there were minds who contemplated hers with some degree of admiration.52

It is tempting to regard the women writers of the 1790s as paragons of republicanism, but they, like Smith had to make a living. And while this is clearly not a self-portrait, there is in the image something of a self-defacement of the still patronized business of writing itself. Most, if not all, of the principles at stake in the Revolution debates, from the nature of human freedom and subjectivity, to our knowledge of objects and other people, to the foundations of social and economic action, to the significance of art, are already apparent in the intellectual traditions of British empiricism. This tradition points to the broader epistemological questions underlying the political ambitions and contests at issue in the 1790s, including the rights of women. The intersecting discourses of the Romantic period are not an indeterminate site of harangue. They are in themselves the product of the twisted logic of contract. Thus, while many feminist writers of the 1790s were critical of British empiricism and social thought, especially as it affected ques-

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tions of sexuality and gender, this should not in itself preclude our recognition of the significant epistemological insights apparent in their criticisms and, to a large extent, in their agreements with that philosophical tradition.

NOTES 1. For discussions of these two works in their political contexts, see Diana Bowstead, ‘‘Charlotte Smith’s Desmond: The Epistolary Novel as Ideological Argument,’’ in Fetter’d or Free?British Women Novelists 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986); Alison Conway, ‘‘Nationalism, Revolution and the Female Body: Charlotte Smith’s Desmond,’’ Women’s Studies 24 (1995): 395–409; Loraine Fletcher, Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography (London: Macmillan, 1998); Gary Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Eleanor Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). 2. Fletcher for instance argues that the novel ‘‘resists simplification into allegory,’’ but stresses its ‘‘dramatisation of a historic moment, when England suddenly seemed accessible to change and new ownership’’ (Fletcher, Smith: A Critical Biography, 168). 3. Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House (London: Pandora, 1987), 404. 4. My account of the law of landownership is drawn from H. J. Habakkuk, ‘‘English Landownership 1680–1740,’’ Economic History Review 10 (1940): 2–17; Lloyd Bonfield, ‘‘Marriage Settlements and the ‘Rise of Great Estates’: The Demographic Aspect,’’ Economic History Review 32 (ns 1979): 483–93; William L. Miller, ‘‘Primogeniture, Entails, and Endowments in English Classical Economics,’’ History of Political Economy 12 (1980): 558n81. 5. Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 384. 6. The case is Pillans v. Van Mierop. 3 Burr. 1663, 97 ER 1035 (KB); see Mark Schoenfield, The Professional Wordsworth: Law, Labour and the Poet’s Contract (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 33–35 and especially Schoenfield, The Professional Wordsworth, 279–80n8. Pillans, a Dutch trader, had contracted a bill of exchange for £800 with White, an Irish merchant, who then negotiated with Van Mierop, a London banker, for a draft on the bill. When White went backrupt, Van Mierop insisted that Pillans not claim payment. Pillans went ahead with the claim and when was denied by the banker, Pillans sued. The original trial found in favor of Van Mierop on the grounds that a bill was exempt if funds were insufficient, under the rule of consideration. On appeal, however, Marshall argued that the bill was legally binding because it had been made in writing. The contract had been freely made and signed by both parties. For a summary of the transition from feudal to bourgeois practices in contract law, see Jay M. Feinman and Peter Gabel, ‘‘Contract Law as Ideology,’’ in The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique, 2nd ed., ed. David Kairys (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 375–79. 7. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 489. 8. Ibid., 522.

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9. Ibid., 490. 10. Ibid., 515. 11. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 202. 12. David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1986), 479. 13. Ibid., 480. 14. Ibid., 481. 15. Ibid., 482. 16. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, ed. Baruch Brady (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 437–38. 17. Ibid., 443. 18. Ibid., 445. 19. Much of the material on contracts is concentrated in a fairly complete set of lecture notes on ‘‘Private Jurisprudence’’ included as chapter 5 of Haakonssen’s edition of these lectures, titled Practical Ethics. These are the most consistently dated of the manuscripts: March 1 to April 1, 1765. Other notes are dated 1770–71. A significant early draft of the essay on contracts appears on the verso side of some of these lecture notes. 20. Thomas Reid, Practical Ethics: Being Lectures and Papers on Natural Religion, SelfGovernment, Natural Jurisprudence, and the Law of Nations, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 146. 21. Ibid., 155. 22. Ibid., 146. 23. Ibid., 142. 24. David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt Against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 55–59. 25. Steven Blakemore, ‘‘Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event,’’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1984): 285. 26. Edmund Burke, ‘‘Reflections on the Revolution in France,’’ in The French Revolution 1790–1794, vol. 8 of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 9 vols., ed. L. G. Mitchell and William B. Todd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 146. 27. Ibid., 147. 28. Richard Price, A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, ed. D. D. Raphael (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 156. 29. Ibid. 30. Ian Balfour, ‘‘Promises, Promises: Social and Other Contracts in the English Jacobins (Godwin/ Inchbald),’’ in New Romanticisms: Theory and Criticism, ed. David L. Clark and Donald C. Goellnicht (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 233–34. 31. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1987), 46. 32. Charlotte Smith, Desmond, ed. Antje Blank and Janet Todd (London: Pickering, 1997), 156. 33. Ibid., 156–57. 34. Ibid., 177–78. 35. Charlotte Smith, Old Manor House, 3. 36. Ibid., 10. 37. Ibid., 15. 38. Ibid., 16.

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39. Ibid., 17. 40. Ibid., 18. 41. Ibid., 19. 42. Ibid., 118. 43. Ibid., 119. 44. Ibid., 105. 45. Austen was one of Smith’s earlier admirers, writing what can only be called ‘‘fan’’ letters in the 1780s when she was a teenager. Austen did not appreciate, however, the revolutionary polemics of Desmond, however. 46. Charlotte Smith, Old Manor House, 127. 47. Ibid., 126. 48. Ibid., 138. 49. Ibid., 410. 50. Ibid., 388. 51. Ibid., 88. 52. Ibid., 492.

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Indigestion and Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought Gavin Budge

THE EMPIRICIST SOURCES OF COLERIDGE’S MEDICAL IMAGINATION

THE ENIGMATIC ENTRY IN ONE OF COLERIDGE’S NOTEBOOKS, ‘‘BODY & soul, an utterly absolute Mawwallop,’’1 represents an unlikely, but revealing, point of entry into Coleridge’s theory of imagination. The word is not in the Oxford English Dictionary, but Partridge, in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, gives the meaning of ‘‘maw-wallop’’ as ‘‘a filthy dish of food.’’ This may not seem very enlightening, but judging from a sense of ‘‘wallop’’ that is in the Oxford English Dictionary (2. 3. ‘‘To boil violently and with a noisy bubbling’’), the slang term would seem to refer to the likely effects of consuming such a meal. In the following essay, I would like to suggest that the very crudity of this reference to indigestion (a subject, of course, with which Coleridge was intimately familiar) illustrates the remarkable degree to which the Coleridgean theory of the imagination is embedded in empiricist philosophical and scientific debates of early nineteenth-century Britain. In particular, I will highlight the very significant role played by Tom Wedgwood in the formulation of Coleridge’s ideas about the imagination. In a recent article, Alan Barnes has demonstrated the important role that philosophical discussions with Tom Wedgwood played in the development of Coleridge’s thought. In particular, Barnes has shown, using unpublished material from the Wedgwood Accumulation, that Coleridge’s well-known philosophical letters to Josiah Wedgwood, whose references to the concepts of time and space have often been claimed by critics as evidence for Kantian influence on Coleridge by 1801 and that have a close relationship to the drafting of the ‘‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,’’2 must be interpreted as responses to Tom Wedgwood’s speculations about temporality and spatiality as psychological 141

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categories.3 As is suggested by the existence of a letter, dated 1790, from Tom Wedgwood to the Scottish Common Sense philosopher Thomas Reid on the philosophical and psychological significance of touch4 (also a subject in which Coleridge took an interest)5 the ideas of Wedgwood to which Coleridge acknowledged his indebtedness were formulated within the context of the British empiricist tradition in which Wedgwood would have been thoroughly grounded by his tutor, Erasmus Darwin. Tom Wedgwood thus represents an important link connecting Coleridgean thought to a native British philosophical context, although unfortunately, owing to Wedgwood’s early death, the only connected form in which his philosophical ideas have come down to us is an article published much later, which was probably assembled by members of the Wedgwood family.6 Although the importance of Wedgwood to Coleridge has previously been noted, few critics apart from Barnes have attempted to explain why Coleridge attached such significance to Wedgwood’s ideas. The present essay suggests that Wedgwood’s significance for Coleridge lay in his formulation, in the wake of the associationist models of Erasmus Darwin and David Hartley, of a vitalist account of the mind’s activity in perception as a process of quasi-organic assimilation of sense-data. Wedgwood, I will argue, furnished Coleridge with the biological model which, as Levere has noted, he consistently applied to the imagination in his writings after 1800.7 Wedgwood effectively invented the ‘‘medical imagination’’ that Jennifer Ford has found in Coleridge,8 in that he applied to the mind and its perceptions ideas about the fundamental role of digestion in organic processes, which were current in vitalist medical theory of the period.

INDIGESTION AND THE MIND The link between Coleridge’s preoccupation with indigestion and what at its most general is called by philosophers ‘‘the mind/body problem’’ is illustrated by a notebook entry which occurs shortly after the one I have already cited:‘‘Metaphysics make all one’s thoughts equally corrosive on the Body by the habit of making momently & common thought the subjects of uncommon interest and intellectual energy.’’9 Coleridge is here elaborating on the rather enigmatic connection between mind, body and ‘‘mawwallop’’ previously noted. Intense thought, he suggests, has deleterious consequences on the body, one of which would presumably be indigestion. The problem with metaphysics is that

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it provokes intense thought continually, by encouraging the mind to scrutinize its own motions even in those moments when it would otherwise have relaxed its attention. The wear of mental activity upon the body is thus rendered nonstop. Neil Vickers has given an account of the personal concerns that lie behind this notebook entry. Many of Coleridge’s friends blamed his rapid decline in health in the early 1800s on his ‘‘abstruse researches,’’10 which, as Vickers shows, involved exactly the kind of scrutiny of his own mental processes that in this entry he finds detrimental to health.11 This unrelenting attention to the workings of his own mind formed part of an investigation into the nature of perception prompted by Tom Wedgwood, whose ideas after his death eventually found a published form in 1817 as ‘‘An Enquiry into the Origin of our Notion of Distance.’’12 I shall be returning to Wedgwood’s ‘‘Enquiry’’ at a later stage of this essay. For the moment, though, I would simply like to point out that the assumption that intense mental activity harms the body was not confined to Coleridge and his circle, but was widespread also in medical discourse in the period. Dorothy Wordsworth’s anxieties about the effect of poetic composition on her brother William’s health,13 and Byron’s assertion that ‘‘The soul wears out the breast,’’14 find echoes in many books of the period, albeit in a more specialized medical register. Alexander Crichton’s 1798 Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement, for instance, discusses the harmful physical effects of intense thought at some length: In every action of the mental faculties, the action of the arteries of the brain is increased, and a great quantity of blood than usual is immediately transmitted to it; a kind of sanguinous congestion takes place in the vessels of the whole head, as is evident from the sense of fullness, giddiness, head-ach, a redness of the face and eyes, which are often felt upon any unusual exertion of mind by those who are not naturally strong, or who are weakened by indisposition; the irritability of the blood-vessels of the brain, therefore, are preternaturally stimulated, in the first place, by this increased quantity of blood, and a state of indirect debility of the brain follows . . . As all irritable parts also become more disposed to action by repetition, and as action necessarily exhausts a great deal of the vital principle, we see the reason why all exertions of the mental faculties, when too long continued, or too violent, produce fatigue, and debilitate the corporeal part of the animal. The bad effects of this corporeal affection are often exhibited in a very powerful manner on many of the viscera essential to the healthy state of our

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frame . . . the excretions are retained longer than they ought to be, and, like useless and foreign bodies, they irritate, and cause disorder in the parts in which they are contained . . . the organs of digestion are impaired, and digestion and chylification are injured; hence a sense of languour, anxiety, dejection of mind, peevishness, spasmodic affections, and all the consequences of a debilitated fibre, and disordered state of nerves ensue.15

Coleridge’s notebook entries, then, reflect commonly held medical views of the period in linking mental states with digestive processes. As Crichton’s description makes clear, in this diagnosis the common medical factor in abnormal mental and digestive conditions is seen as the circulation of the blood: intense mental activity increases the circulation of blood to the brain at the expense of the digestive organs, leading to indigestion, constipation, and, significantly in view of Coleridge’s poetry, ‘‘dejection of mind.’’ In his notebook, Coleridge seems to be drawing on this account to explain his own complicated mental and physical malaise, one symptom of which was precisely the problems with constipation to which Crichton refers. There is, however, a greater significance to the link between mind and digestion than Coleridge’s preoccupation with the state of his own bowels. Crichton’s reference to the exhaustion of the ‘‘vital principle’’ by too long continued mental activity places his outline of this mentaldigestive syndrome within the context of the Vitalist school of medical thought, which was to dominate the British medical establishment throughout much of the first half of the nineteenth century. Most critical writing on Vitalism concentrates on the ‘‘Vitalist controversy’’ between John Abernethy and William Lawrence in the 1810s,16 to which Coleridge himself contributed in the form of the ‘‘Theory of Life’’ that he (at least ostensibly) coauthored with Gillman, but, as Crichton’s reference shows, vitalist medical theories were already current in the 1790s,17 having their origin in the comparative anatomical studies of John Hunter (of whose work Abernethy’s lectures professed to be no more than an explication).18 An analysis of the process of digestion played a particularly important role in justifying the claim of Hunter and his followers that what distinguished living organisms from dead or inorganic matter was a mysterious ‘‘principle of vitality.’’19 Hunter had shown that food in the stomachs of dead animals remained undigested; he had also shown that the powerful acids in the stomach did not attack the living tissue by which they were enclosed.20 Digestion, therefore, could not be explained in terms of a purely chemical process; living matter, it seemed,

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possessed a power to suspend or initiate material processes that contradicted physical determinism.21 In this intellectual context, the phenomenon of indigestion on which we have seen Coleridge and Crichton comment acquired peculiar significance. Varieties of indigestion other than those that arose from simple physical causes demonstrated graphically not only the influence of the mind over the body,22 but even its quasi-independence,23 since stimulation of the mind could be seen to have effects that ran directly contrary to the body’s physical functioning. Indigestion indicated a fundamentally dualistic relationship between mind and body,24 which would invalidate the kind of materialist associationism represented by Priestley’s interpretation of Hartley. This medically based dualism was widely interpreted in the early nineteenth century as practical evidence for the epistemological dualism propounded by philosophers in the Common Sense tradition.25

NATURALISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH THOUGHT Crichton’s remarks about the relationship between constipation and an overstimulated state of the brain caused by intense mental activity occur in the context of a discussion of the causes of hallucination and delirium, and, as we shall see, the connection between digestive and mental disorder in early nineteenth-century medical discourse influenced a popular tradition of writings about the supernatural, a tradition that has been surveyed in Terry Castle’s study The Female Thermometer.26 It is all too easy from a modern perspective to interpret this kind of medical account of the supernatural as ‘‘materialist,’’ in the reductive sense in which any spiritual dimension to human experience becomes an epiphenomenon of the material conditions of living. As George Rousseau has emphasized in a recent article,27 however, ideas about an immaterial soul played an important part in medical discourse of the period, and in the context of the claim of vitalist thinkers that living matter was not subject to the same laws of physical determinism as dead matter, a claim pressed into service by theologians such as Butler as evidence for the immortality of the soul,28 the relationship between indigestion and the seeing of apparitions was often interpreted by nineteenth-century thinkers in terms that are exactly the opposite of materialist reductionism. Indigestion is not regarded as a direct physical cause for the seeing of apparitions, but rather as correlating with that

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power of the mind over physical processes, which was also manifested in the field of sense-perception by the seeing of apparitions. From this immaterialist point of view, indigestion and apparitions were two manifestations of the same cause, which was mind itself, rather than the relationship between the two, as in the reductionist view, implying the redundancy of the category of mind in scientific explanation. This nineteenth-century belief in the power of the mind over the body is graphically illustrated by the way in which, in Charles Kingsley’s novel Two Years Ago, the excitement caused by hellfire preaching is held responsible for infection by cholera, from which the calm and resolute commitment to prayer of one of the protagonists is shown to be sufficient to protect him.29 From this immaterialist position, the link between indigestion and apparitions becomes evidence for the mind’s capacity to transcend the material world. It is for this reason, for example, that references to apparitions, or ‘‘specters’’ (with an accompanying emphasis on the disruption of food supplies) occupy such a prominent place in Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution,30 since Carlyle’s whole emphasis as a historian is on the way a social phenomenon such as the French Revolution defies cause-and-effect forms of explanation.31 The significance of indigestion within Carlyle’s philosophically immaterialist position helps to explain the frequency of his references to digestive disorders, which has often been noted by critics.32 The deployment of the concept of ‘‘spectrality’’ in recent deconstructive criticism has taken up the nineteenth-century emphasis represented by Carlyle and other writers on the way human experience exceeds reductionist forms of explanation, though within the deconstructive theoretical context the concept of transcendence tends to be placed sous rature (i.e. is both invoked and negated).33 In this chapter, I want to suggest that Coleridge’s engagement with the relationship between specters and indigestion, some aspects of which have already been studied by Jennifer Ford in relation to nightmares,34 simultaneously reflects this immaterialist tradition and critiques it, in a way that makes his relationship with the Berkeleyan philosophical position of the Common Sense School, represented by his contemporaries Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown, a highly ambivalent one. Like them, Coleridge is opposed to the radical materialism of thinkers such as Erasmus Darwin35 and Horne Tooke,36 and emphasizes the way in which mind transcends the materiality of sense-perception through its capacity for intuition.37 But whereas Stewart and Brown think that the radical duality of mind and matter is best conveyed

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through the demetaphorization of language into a set of abstract intellectual counters,38 Coleridge, on the contrary, emphasizes the value of startlingly vivid metaphor in drawing attention to that disparity between mind and matter that is only to be bridged by an act of intuition. Both Coleridge and these early nineteenth-century members of the Common Sense School agree in their epistemologically dualistic view that mind and matter are essentially different substances, but disagree profoundly over the issue of how this epistemological dualism is to be linguistically conveyed, given that language itself is derived from material metaphors. It is significant in this context that both Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown were part of the circle responsible for producing Coleridge’s beˆte noire, the Edinburgh Review.39 The political radicalism of Stewart’s early career was accompanied by an elogy on the politically progressive effects of the spread of printing,40 which, taken in the context of Stewart’s marked hostility to metaphor in philosophical writing,41 suggests that Stewart regarded the press generally, and the periodical press in particular, as the agent of a radical politics of demetaphorization through the necessary detachment of written language from any material context that is involved in its mass circulation—a position that, in the 1790s, would have represented a critique of the oft-noted metaphorical quality of Burke’s political writings, and that reflects philosophical themes in Hume’s writings.42 The connection Coleridge made between political radicalism and the rootless and disconnected form of writing to be found in periodicals, in which language had been ‘‘mechanized into a barrel-organ,’’43 implies that he regarded the founding of the Edinburgh Review as a continuation of this kind of radical political project. In such an intellectual context, the importance for Coleridge of medical theories that linked indigestion and the seeing of specters would have consisted in the way they anchored deeply significant mental experiences back into the material context from which Stewart’s radical demetaphorization threatened to detach conceptual thought altogether, an agenda that seems to be reflected in Coleridge’s enduring preoccupation with the questions of how nightmare visions come to be located in the context of everyday physical objects, and of how tactile sensations in nightmares can be understood as projections into the external world of perception of specific internal physical discomforts.44 If the very existence of the Edinburgh Review as an anonymous periodical represented a potent agent for the detachment of language from the local and the material, Stewart’s status in the early nineteenth century as the leading expert in political economy45 would have made him dou-

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bly threatening in Coleridge’s eyes. As Southey’s diatribes in the Quarterly Review make clear, for the Wordsworth/Coleridge circle the discourse of political economy was dangerous above all because it refused to recognize the socially embedded position of the worker, defining him in abstract terms as ‘‘a manufacturing animal.’’46 Political economy, in its reduction of the worker to an abstraction, could thus be seen, as Southey suggests,47 as complicit with the demetaphorization project of political radicalism. From the point of view of the immaterialist philosophical position represented by members of the Common Sense School associated with the Edinburgh Review, such as Stewart and Brown, political economy represented a triumph of the essentially mental capacity for the creation of system over the worker’s naturally desultory engagement with material conditions,48 a victory of the immaterial often referred to in the early nineteenth century as ‘‘the march of mind.’’ As Derrida has pointed out, this vision of a capitalist world in which bourgeois political economy has made material relationships become immaterial, or spectral, is one that is implicit in Marx’s metaphors in Capital.49 The project of regrounding the conceptual in intuitions arising from the lived experience of the individual, which I will suggest underlies Coleridge’s engagement with medical theories linking apparitions and indigestion can thus be seen to anticipate the Marxian critique, particularly when it is borne in mind that Marx’s description of capitalism as a condition in which the accumulated labor of the dead sucks ‘‘vampire-like’’ the life out of the worker50 borrows the language of medical accounts of apparitions in order to suggest that capitalism is like a massive case of indigestion in which dead matter remains unassimilable by the living tissue of society. This potential compatibility between Coleridgean thought and Marxism will not seem irreconcileable with my characterization of Coleridge as basically in agreement with the immaterialist position of Berkeley and earlier members of the Common Sense School, such as Thomas Reid, if we remember that Marx described himself as a ‘‘dialectical,’’ rather than a ‘‘vulgar,’’ materialist, though it does suggest that Coleridge and Marx shared a common vitalist philosophical orientation. The progressive immaterialization of the world promised by early nineteenth-century political economy was easily incorporated into the worldview of Evangelicalism,51 which tended to regard the category of materiality with suspicion, as tainted by original sin,52 and was itself strongly influenced by Common Sense philosophy.53 While political economy rendered the material world spectral, a simulacrum hollowed out from within by immaterial economic relationships, the Evangelicals’

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exclusive emphasis on religion’s transcendence of the embodied condition of materiality, expressed, as Coleridge noted, in the hermeneutic doctrine of the plenary inspiration of the Bible, also made religious texts into simulacra, in which by an act of divine ventriloquism God expressed Himself without reference to the material conditions of the men who actually wrote them: The Doctrine in question petrifies at once the whole body of Holy Writ with all its harmonies & symmetrical gradations,—the flexile and the rigid; the supporting Hard and the clothing Soft; the blood that is the life; the intelligencing Nerves; and the rudely woven, but soft and springy Cellular, in which all are embedded and lightly bound together—this breathing Organismus, this glorious Panharmonicon that I had seen ‘‘stand on its feet as a man, and with a Man’s voice given unto it’’—the Doctrine in question turns at once into a colossal Memnon’s Head, a hollow passage for a Voice, a Voice that mocks the voices of many men, and speaks in their names, and yet is but one voice and the same—‘‘and no man uttered it, and never in a human heart was it conceived.’’54

Coleridge’s insistent medical imagery here foregrounds the centrality of the human condition of embodiment to his theological critique of the Evangelical position in a way that I will argue is also anticipated by his interest in the relationship between apparitions and indigestion. As we shall see, one of Coleridge’s most extended applications of medical theories about apparitions is his account in The Friend of how Luther came to throw his inkpot at the Devil,55 an incident that he interprets as central both to Luther’s career as a religious reformer and to his world-historical significance as leader of the Reformation (and that, significantly for the argument of this essay, is coupled with Coleridge’s effusive tribute to Tom Wedgwood’s influence on his thinking). For Coleridge, Luther’s hallucination testifies to the profundity of his religious thought, showing that it is so deeply rooted in his very existence that it becomes capable of rearranging perceptual categories to become part of his bodily experience, a perspective which also explains his interest in other ‘‘visionary’’ thinkers such as Boehme.56 Coleridge’s emphasis on the profound human reality of experiences of apparitions, reflected in his praise for the way Shakespeare presented the supernatural without attempting to rationalize it,57 is in marked contrast to most of the extensive literature on supernatural phenomena produced in the early to mid-nineteenth century,58 of which Walter Scott’s 1830 Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft is merely the best known example. This popular writing on the supernatural manages to

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be thoroughly demystificatory and rationalist in tone, while at the same time orthodoxly asserting the essential immateriality of the mind, a combination that, as we shall see, reflects the rejection of the intellectual legitimacy of metaphor on the grounds of its materiality, which characterizes Stewart’s version of Common Sense philosophy. An example of this seemingly contradictory tactic can be found in Walter Cooper Dendy’s 1841 The Philosophy of Mystery, a book that effectively amounts to a compendium of earlier writings on the supernatural. Dendy’s book is structured as a series of dialogues, chiefly between Evelyn, a spokesman for rationalism, and Astrophel, a Romantic scholar who has been reading too many blackletter tomes, with occasional interjections from Ida, a devout young maiden, and Castaly, who is possessed of a lively and ‘‘romantic’’ imagination. The advantage of this structure for Dendy is that it allows him to have his cake and eat it, but the voice of the rationalist Evelyn is very decidedly the dominant one in the book, and ‘‘the natural sympathy between the brain and the stomach’’59 is frequently invoked as an explanation for supernatural visions, in terms that are very close to the ones we have already seen in Crichton and Coleridge. Near the beginning, Dendy (in the person of Evelyn) tackles the question of the implications of his rationalist reduction of the supernatural for religious belief: The grand causes and awful judgments of the inspired aeras of the world prove the truth by the necessity of the miracles, not only in answer to the Pharisees and Sadduccees, who required a sign, but even before the eyes of the early disciples, whose apathetic hearts soon forgot the miracles, and their divine Master himself; for, as he was walking on the sea, ‘‘at the fourth watch, they thought he was a spirit.’’ I would fain, however, adopt the precept of Lord Bacon, to waive theology in my discussions and my illustrations, because I am unwilling to blend the sacred truths of spiritual futurity with arguments on the imperfection of material existence. In the abstract spiritual evidence of all modern superstition, I have little faith. These records are scarcely more to be confided in than fairy tales, or fictions like those of the antique sages . . . You will call me presumptuous, but, believe me Astrophel, it is superstition which is presumptuous and positive, and not philosophy; for credulity believes on profane tradition, or the mere assertion of a mortal. But the glory

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of philosophy is humility; for they who, like Newton, and Playfair, and Wollaston, and Davy, look deeply into the wonder and beauty of creation, will be ever humbled by the contemplation of their own being,—an atom in the universe. A philosopher cannot be proud; for, like Socrates, he confesses his ignorance, because he is ever searching for truth. He cannot be a sceptic; for when he has dived into the deeps of science, his thoughts will ascend the more toward the Deity: he has grasped all that science can afford him, and there is nothing left for his mighty mind but divine things and holy hopes. Philosophy is not confident either, because she ever waits for more experience and more weight of testimony. How often, Astrophel, must we be deceived, like children, by distance, until experience teaches us truth. By this we know that the turrets of distant towers are high, yet they dwindle in our sight to the mere vanishing point, as the child believes them. Such is the power of demonstration.60

Dendy denies that questions about the status of the supernatural have any bearing on religious issues, because the kind of scientific investigation into supernatural phenomena of which he sees his book as an example is essentially separate from religious belief. When the scientist has ‘‘grasped all that science can afford him’’ he will then turn to ‘‘divine things and holy hopes,’’ but there is no suggestion from Dendy that the scientist’s religious belief will be any stronger as a result of his inquiries, merely that it will not have been affected by them. Dendy does claim that the true scientist ‘‘cannot be a sceptic,’’ but he implies that this is due to the attitude of open inquiry that is a necessary precondition of scientific work rather than to any evidence inherent in the physical phenomena, which the scientist might study: appeals to ‘‘design’’ are notably absent in this passage. Implicit in Dendy’s rationale for his inquiry into the supernatural is an assertion that there can be no connection between scientific and religious forms of truth. Dendy’s argument reflects an epistemological paradigm that had been articulated by the Common Sense philosopher Thomas Brown, to whom one of the writers on the supernatural drawn on by Dendy explicitly refers.61 Brown, whose views reflect emphases present in the philosophy of his teacher Dugald Stewart, argued in his Inquiry into the Relations of Cause and Effect that the model of causality appropriate to scientific inquiry was essentially different to the one that had to form the basis of theological or philosophical thought. Since all a scientist could hope to do was to establish the constancy of relationships between certain phenomena, scientific inquiry had to operate with a ‘‘weaker’’ notion of causality than that which formed the basis of philos-

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ophy or theology, which could ground themselves on infallible mental intuitions. In Brown’s view, this difference in the underlying model of causality rendered it impossible to draw inferences between the religious and scientific realms.62 Coleridge, as Trevor Levere has comprehensively demonstrated, utterly rejected the kind of division between religious and scientific modes of argument proposed by Brown63 —the association of this position with the Common Sense philosophy of his day may well lie behind Coleridge’s disparaging remarks about Scottish philosophers.64 This kind of separation between religion and science is absent, however, from earlier representatives of the Common Sense School,65 so that Coleridge’s quarrel with ‘‘Scottish philosophy’’ may legitimately be characterized as a disagreement that takes place within the context of Common Sense philosophy, rather than a wholesale rejection of the British philosophical tradition as such. Berkeley, for example, who in many ways deserves to be regarded as the founder of the Common Sense School, notoriously combines theological issues with medical ones in Siris, and Thomas Reid, who was a minister in the Church of Scotland, finds support in experimental studies of optics for epistemological claims about the nature of perception which have significant theological implications.66 Coleridge’s refusal to separate religious and scientific spheres of argument is indicated by his objections to the rationalizing treatment of the supernatural as it appeared in the writings of Scott (who was of course steeped in the same intellectual milieu as Stewart and Brown). Coleridge commented, for example, that the rationalizing explanations Scott offers for the appearance of the Bodach Glas to Fergus Mac Ivor in Waverley worked against the purposes of his story.67 In Coleridge’s view, Scott would have done better to present the apparition with no explanation, because in so doing he would have preserved the imaginative coherency of his fiction.68 Coleridge’s comments on the unsatisfactoriness of Scott’s treatment of the supernatural have a significance that goes beyond purely aesthetic considerations. They represent an important aspect of his thinking about the relationship between imagination and society that underlies his characterization of Wordsworth’s poetry in the Biographia Literaria. At the same time, as I hope to show, the ideas about the interconnectedness of mind and body that ultimately find their expression in the Coleridgean account of the symbol are not elaborated in isolation from the scientific and philosophical debates current in Britain in Coleridge’s own day, particularly as they turn around the nature of vitality.

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Coleridge’s organic conception of the imagination is not imported wholesale from Germany, but can be seen as developing out of the ambiguous relationship between, on the one hand, a definition of rationality in terms of social consensus and, on the other, an appeal to unanalyzable intuition within the Common Sense philosophical tradition itself.69 The argument of Brown’s Inquiry, that the causal relationships identified by science are distinct in kind from the equally valid deductions of theology and philosophy, embodies this Janus-faced stance between equating rationality with ‘‘probability’’ (a term that had a significantly wider sense in the period than it does now)70 and the foundational claims of intuitionism, which is also apparent in the peculiar combination of hard-headed rationalist debunking and orthodox piety we have noted in Dendy and other early nineteenth-century writers on the supernatural. Scientific arguments about the nature of vitality were characterized by a similar kind of ambiguity: as Coleridge himself noted, one of Abernethy’s intellectual difficulties in defending an immaterial ‘‘principle of vitality’’ against the materialist arguments of Lawrence, which ultimately rested on a Humean conception of causality of the kind invoked by Brown, was that the very analogy employed by Abernethy in support of this immaterial principle, the comparison of ‘‘vitality’’ to a subtle fluid such as electricity, itself tended to contradict Abernethy’s argument by inadvertently suggesting the essential materiality of ‘‘vitality.’’71 The principle of vitality bridged the interval between the material realm of the body and the immaterial realm of the mind, and for that very reason, as Coleridge recognized, posed a challenge to the disparagement of the materiality of metaphor by thinkers such as Brown and Stewart. Rather than accept the purely material nature of vitality, with the epistemological separation of the embodied experience of self from the legitimate immaterial domain of rational inquiry, which that implied within the context of the Common Sense tradition, Coleridge, as we shall see, asserted the radical metaphoricity of thought itself by emphasizing the defamilarizing and dematerializing effects of bold and vital metaphor.

THE IMMATERIALIST DISPARAGEMENT OF METAPHOR Coleridge’s identification of questions about the intellectual validity to be accorded to metaphor as being what was essentially at stake in the controversy between Abernethy and Lawrence over vitalism comes to

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seem far less intellectually idiosyncratic when placed in the context of the Common Sense philosophical position of Dugald Stewart and his teacher, Thomas Reid. A rejection of the legitimacy of metaphor in philosophical discourse had been central to Reid’s arguments against the philosophical skepticism of David Hume. Hume, Reid complained, had written in a way that was far more appropriate to a poet than to a philosopher, in that he had allowed his writing to be dominated by leading metaphors which ended up shaping his arguments.72 Dugald Stewart extended Reid’s criticisms of the role played by material metaphor in Hume’s philosophy into rejection of merely ‘‘metaphysical’’ accounts of the mind in general. As Stewart comments in the introduction to his 1792 Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, the problem with materialist accounts of mental processes such as Priestley’s version of Hartleyan associationism is not so much that they are fallacious as that they are simply beside the point: Instead . . . of objecting to the scheme of materialism, that its conclusions are false, it would be more accurate to say, that its aim is unphilosophical. It proceeds on a misapprehension of the proper object of science; the difficulty which it professes to remove being manifestly placed beyond the reach of our faculties. Surely, when we attempt to explain the nature of that principle which feels and thinks and wills, by saying that it is a material substance, or that it is the result of material organization, we impose on ourselves by words; forgetting, that matter as well as mind is known to us by its qualities and attributes alone, and that we are totally ignorant of the essence of either.73

Stewart suggests that the essential nature of matter, just as much as that of mind, is ‘‘beyond the reach of our faculties’’ because all we can really know about matter are its ‘‘sensible qualities’’ (roughness, temperature, shape, hardness, color etc.); similarly, all the evidence available to us about the nature of the mind consists of our experience of mental operations such as ‘‘sensation, thought, and volition.’’ To attempt to explain the mind by metaphors drawn from material processes does not in the slightest add to our knowledge, because we really understand no more about matter than we do about mind—or perhaps even less, given our intuitive awareness of mental operations. The only reason materialist accounts of the mind appear persuasive is owing to the greater attention that ‘‘the preservation of our animal existence’’ has required us to pay to ‘‘the qualities and laws of matter,’’ rendering material forms of explanation more familiar to us.74

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COLERIDGEAN METAPHOR AS THE MATERIAL EMBODIMENT OF THOUGHT Because my concern has been to suggest connections between a wide variety of Coleridgean preoccupations that are not normally linked in modern Romantic criticism, I may appear to have strung together a bewildering series of topics somewhat in the manner of Keats’s record of Coleridge’s conversation:75 indigestion; vitalism; the supernatural; the nature of scientific causality; and now the intellectual legitimacy of metaphor. The connecting thread running through these apparently disparate subjects, however, is Coleridge’s persistent interest in revaluing ‘‘embodiedness’’ as precondition of thought. Coleridge’s hostility to the dualistic separation between the mental and the material fundamental to Stewart’s and Brown’s philosophy, I want to suggest, cannot be characterized as a simple rejection of eighteenth century ‘‘materialism,’’ as is often suggested in conventional critical accounts of Romanticism—the Common Sense School, as we have seen, make arguments in support of the position of Berkeleyan immaterialism with which Coleridge has often been identified. On the contrary, the Common Sense philosophy of Stewart is rejected by Coleridge precisely because Coleridge is a ‘‘materialist,’’ in the sense that the focus of his attention is the materially embodied situation in which human thought takes place. Metaphor, in the context of the Common Sense School’s arguments about the nature of philosophy, represents this condition of material embodiment, which, as we shall see, also gives rise to the supernatural (as it is described in early nineteenth-century medical theory). Stewart’s hostility to metaphor is part and parcel of his immaterialism, since he views metaphor as corrupting our original intuitions of the mind’s immaterial nature by ‘‘materializing’’ them.76 It is this narrative of ‘‘corruption’’ by metaphor that, I would suggest, Coleridge is concerned to challenge, preferring to see metaphor as a process whereby matter is spiritualized. Stewart is plainly embarrassed by the role played by metaphor in philosophical discourse, seeing the material analogies embodied in our psychological vocabulary as a legacy from the intellectual childhood of the human race. For Stewart, the only way to liberate philosophical language from this messy materiality is to ensure that all its metaphors are safely ‘‘dead.’’ Custom and habit ‘‘immaterialize’’ language by discouraging us from referring its meaning to originary metaphors, so that the appeal to ‘‘common sense’’ as the source of intellectual authority becomes equivalent to an appeal to linguistic propriety.77

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Obviously such a view represents the opposite of Coleridge’s view of words as ‘‘living things,’’78 and his emphasis on the vital role of metaphor in the development of thought. Coleridge’s reasons for opposing Stewart’s kind of equation between intellectually valid argument and an absence of active metaphors go beyond the aesthetics of poetic language, since there are significant implications for his conception of history itself. One important corollary of Stewart’s characterization of philosophical language is that radically new kinds of philosophical (and, by extension, political) argument are impossible, since they would offend against the sense of linguistic propriety that is our sole standard of intellectual validity in these matters. This attitude is reflected in Stewart’s own philosophical eclecticism: Stewart defined the task of a modern philosopher as being to identify and reconcile the elements of truth in existing philosophical systems, rather than to find ‘‘new’’ truths.79 Stewart’s attitude to language can be compared with that of George Campbell, whose influential book The Philosophy of Rhetoric emerged from the same Aberdeen intellectual context as Common Sense philosophy.80 Campbell emphasizes the need to safeguard the purity of English usage81 because ‘‘we really think by signs as well as speak by them’’;82 the linguistic habits constituted by normal usage enable the mind to ‘‘immediately perceive . . . absurdity’’83 without the need for reference back to the things that words represent. For Campbell, however, ‘‘exuberance of metaphor’’84 endangers this intuitive safeguard of meaning, because it places language at one remove from signification: words are no longer ‘‘the immediate signs of . . . thought,’’ being made ‘‘at best but the signs of the signs of . . . thought,’’85 and this disruption of the customary relations between words makes nonsensical statements much harder to detect.86 Campbell’s account of metaphor formed the basis for a well-known Romantic-period review of Shelley’s poetry that claimed that its densely metaphorical nature disguised the nonsensical nature of Shelley’s radicalism.87 In keeping with his claim that ‘‘authority is everything in language,’’88 Campbell provides an account of linguistic desynonymization which sharply contrasts with the account of desynonymization that Coleridge sketches in the Biographia Literaria, identified by a number of critics as deeply significant for an understanding of Coleridge’s thought.89 Campbell compares the intellectual advantages of desynonymization with the economic benefits accruing from agricultural enclosure,90 a legal analogy that indicates the essentially prescriptive nature of his conception of language. Language is to be made ‘‘more useful and expressive’’91 through subdivision, an assumption which Jeremy Bentham’s obses-

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sively elaborated taxonomic definitions may be seen as putting into practice.92 Coleridge’s comments on the definition of ‘‘common sense’’ in the Biographia Literaria show he recognized that thinkers such as Stewart and Campbell had effectively equated intellectual authority with prescriptively defined linguistic usage, in a way that denied any creative role to metaphor in the process of thinking.93 The theory of ‘‘desynonymization’’ that he outlines in that lengthy footnote combats the conservatism implicit in this view by insisting on the ability of the exceptional individual to alter general linguistic usage through elaborating new distinctions founded on the originary metaphors underlying our vocabulary.94 Without recourse to the intuitive metaphors on which all our thought is based, Coleridge implies, intellectual progress is impossible. The connection Coleridge suggests between progress in the sciences and the unfolding of implicit linguistic metaphors through time can be seen as directed not just against Stewart’s conventionalist account of intellectual authority, but also against his pupil Thomas Brown’s separation of scientific approaches to causality from religious modes of explanation. Stewart’s appeal to ‘‘custom,’’ as represented by existing linguistic usage,95 is reflected in Brown’s account of the nature of causeand-effect relationships in science: if, as Brown claims, the only criterion of causality that can be applied in scientific inquiry is the Humean one of ‘‘constant conjunction,’’ then ‘‘custom,’’ or the way in which phenomena are habitually associated in our minds, must become the sole standard of scientific validity.96 Scientific explanation, Brown implies, is essentially a process of situating the unexplained in the framework of what we already know, rather than of positing radically new kinds of explanation. Coleridge’s objections to the limitation of scientific discourse to ‘‘dead metaphor,’’ which is implied by Brown’s account of cause-and-effect relationships in science can be illustrated by his comments on the problems raised for Abernethy’s defense of an immaterial ‘‘principle of vitality’’ by the comparison to electricity he uses. Abernethy unwittingly reduces vitality to the status of a material phenomenon, Coleridge implies, because, paradoxically, his anxiety to preserve its immaterial status leads him to compare it to the attenuated materiality of electricity, considered as a ‘‘subtle fluid.’’ Abernethy’s basic distrust of the materiality of metaphor leads him to choose this seemingly ‘‘safe’’ comparison, but, Coleridge suggests, the very lack of an obviously metaphorical relationship between electricity and vitality has the effect of inadvertently suggesting that vitality is no more than electricity, contrary

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to Abernethy’s intentions.97 Coleridge’s own metaphorical description of the vital principle, the famous account in The Statesman’s Manual of the growth of the plant, which is also the growth of the human mind, avoids this problem by its very boldness since, whatever else Coleridge may be saying, he is obviously not claiming that the mind literally is a plant in the way that Abernethy might be understood as saying that vitality is electricity.98 Although Coleridge shares Stewart’s basic commitment to a Berkeleyan ‘‘immaterialist’’ account of the mind, he has very different attitudes to the question of how philosophical immaterialism is to be conveyed in language. Stewart regards the problem for the immaterialist philosopher as lying in the material origins of our metaphors for the mind, and suggests that a conventionalist attitude toward language supplies the remedy: language, Stewart frequently remarks, should be regarded by the philosopher as a kind of algebra, a system of purely conventional signs.99 For Coleridge, on the other hand, the threat to attempts to convey philosophical immaterialism lies not in metaphor, but in precisely the linguistic conventionalism to which Stewart had appealed: the ‘‘deadness’’ of conventionalized metaphors is what reduces them to materiality, in Coleridge’s view, because the very familiarity with which the mind regards them makes them blend in unobtrusively with that familiar material world in whose terms we naturally tend to describe our mental operations.100 Living, ‘‘vital’’ metaphor, on the other hand, has the potential to divest even our ordinary language of materiality by drawing attention to the basic disparity, or catachresis, implicit in all our metaphors about the mind.101 This revaluation on Coleridge’s part of the relationship between metaphor and an immaterialist philosophical position is reflected in his sympathy for ‘‘visionary’’ thinkers such as Swedenborg and Boehme, whose bold use of metaphor would probably have been read by Stewart as implying a materialization of the mind.102

THE SUPERNATURAL AS VITAL METAPHOR: COLERIDGE ON LUTHER Coleridge’s reassessment of the value of ‘‘visionary,’’ metaphorical writing is paralleled by his reconceptualization of the nature of dramatic illusion, in which audience response to what is seen on stage is characterized by a similar kind of catachresis in which the material is mapped onto the spiritual. Coleridge’s extended analysis in his lectures of the

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way in which Shakespeare prepares the audience for Hamlet’s dialogue with his father’s ghost exemplifies this understanding of the apparition as a kind of metaphor, which is grounded in the state of the spectator’s body,103 a position which appears in more explicit form in some preparatory notes for his 1808 Lectures on the Principles of Poetry. Coleridge notes that genuine apparitions are characterized by a consonance with the state of the subject’s nervous system which fakes do not possess: Fifty years ago, & to this day in the ruder parts of G. Britain & Ireland in almost every Kitchen, & in many Parlours, you might meet persons who would assure you in the most solemn manner so that you would not doubt of their Veracity at least, that they had seen an Apparition of such & such a person—in many cases, that the Apparition had spoken to them—& they describe themselves as in an agony of Terror—. But how were you in health the hour after?—O there was nothing the matter with my Health.—Now take the other class of Facts in which real Ghosts have appeared—I mean, tricks & dressed up figures for the purpose of passing for an Apparition—in every Instance, I have known or heard of (& I have collected very many) the consequence has been either sudden Death, or Fits, or Ideotcy, or Mania, or a Brain Fever—. Whence comes the difference? Evidently from this—that in the one case the whole nervous system has been by slight internal causes gradually & all together, brought into a certain state, the sensation of which is extravagantly exaggerated during Sleep , & of which the Images are the mere effects and exponents, as the motions of the weather-cock or of the Wind—while in the other case the Image rushing thro’ the senses upon a nervous system wholly unprepared actually causes the Sensation, which is sometimes powerful enough to produce a total check, & almost always lesion or inflammation—.104

Coleridge’s reference to the way in which, in genuine cases of seeing apparitions, ‘‘the whole nervous system has been . . . brought into a certain state’’ is paralleled by his emphasis on the gradual way in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father is introduced.105 As Coleridge notes, the status of the apparition as an incarnation of the viewer’s own nervous system ensures that this visionary experience remains readily assimilable by the spectator’s mind, in contrast to instances of actual deception, where nervous shock leaves lasting harmful effects. As we shall see, this emphasis on the lack of assimilability of supernatural incidents that are not motivated by suitable stimulation of the nervous system is reflected in the review of Maturin’s Gothic drama Bertram, which Coleridge includes at the end of the Biographia Literaria. Coleridge’s general characterization of Shakespearean drama as an inherently metaphysical or

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symbolic form of theatre also seems to reflect these ideas about the capacity of nervous stimulation catachretically to unite the material and the spiritual in metaphor, since Coleridge stresses that it was the ‘‘energy of thinking’’106 to which the Elizabethan audience had become inured through religious controversy that made Shakespeare’s dramatic techniques possible. Coleridge’s insistence on the vital role played by metaphor (considered as a catachresis in which the material world is mapped onto the immaterial realm of mind) in enabling the mind to assimilate knowledge of the material world to itself, underlies his objections to the kind of rationalistic explanation of the supernatural, which we have found in Scott and Dendy. This can be seen from his discussion of the effect of such demystifying accounts in the essay ‘‘On the Communication of Truth’’ in The Friend, which develops themes to be found in the notes on Shakespeare to which we have already referred.107 Coleridge puts essentially the opposite case to the one we have already seen Dendy make: The third condition of a right though inadequate notion is, that the error occasioned be greatly outweighed by the importance of the truth communicated. The rustic would have little reason to thank the philosopher, who should give him true conceptions of the folly of believing in ghosts, omens, dreams, &c. at the price of abandoning his faith in Providence and in the continued existence of his fellow-creatures after his death . . . One condition yet remains: that the error foreseen shall be not be of a kind to prevent or impede the after acquirement of that knowledge which will remove it. Observe, how graciously Nature instructs her human children. She cannot give us the knowledge derived from sight without occasioning us at first to mistake images of reflection for substances . . . but ere the mistake can have any practical consequences, it is not only removed, but in its removal gives us the symbol of a new fact, that of distance.108

Whereas Dendy, following Brown, argues that his rationalistic analyses of supernatural phenomena have no implications for religious belief, Coleridge stresses that the effects of such rationalizations vary according to the extent to which they can be assimilated into the intellectual economy of the individual who encounters them. In the belief-system of a ‘‘rustic’’, Coleridge implies, the supernatural functions as a kind of metaphor whereby the immaterial truths of religion are embodied in a quasi-corporeal form, so that although the supernatural is not literally true, the rationalistic attempt to discredit it can in such circumstances

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legitimately be described as ‘‘false’’ in that it will have the effect of invalidating the rustic’s mode of apprehending these religious truths. Conceived as a metaphorical embodiment of religion, the supernatural aids the mind in digesting immaterial truths that are inconceivable in their own terms. For Coleridge, this licenses the presentation of the supernatural in fiction, which not only does not require justification through rational explanation in the manner of Scott, but whose purpose is counteracted by it. Coleridge in the passage quoted illustrates his conception of the supernatural as a metaphorical embodiment of immaterial truth by using as an example the process by which the mind learns to judge distance by sight. Coleridge’s wording is somewhat ambiguous: ‘‘images of reflection’’ could be mirror images, or they could be mental images, but Coleridge’s point appears to be that the confusion of ‘‘reflection’’ (however interpreted) with first-hand perception is a necessary stage in the process whereby the mind learns to appreciate the nature of its own perception of distance. Coleridge here seems to be alluding to Berkeleyan arguments about the nature of visual perception, to which we shall be returning. The point to which I wish to draw attention at the moment, however, is the parallel between this Coleridgean example and the passage from Dendy quoted earlier, where Dendy comments that we are ‘‘deceived, like children, by distance, until experience teaches us truth.’’109 What is noticeable about Coleridge’s treatment of this example is the way he avoids the language of deception which Dendy, consistently with his rationalism, employs.110 In Coleridge’s providential account, the ‘‘removal’’ of the visual ‘‘mistake’’ is ‘‘the symbol of a new fact’’: it is not merely an optical illusion, but a physically embodied metaphor of the immaterial truth of distance. One of Coleridge’s most extended discussions of the way in which supernatural apparitions can be seen to function as ‘‘symbols,’’ or embodied metaphors of immaterial truths, is his account in The Friend of how Luther came to throw his inkpot at the devil. Coleridge’s description draws on early nineteenth-century accounts of the nature of hallucination, in which indigestion figures prominently, but with the characteristic difference that instead of explaining away this episode as a mental aberration Coleridge regards it as eminently significant of Luther’s greatness, so that the apparition of the devil becomes the material embodiment of Luther’s historical struggle: Luther’s unremitting literary Labour and his sedentary mode of Life, during his confinement in the Warteburg . . . had begun to undermine his former

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unusually strong health. He suffered many and most distressing effects of indigestion and a deranged state of the digestive Organs . . . Had Luther been himself a Prince, he could not have desired better treatment than he received during his eight months stay in the Warteburg; and in consequence of a more luxurious diet than he had been accustomed to, he was plagued with temptations both from the ‘‘Flesh and the Devil.’’ It is evident from his Letters that he suffered under great irritability of his nervous System, the common effect of deranged Digestion in men of sedentary habits, who are at the same time intense thinkers: and this irritability added to, and revivifying the impressions made upon him in early life, and fostered by the theological Systems of his Manhood, is abundantly sufficient to explain all his Apparitions and all his nightly combats with evil Spirits. I see nothing improbable in the supposition, that in one of those unconscious half sleeps, or rather those rapid alternations of the sleeping with the half waking state, which is the true witching-time ‘‘the season Wherein the spirits hold their wont to walk’’ the fruitful matrix of Ghosts—I see nothing improbable, that in some one of those momentary Slumbers, into which the suspension of all Thought in the perplexity of intense thinking so often passes; Luther should have had a full view of the Room in which he was sitting, of his writing Table and all the Implements of Study, as they really existed, and at the same time a brainimage of the Devil, vivid enough to have acquired apparent Outness, and a distance regulated by the proportion of its distinctness to that of the objects really impressed on the outward senses.111

Coleridge’s account of Luther’s hallucination draws on the medical theories stressing interrelationship between circulation, digestion, and intense mental activity, which we have already discussed. Coleridge emphasizes the causative role of the disturbance in Luther’s digestion and the ‘‘irritability’’ caused by Luther’s ‘‘unremitting literary Labour,’’ in a way that reflects other nineteenth-century accounts of ‘‘mental overstrain.’’112 Coleridge follows this discussion of Luther with a long illustration, using the example of Coleridge himself in his own library at Keswick, of how Luther could have come to ‘‘perceive’’ an image existing only in his own mind as apparently located externally among the familiar paraphernalia of his study. The terms in which Coleridge introduces this example, describing it as for the benefit of ‘‘those of my Readers who are fortunate enough to find . . . [the account of Luther] obscure in consequence of their own good health and unshattered nerves,’’ and the following report of his response to an inquiry as to

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whether he believed in ghosts—‘‘No. I have seen far too many myself’’—strongly suggest that the description of Luther’s hallucination has a heavily autobiographical element.113 Coleridge’s elaborate discussion of how Luther in his mind came to attribute ‘‘apparent Outness’’ to the ‘‘brain-image of the Devil’’ is the feature that differentiates this account of hallucination from similar descriptions in contemporary medical writings, and I want to suggest that this concern with how an hallucination is put together by the mind from several different perceptual inputs is linked to the conception of metaphor as the product of the materially embodied condition of human thought, which I have identified in Coleridge’s work. Coleridge distances himself from explanations of hallucination in terms of mere mental illusion, a maneuver that is intimately connected with his theories of perception. In a move that parallels his reference to perception of distance in the Friend passage about the relationship between superstition and religion, which we have already looked at, Coleridge interprets hallucination as a ‘‘symbol’’ of a greater truth about the immaterial nature of perception, rather than dismissing it as a mental aberration.

WEDGWOOD AND COLERIDGE: REINTERPRETING BERKELEY Coleridge footnotes his discussion of ‘‘Outness’’with an effusive tribute to the memory of Tom Wedgwood, ‘‘my Friend! My munificent Copatron, and not less the Benefactor of my Intellect!’’114 whose speculations on the nature of perception Alan Barnes has shown were an important influence on Coleridge’s thinking. Wedgwood, however, like his tutor Darwin, was a thorough-going materialist who believed that thought consisted in a particular kind of muscular motion,115 so my argument that Coleridge made use of Wedgwood’s ideas in order to articulate his own, essentially immateralist, account of the mind may seem paradoxical. If there is a paradox here, however, it is one Coleridge shares with other medical thinkers in the Romantic period, such as Charles Bell116 and John Abercrombie,117 who did not regard their detailed anatomical studies of the nerves and brain as in conflict with the immaterialist position of Common Sense philosophy, by which they were influenced. For the purposes of the critique of the immaterialist, but essentially rationalist, position represented by Dugald Stewart and the Edinburgh Review circle, which I have suggested underlies Coleridge’s interest in the implications of supernatural phenomena, what is significant about

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Wedgwood’s ideas is that they avoid reductionist accounts of perception. In particular, they suggest that perceptions of distance, a quality that, as Berkeley had noted, cannot be derived from purely physical impressions on the eye,118 are not intrinsically different from the perception of apparitions. The implication of Wedgwood’s theorizing is that all perception is, in an important sense, spectral, a position that allows Coleridge to avoid Erasmus Darwin’s vulgar materialism while still emphasizing the importance of the human condition of embodiedness for an understanding of perception in a way that Stewart’s version of immaterialism failed to do. The redaction of Wedgwood’s writings which eventually appeared in print, represents an extended attack on Berkeley’s claim in An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, that the mind learns to perceive distance through associating visual perceptions with tactile perceptions, a fact that critics such as Jennifer Ford have noted without offering any explanation.119 As commentators have pointed out, Berkeley’s reliance in this early essay on a sense of touch, which is assumed to be more securely grounded in the material world than vision, seems inconsistent with the general thrust of his philosophy, which is that all perception is a process whereby the mind actively constructs the material world.120 This early Berkeleyan account, which is later followed by Dugald Stewart,121makes visual perception, like the description of metaphor that we have found in Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric, into the sign of a sign, inherently less reliable than the signs furnished by the sense of touch, which are assumed to be immediately intelligible in their own right. Stewart appears to have preferred this account of vision as furnishing sensory information above all through association with tactile perceptions, which is not the only one that could be derived from Berkeley’s writings, because it tended to distance what was regarded as one of the chief senses122 from the mysterious originary intuitions on which both Berkeley and the Common Sense school agreed perception ultimately depended.123 Deriving visual perceptions of distance from association with the sense of touch can be seen as congruent with the demetaphorizing project I have suggested was associated with Stewart’s political radicalism, because it cast doubt on the intellectual validity of ‘‘visionary’’ forms of discourse in general, insisting that they be grounded in the tactility of the material world. In the context of Coleridge’s characterization of hallucinations as materially embodied metaphors, or ‘‘symbols,’’ of immaterial truths, it becomes possible to understand the significance Coleridge attached to Wedgwood’s arguments as an aspect of his general insistence on the

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productivity of the human condition of ‘‘embodiedness’’ for all thought, including the ‘‘visionary’’ kinds of discourse represented by Boehme and Swedenborg. Coleridge can be seen as intervening in a debate within the British Common Sense tradition to oppose the reductive rationalism of Stewart’s philosophy, but this does not reflect a shift to some fully fledged German Idealist position so much as a return to the more Berkeleyan position of Thomas Reid, which is accommodating to Butlerian theological invocations of the ‘‘analogy of Nature’’124 in way that the linguistic conventionalism of Stewart is not. Wedgwood’s ‘‘Enquiry’’ makes use of a number of practical examples to demonstrate that the sense of touch cannot be the source of our concepts of distance, as Berkeley’s Essay towards a New Theory of Vision had supposed, the most significant of which, and the one that is mentioned in many places in Coleridge’s works, was the phenomenon of ‘‘double touch.’’ Wedgwood describes ‘‘the common experiment of a body seeming double when felt in the angle of the tips of the first and second finger crossed’’: A person is blindfolded, and desired to attend to the impression of touch from a body so placed: the bandage being removed, he is directed to look at his fingers, while the object is placed as before. He will say, that the first time he felt two bodies at a distance from each other, and that now he feels only one: in his prior experience, if similar sensations occurred on the remote sides of those two fingers, they had always been occasioned by the contact of two bodies; when he was blindfolded therefore, the idea of the usual visual appearance of two bodies came into his mind, and made him imagine that he touched two bodies; when the bandage was removed, and he saw that there was but one, he immediately perceived that he felt but one. As the sensations of touch from the same impressing body must have been the same in both cases, the supposed difference in them must have been owing to some circumstance of vision: in the first case, the experimenter was deceived by a visual idea; in the second, he was rightly informed by a visual impression.125

The phenomenon of ‘‘double touch’’ for Wedgwood disproves Berkeley’s assumption that there is a simple relationship of one-to-one correspondence between visual and tactile perceptions. Berkeley had suggested in the Essay towards a New Theory of Vision that the mind only learned to judge distance visually through associating visual perceptions with touch. Referring to the famous Cheselden case in which the removal of cataracts allowed a youth to see for the first time (a staple of eighteenth-century discussions of this topic), Berkeley had argued

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that prior to the formation of these kinds of associations, all objects impinging on the eye were experienced as equally ‘‘close’’ to it, in the same way that we naturally experience all objects impinging on our sense of touch as being near to the body.126 Touch in this early Berkeleyan argument thus represents the primary mode of sense-perception from which vision is only gradually differentiated by the discovery that what ‘‘touches’’ the eye is not objects themselves, but light reflected from those objects. For Wedgwood, on the other hand, there is no primary mode of sense-perception, since the phenomenon of ‘‘double touch’’ shows that even our perceptions of touch are constructed by the mind.

METAPHORICAL CATACHRESIS AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE LOCKEAN CORRESPONDENCE THEORY OF LANGUAGE Wedgwood’s account of perception would have ‘‘extricated’’ Coleridge’s thought from associationism, as Coleridge puts it in his 1801 letter to Thomas Poole127 by emphasizing the mind’s capacity to elaborate its own reality without being dependent on a material world conceived as ‘‘external’’ to the mind, thus making possible a more consistent form of philosophical immaterialism than that presented by Berkeley in the Essay towards a New Theory of Vision. Whereas for the early Berkeley touch had grounded vision in material reality, for Wedgwood the relationship is if anything the reverse: the materiality of the body is inchoate without the organizing clarity of sight. ‘‘Double touch’’ shows that tactile perceptions do not represent merely an unquestionable given, which is the function accorded them in the argument of Berkeley’s Essay, but themselves must be actively constructed by the mind to produce that common ‘‘reality’’ in which we all share. Wedgwood’s account of double touch seems to have appealed to Coleridge because it stressed the active role played by the mind in putting together different sensory inputs (such as tactile sensations impacting on several different surfaces of the body at once) to form a coherent external reality. Implicit in Wedgwood is a model of perception as a process of metaphorical transfer, or bodily catachresis, in which sensations in themselves discrete are identified with each other to form a ‘‘perception’’ of an external cause: the obviously ‘‘metaphorical’’ character of the projection of internal pains in nightmares128 merely illustrated for Coleridge a process that was characteristic of all perception. Regarded in this light, Wedgwood’s account of perception can be seen to have important implications for Coleridge’s theory of language gener-

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ally, particularly given the pervasive analogies between perception and language which are characteristic of the British philosophy of Coleridge’s day. Berkeley’s account of vision invokes language as a model for perception, suggesting that we should regard the process of seeing as consisting in the interpretation of a divine language of visual signs. This use of a fundamentally linguistic model of perception figures very prominently in the Common Sense philosophy of Reid and Stewart, so it is not surprising to find Wedgwood, shortly after citing Reid, also referring to the analogy of language that Berkeley employs, which he describes in terms which echo Reidian philosophy: Doctor Berkeley[’s] . . . beautiful theory has been received with general assent . . . When we have learned by touch the real magnitude of an object, the visual or apparent magnitude becomes only a sign which instantly suggests the tactual magnitude. As in the case of language, the mind passes over the sign, and attends only to the thing signified. The visual magnitude, which in the primitive state of the human mind was its only object, in the progress of experience entirely vanishes from its notice. It so immediately calls up the tactual magnitude, that what can only be touched appears to us to be seen . . . Berkeley . . . was the first who advanced the important principle, that some perceptions are capable of becoming a language by which other perceptions are represented and suggested.129

Wedgwood’s comment that ‘‘the mind passes over the sign, and attends only to the thing signified’’does not correspond directly to anything in Berkeley’s Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, but verbally echoes a point Reid makes repeatedly about the subliminal nature of perceptual signs.130 The approving terms in which Wedgwood refers to the analogy between language and perception suggest that his own account of perception can also be read as an account of the nature of linguistic meaning. It is in this context of this analogy between language and perception that Wedgwood’s attack on Berkeley’s derivation of visual perceptions of distance from touch can be seen to be an influence on Coleridge’s own view of supernatural phenomena as materially embodied metaphors of immaterial truths and his related opposition to the conventionalist attitude toward language associated with Dugald Stewart. The early Berkeley’s own assumption of a relationship of one-to-one correspondence between visual and tactile perceptions reflects a Lock-

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ean model of language, in which words are supposed naturally to map directly onto ideas, and could be seen as compatible with the linguistic conventionalism of Stewart. For Berkeley, the relationship between visual signifier and tactile signified is in the last analysis arbitrary, in the sense that it might have been entirely otherwise if God had so ordained.131 A similar emphasis on the arbitrary nature of the relationship between the perceptual signifier and what it signifies pervades the philosophy of Reid,who insists, as part of his argument against the philosophical naturalism of Hume, on the lack of any relationship of ‘‘resemblance’’ between sensory stimuli and the external world suggested to our minds by those stimuli.132 In the case of Berkeley and Reid, of course, the ‘‘arbitrariness’’ of the signifier/signified relationship is underpinned by religious providentialism, and so has very different implications from those that poststructuralist critics have identified in the arbitrary signifier of Saussurean linguistics. Stewart’s conventionalism, however, and the separation of scientific from religious modes of causal explanation, which Brown theorizes, have a distinct tendency to demote the role of providential argument in intellectual life and so create a purely secularized mode of discourse in which the ‘‘arbitrary’’ relationship between signifier and signified is much closer to that theorized by Saussure. One reason Coleridge found Wedgwood’s account of perception so significant, I would suggest, is that it derived the meaning of perceptual signifiers from metaphorical relationships to which the embodied conditions of perception gave rise, and so provided an account of signification (and thus of language itself) in which arbitrariness played no role, but which could still be indirectly referred to Providence in that it was the organic product of living beings. This implicitly theological recourse to vitalism on Coleridge’s part can be paralleled in the argument of Butler’s Analogy of Religion.133 Wedgwood’s comment that the most important aspect of Berkeley’s argument is the ‘‘principle, that some perceptions are capable of becoming a language by which other perceptions are represented and suggested’’ indicates the way he proposes to reinterpret the linguistic model that Berkeley and Reid had applied to perception. Wedgwood still explains visual perception as a process of interpreting signs, but conceives the nature of those signs themselves very differently. For Wedgwood, the meaning of visual signs is not fixed once and for all by reference to perceptions of touch, which are altogether outside the visual realm, but instead is constantly evolving through a process of reinterpretation and

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assimilation that occurs naturally as a concomitant of our visual experience itself. Wedgwood articulates this fluid relationship between sense-experience and the conclusions drawn by the mind when he suggests that perceptions and ideas have a ‘‘common nature.’’ For Wedgwood, this implies that association, instead of operating to correlate perceptions of sight and touch as Berkeley had suggested, is a mental function internal to the process of seeing itself. Ideas are not merely associated with other ideas, in Wedgwood’s view, but can be associated with perceptions themselves, so that association is not merely a retrospective process in which perceptions (regarded as already complete in themselves) are connected with other perceptions, but is integral to the process whereby what counts as a ‘‘perception’’ is formulated by the mind in the first place.134 In Wedgwood’s view, what we normally call perception is in fact mostly reminiscence, a point which Coleridge echoes in his 1811 Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton when he comments that ‘‘when you look upon a portrait, you must not compare it with the face when present, but with the recollection of the face.’’135 Wedgwood suggests that perception is perpetually evolving: When I perceive a small part of an object which I have known familiarly, that perception instantly calls up the idea of all the other parts, and though I only see a part, I think of the whole. The perception and the recollection blend together, so as to form one homogeneous whole. Almost all that seems to be simple perception, is in fact the result of this process. Suppose any object, a chair for example, to be presented frequently to view, and allowed each time to continue in sight for the space of a second: it is plain that each separate perception is the same as that which preceded it, that as a mere perception of the sense the twelfth perception differs nothing from the eleventh, nor the eleventh from any one that has gone before. Yet the picture of the object, after the first glimpse or two, is confused and faint; after the twelfth time it becomes clear and accurate. Something, therefore, must have coalesced and assimilated with the last perception to render it so much more correct and vivid; and that can only be the ideas, the reproduction or reminiscence of the preceding perceptions. Every perception of the object, leaves behind it an idea which instantly coalesces with the subsequent perception. The last perception, blended with all the ideas derived from the antecedent ones, gives a full and distinct notion of the chair. It often happens that the perception is obscure and imperfect, compared with the antecedent kindred ideas; but deriving clearness and completeness from the accession of these, it becomes as useful for all the purposes of reasoning or life as the most perfect perception.136

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Wedgwood describes a mode of perception that is constantly changing as fresh perceptions are assimilated to the associative whole which constitutes the object perceived. For Wedgwood, the relative ‘‘clarity’’ of perceptions is almost entirely a function of association, since he regards all perception, considered in itself, as essentially obscure and fleeting. What differentiates a ‘‘clear’’ perception from an obscure one is the extent of the associations which it awakes in the perceiving mind, so that even an ‘‘imperfect’’ perception can seem clear to someone who possesses the right stock of ideas: Wedgwood cites examples of professional observers such as lookouts at sea, who can recognize things that are not apparent to other onlookers.137 Wedgwood refers to the mind’s ‘‘assimilation’’ of perceptions, a choice of word that indicates the fundamentally biological model that underlies his account. Seeing for Wedgwood is not a mechanical registration of external impressions by the mind, but a living process of digestion: perceptions, in order to be really ‘‘seen,’’ must be incorporated into the evolving organism which is the faculty of vision. This process of digestion, whereby the perception becomes ‘‘embodied’’ and acquires ‘‘outness,’’ is however also a process of metaphorical transfer in which the part, or individual obscure perception, becomes identified with the whole, the perceptual ensemble which constitutes what the mind regards as the ‘‘object’’ which is perceived.138

DIGESTION IN COLERIDGE’S POETICS I have suggested that Wedgwood’s theories about perception made a significant contribution to Coleridge’s formulation of an organicist account of mental processes, whose emphasis on progress and development contrasted markedly with the emphasis on social convention to be found in the writings of Stewart and the Edinburgh Review circle. Importantly I have shown that Coleridgean organicism can be understood as a position that engages with elements of the thought of Berkeley, Erasmus Darwin (via his prote´ge´ Tom Wedgwood), and the Common Sense philosophers, rather than marking an entire rejection of the British empiricist tradition in favor of German Idealism and Naturphilosophie, though this is not to discount the possibility that Coleridge’s organicist turn may have been encouraged to some extent by his exposure to the German intellectual environment. Organicism, however, was already a prominent theme in British intellectual life before Coleridge went to Germany, as is shown by the oft-remarked organicism of Burke’s Re-

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flections on the Revolution in France.139 Coleridge’s appeal to an organicist model of language development in the face of Stewart’s linguistic conventionalism, as reflected in the well-known distinction between Imagination and Fancy in the Biographia Literaria,140 can be seen as replaying, on the level of linguistics and poetics, Burke’s political argument that a functioning political constitution is not to be established simply by the decontextualized discourse of legal prescription.141 In this context, there is a revealing contrast between Campbell’s attitude toward linguistic desynonymization in The Philosophy of Rhetoric and Coleridge’s description of desynonymization in a footnote to the Biographia Literaria, on which we have already remarked. Whereas Campbell compares desynonymization to the productivity gains created by the legally prescriptive method of agricultural enclosure,142 Coleridge emphasizes that desynonymization is an ongoing process of linguistic development, in terms invoking vitalist theories of organic activity in a way that reveals striking affinities with Wedgwood’s account of the process by which the mind recognizes a ‘‘perception.’’ Coleridge compares the formation of a multiplicity of distinct words out of the original ‘‘few simple sounds’’ of a savage language to the propagation of microorganisms through cell division. This biological analogy also underlies his following sketch of language growth: ‘‘Each new application, or excitement of the same sound, will call forth a different sensation, which cannot but affect the pronunciation. The after recollections of the sound, without the same vivid sensation, will modify it still further; till at length all trace of the original likeness is worn away.’’143 Coleridge’s rejection of the assumption of one-to-one correspondence between words and ideas characteristic of Lockean theories of language draws on the model supplied by Wedgwood’s account of visual perception. Coleridge is describing language as a process of continuing mental assimilation of the external world, in which an associative complex composed of language sound and the objects to which that sound refers the mind is constantly modified as a concomitant of language use itself. Just as in Wedgwood’s account what the mind conceives as a ‘‘perception’’ becomes subject to constant revision, so for Coleridge even the very ‘‘sound,’’ which constitutes a word, is constantly reimagined in a way that leads to the spawning of new associative complexes. It would be possible to trace the influence of the organicist model of perception derived from Wedgwood throughout Coleridge’s mature thought, for instance in On the Constitution of Church and State’s invocation of ‘‘Ideas’’ as living associative complexes that structure social relationships by assimilating them.144 To conclude this essay, however, I

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would like briefly to examine the role which medical discussions of digestion play in Coleridge’s critical vocabulary in the Biographia Literaria, in order to show the indebtedness of Coleridge’s concept of the imagination to Wedgwood’s strategy of applying the digestive paradigm to processes of perception. The affinity of Coleridge’s thought to these medical models was recognized by his early nineteenth-century contemporaries, as is shown by regular references to Coleridge in the fairly extensive popular medical literature dealing with ghosts and apparitions, which was published in the first half of the nineteenth century.145 The recognition that Coleridge is drawing on theories of digestion in his critical analyses can help illuminate his characterization of Wordsworth, as well as his attitudes to contemporary literature. The connection between early nineteenth century theories of digestion and Coleridge’s account of the imagination is apparent in the description of the origins of the ‘‘German drama’’ that forms part of the ‘‘Critique of Bertram’’ included by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria. Coleridge suggests that it is a combination of the ‘‘bloated style’’ of Hervey, the ‘‘strained thoughts’’ of Young and ‘‘the loaded sensibility, the minute detail, the morbid consciousness of every thought and feeling in the whole flux and reflux of the mind, in short the self-involution and dreamlike continuity of Richardson,’’ which had been rightly diagnosed by ‘‘the best critics in Germany’’ as ‘‘the mere cramps of weakness and orgasms of a sickly imagination.’’146 Coleridge’s vocabulary of bloatedness and straining suggests fairly graphically a case of indigestion and constipation, an implication that is also present in his reference to ‘‘cramps.’’ The more extended description of the ‘‘morbid consciousness’’ of Richardson also echoes medical discourse, in that it recalls the accounts of how intense thought (perhaps the ‘‘strained thoughts’’attributed to Young) can produce a heightened state of ‘‘irritability’’ in the brain, accounts to which we have seen Coleridge himself allude in his notebooks. Significantly Coleridge makes Richardsonian ‘‘morbid consciousness’’ a concomitant of a ‘‘dreamlike’’ state, invoking the medical explanation of hallucinations, which we have previously examined, a gesture that implies that the predilection for the Radcliffean ‘‘perpetual moonshine’’ apparent in tragedies like Maturin’s Bertram is a symptom of a disordered state at once of stomach and mind—the close relationship posited in early nineteenth-century medical discourse between mental and digestive derangement facilitates Coleridge’s conflation of the two here. Coleridge is diagnosing a state of ‘‘diseased taste’’ in the audience for Gothic drama (as well as mental disturbance in the author), but his in-

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vocation of the medical context I have outlined effectively revivifies the dead metaphor of ‘‘taste,’’ converting it into something altogether more physical than we would normally assume. The taste for Gothic drama is, Coleridge implies, a quasi-physical craving for inappropriate nourishment of the kind that we still associate with pregnancy. Coleridge reinforces this point slightly later when he describes the effect of the ‘‘jacobinism’’ he associates with Bertram as having ‘‘left the feelings callous to all the mild appeals, and craving alone for the grossest and most outrageous stimulants.’’ Coleridge’s use of the word ‘‘stimulants’’ alludes to the medical theories of John Brown, who had claimed that all diseases were conditions either of over- or understimulation, and as such should be treated with judicious application of ‘‘stimulants’’ (in practice, chiefly opium and alcohol). For Brown, over-stimulation led to a weakened state of nerves, which the physician should counter by judiciously applied further stimulation,147 and it is this state of nervous debility, in which the ‘‘feelings’’ have become ‘‘callous,’’ that Coleridge finds characteristic of the audience for Gothic drama. John Brown himself, however, had notoriously ended up addicted to opium and alcohol148 —indeed, Brunonian medical thinking was probably responsible for Coleridge’s own opium habit149—so that the resort of dramatists such as Maturin to the ‘‘grossest and most outrageous stimulants’’ in response to the demands of their audience is being represented by Coleridge as a botched Brunonian therapy: instead of the audience’s weakened nerves being treated with a homeopathic dose of mild stimulation, Gothic dramatists are exacerbating their spectators’ debilitated condition by resorting to overpowerful stimulants in a self-reinforcing spiral of addiction. The Brunonian model of overstimulation leading to a weakened nervous state which craves further stimulation recognizably underlies the medical accounts of mental overstrain as the cause of hallucination, which we have previously examined. The intense concentration required by writing is characterized in these accounts as an addictive state that eventually leads to the entire derangement of the mental faculties,150 a derangement of which hallucinations are at once a symptom and a potential cause insofar as they can lead to further mental excitement.151 Coleridge implies that Gothic drama, with its reliance on the supernatural, is like the state of hallucination, at once symptom and cause of mental debility. Where Coleridge differs from the medical writers I have referred to is in his insistence that this state of addiction to mental excitement is not a necessary price that the genius has to pay, but rather a symptom

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of lack of genius. This vindication of the essential healthiness of genius forms part of the significance of Coleridge’s appropriation of digestive analogies in order to describe the imagination. In the Biographia Literaria, Wordsworth is the exemplar of the superior digestive powers of genius, in a way that informs both the positive and the negative aspects of Coleridge’s characterization of his poetry. Coleridge’s wish to assert the healthiness of genius appears early on in the Biographia Literaria, in his argument against the common belief that ‘‘men of genius’’ are distinguished by a peculiar ‘‘irritability.’’ In the context of the medical discourses we have been examining, ‘‘irritability’’ does not just mean ordinary peevishness, but refers to the nervous excitability which John Brown had theorized. Coleridge’s argument that men of genius do not inhabit a state of nervous overstimulation is based on an underlying digestive analogy: ‘‘Where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections blend more easily and intimately with these ideal creations than with the objects of the senses; the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by things; and only then feels the requisite interest even for the most important events and accidents when they have passed into thoughts . . . The creative and self-sufficing power of absolute genius . . . rest[s] content between thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium of which their own living spirit supplies the substance.’’152 Coleridge’s claim that ‘‘feelings and affections blend more easily with . . . ideal creations than with the objects of the senses’’ implies that the imagination of men of genius performs the function of digesting their perceptions so that they can be assimilated into their mental constitution: ‘‘their own living spirit’’ is responsible for keeping them mentally nourished, in the same way as early nineteenth-century theories of digestion posited that the ‘‘vital principle’’ made possible assimilation of dead matter into the living substance of the body by suspending the normal chemical processes of decomposition. Imagination, then, for Coleridge enables the assimilation of perceptions into the living whole which is the mind. In these terms, genius can be equated to a superior power of mental digestion, a characterization that appears to be implicit in the way Coleridge describes Wordsworth’s distinctive ‘‘healthiness.’’ Arguing for Wordsworth’s inimitability, Coleridge claims that ‘‘without his depth of feeling and his imaginative power his sense would want its vital warmth and peculiarity; and without his strong sense, his mysticism would become sickly—mere fog, and dimness.’’153 The significant word ‘‘vital’’ suggests that the ‘‘depth of

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feeling’’ Coleridge attributes to Wordsworth is an agent of mental digestion and assimilation: this ‘‘feeling’’ would equate to the ‘‘irritability’’ of the nervous fibers that for contemporary medical theory was a manifestation of the ‘‘vital principle’’ and that enabled digestion. The digestive role played by Wordsworthian feeling, however, prevents it from degenerating into a state of nervous overstimulation. Wordsworth does not develop a ‘‘sickly’’ mysticism, or mere emotionalism, because his feelings have properly assimilated their objects and are not continually provoked by what they cannot absorb, as contemporary medicine suggested nervous irritability was provoked by indigestion.154 Coleridge’s comments on the digestive powers of Wordsworth’s mind can also help us interpret some of his more negative characterizations of Wordsworth’s poetry. Coleridge represents Wordsworth attacking the ‘‘sickly and fastidious feelings’’ that have led critics such as Jeffrey to attach ‘‘mean or ludicrous associations’’ to lower class characters such as the Pedlar in The Excursion.155 Coleridge’s use of the words ‘‘sickly and fastidious’’ implies, once again, an analogy with digestion: Wordsworth, as ventriloquized by Coleridge, is complaining that his critics have vitiated digestive systems that are unable to stomach the wholesome fare he is offering. Coleridge, however, suggests Wordsworth is being too demanding of his readers: what the assimilative powers of a Wordsworth can manage with ease, might nevertheless be too tough for the majority of his readers, because insufficiently refined by the poet. It might not be too fanciful to think that Coleridge, in making use of this digestive analogy, has in the back of his mind memories of the quality of food served in the Wordsworth household, which had been matter of complaint.156

NOTES 1. S. T. Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 4 vols., ed. Kathleen Coburn (London and Princeton: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Princeton University Press, 1957–90), entry no. 1304. 2. William Hatherell, ‘‘ ‘Words and Things’: Locke, Hartley and the Associationist Context for the Preface to Lyrical Ballads,’’ Romanticism 12, no. 3 (2006): 223–35. 3. Alan Barnes, ‘‘Coleridge, Tom Wedgwood and the Relationship between Time and Space in Midlands Enlightenment Thought,’’ British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 30, no. 2 (2007) (forthcoming). 4. Tom Wedgwood, Letter to Thomas Reid, 28515/115–40, Wedgwood Accumulation (University of Keele, 1790). 5. See Coleridge’s comments on the character of his wife, Notebooks, 979. 6. Thomas Wedgwood, ‘‘An Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Notion of Distance,

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Drawn up from Notes Left by the Late Thomas Wedgwood, Esq,’’ Quarterly Journal of Science and the Arts 3 (1817): 1–12. 7. Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 3–4. 8. Jennifer Ford, Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5–6. 9. Coleridge, Notebooks, 1313. 10. Neil Vickers, ‘‘Coleridge’s ‘Abstruse Researches,’ ’’ in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 156. 11. Ibid., 165–66. 12. Ibid., 163. 13. Dorothy Wordsworth, Journals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 87, 137. 14. ‘‘So, we’ll go no more a roving,’’ l.6, in Lord Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 7 vols., ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979–80), 4:109–10. 15. Crichton, 2:29–33. 16. Frederick Burwick, ‘‘Sir Charles Bell and the Vitalist Controversy in the Early Nineteenth Century,’’ in The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, ed. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 109–30; Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, 44–51. 17. Ian Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 123–35. 18. John Abernethy, Physiological Lectures (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1825), 8–10. 19. Ibid., 174–75. 20. Ibid., 162. 21. Wylie, Young Coleridge, 126–28. 22. Dendy, 105–6. 23. William Tattersall, A Brief View of the Anatomical Arguments for the Doctrine of Materialism; Occasioned by Dr Ferriar’s Argument Against It (London: Johnson, 1795), 11. 24. Abernethy, Physiological Lectures, 64–65, 174–76. 25. Abercrombie, Intellectual Powers, 19–29; Robert MacNish, The Philosophy of Sleep (Glasgow: McPhun, 1830), 54; Dendy, 260. 26. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 27. George Rousseau, ‘‘ ‘Brainomania’: Brain, Mind and Soul in the Long Eighteenth Century,’’ British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 30, no. 2 (2007) (forthcoming). 28. Joseph Butler, Works; 2 vols., ed. W. F. Gladstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), 1:25. 29. Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago (London: Macmillan, 1886), 304–10. 30. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History (London: Ward, Lock and Bowden, nd), e.g., 448, 466, 477 (vol. 3, book 2, chaps. 1, 7; book 3, chap. 1). 31. Ibid., 477–78 (vol. 3, book 3, chap 1). 32. Kristin Guest, ‘‘Dyspeptic Reactions: Thomas Carlyle and the Byronic Tempter,’’ in Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism, ed. Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004), 149–52. 33. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge,

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1994); Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002). 34. Ford, Coleridge on Dreaming, 124–26. 35. Dugald Stewart, ‘‘Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Reid, D. D,’’ in Thomas Reid, Works, 7th ed., ed. William Hamilton (Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart, 1872), 19. 36. Stewart, Works, 5:175. 37. Thomas Reid, Works, 146–47. 38. Stewart, Works, 5:173–74; Thomas Brown, Inquiry Into the Relation of Cause and Effect (Edinburgh: Constable, 1818), 22–24. 39. S. T. Coleridge, The Friend, 2 vols., ed. Barbare E. Rooke (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 2:86. 40. Stewart, Works, 2:246–51. 41. Ibid., 2:177–82. 42. Cf. David Hume, Philosophical Works, 4 vols., ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (London: Macmillan, 1875), 3:97n. 43. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1: 38–39. 44. Coleridge, Notebooks, 4046. 45. Collini, Winch, and Burrow, 25. 46. Robert Southey, review of Propositions for ameliorating the Condition of the Poor etc., by P. Colquhoun, Quarterly Review 8 (1812): 337. 47. Ibid., 342. 48. Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures: Or, an Exposition of the Scientific, Moral, and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain, 3rd ed., Rev. F. L. Simmons (London, 1861), 278–80; Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols., ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 1:19. 49. Derrida, Specters of Marx. 50. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 342. 51. Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 52. Edward Irving draws attention to this tendency in early nineteenth-century Evangelical theology, in The Doctrine of the Incarnation Opened, in Collected Writings, ed. G. Carlyle (London: Strahan, 1865), 126–27. 53. Harriet Harris, Fundamentalism and Evangelicals, 118–20. 54. S. T. Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, 2 vols., ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1995), 1134. 55. Coleridge, The Friend, 2:114–21. 56. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1:146–51. 57. S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–19 on Literature, 2 vols., ed. R. A. Foakes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 1:540. 58. Samuel Hibbert, Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions (Edinburgh, 1825); Dendy, David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic Addressed to Sir Walter Scott (London: Murray, 1832). 59. Dendy, 105–6. 60. Ibid., 34–35. 61. Hibbert, Sketches, 62–63.

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62. Brown’s argument was not merely an abstract exercise in conceptual clarification, but had important practical implications given the status of his Inquiry as a contribution to the controversy surrounding John Leslie’s appointment to a chair in mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. Leslie, a personal acquaintance of Coleridge (Coleridge, Notebooks, 1043n, 1044n), was widely suspected of atheism, and his opponents had taken advantage of Leslie’s apparent advocacy of a Humean model of causality in his Essay on Heat to block the appointment, arguing that this demonstrated Leslie’s religious scepticism and hence his unfitness to be entrusted with the education of youth (Morrell, 78, 76). Brown’s defence of the Humean model, in which causality was defined as implying no more than the ‘‘constant conjunction’’ of phenomena, as appropriate to the epistemological requirements of science, and his claim that use of this model had no consequences for theological doctrines owing to differences in their epistemological foundation, were intended to refute the arguments of Leslie’s opponents (Thomas Brown, Inquiry Into the Relation of Cause and Effect, 3rd ed. [Edinburgh: Constable, 1818], 15–22, 108–32, 140). Brown’s paradigm of the ‘‘separate spheres’’ to which religious and scientific arguments belonged (Cause and Effect, 485–86) also implied more generally that religious authorities shouldn’t have any right of veto over academic appointments, and that academic positions should not be regarded merely as adjuncts to clerical office, both of which were contentious political issues underlying the Leslie controversy (Morrell, 79, 81). 63. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature, 3–4, 50. 64. Coleridge, The Friend, 1:423 and 423n. 65. Brown in the Inquiry is rejecting the Berkeleyan position of Reid (Thomas Brown, Cause and Effect, 61, 121). 66. Thomas Reid, Works, 147–82. For Reid’s interest in science, see Thomas Reid, Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation: Papers Relating to the Life Sciences, ed. Paul Wood (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995). 67. S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, 6 vols., ed. H. J. Jackson and George Whalley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980–2001), 4:581. 68. Ibid., 4:596–97, 599, 605. 69. As commentators have pointed out, the term ‘‘Common Sense’’ within Thomas Reid’s philosophy reflects the ambiguity that I am suggesting is inherent in the Common Sense tradition in general, in that sometimes it refers to a social consensus, and sometimes to intuitive principles of knowledge (Cuneo and Woudenberg, 19). From Reid’s own providentialist perspective, social consensus is only possible on the basis on divinely ordained intuitions (Thomas Reid, Works, 422), so the two meanings of ‘‘common sense’’ are complementary. Brown’s Humean approach to causality, on the other hand, arguably creates a tension between these two meanings of ‘‘common sense.’’ 70. Douglas Lane Patey, Probability and Literary Form: Philosophical Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 71. Coleridge, Shorter Works, 1:530–32, 532n; Abernethy, Physiological Lectures, 32–35. 72. Thomas Reid, Works, 222, 472, 474. 73. Stewart, Works, 2:47–48. 74. Ibid., 2:46–47. 75. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, 2 vols., ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:88–89. 76. Stewart, Works, 2:54–55, 173–75 Stewart’s assumption that an originary imma-

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terial intuition was corrupted by its embodiment in material metaphors can be parallelled in William Warburton’s The Divine Legation of Moses (in Collected Works, fac. ed., 13 vols., introd. by Gavin Budge [Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2005], cf. 3:266–67), to whose argument it is fundamental. 77. Stewart, 2:54; 5:173; 2:193–95. In Common Sense philosophy, linguistic propriety embodies originary preverbal intuitions (Reid, 222–24, 448–49, 460). An appeal to the authority of linguistic usage is not merely an appeal to the force of arbitrary convention, since ‘‘convention’’ itself is understood to be based in a providentially ordered Nature. Stewart’s arguments about the relationship between the capability for linguistic abstraction and the development of commercial society (2:209–12), however, make it possible to read him as appealing to the authority of arbitrary, rather than naturally grounded, conventions, and such a reading could adduce Stewart’s rejection of Reid’s appeal to the evidence of universal linguistic structures (5:154) in its support. I am arguing that Coleridge read, or perhaps misread, Stewart in this way. 78. S. T. Coleridge, Collected Letters, 6 vols., ed. E. L. Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–66), 1:626. 79. Coleridge, Letters, 1:626. For a discussion which exemplifies Stewart’s eclectic approach to philosophy see Works, 2:182–83; Stewart justifies this historical, rather than systematic approach at Works, 2:343–44. 80.Kathleen Holcomb, ‘‘Campbell, George (1719–96),’’ in The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century British Philosophers, (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999), 175. 81. Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1:362–68. 82. Ibid., 2:113. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., 2:124. 85. Ibid., 2:126. 86. Ibid., 2:124. 87. W. S. Walker, ‘‘Review of Prometheus Unbound,’’ in Romantic Bards and British Reviewers: A Selected Edition of the Contemporary Reviews of the Works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats and Shelley, ed. John O. Hayden (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 168–80. 88. Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1:331. 89. James C. McKusick, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 91–97. 90. Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1:423. 91. Ibid. 92. Cf. Jeremy Bentham, ‘‘The Book of Fallacies,’’ in Works, 11 vols., ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: Tait, 1843), 2:418. 93. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1: 82–83. 94. Cf. Jerome Christensen, Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 140; Tim Fulford, Coleridge’s Figurative Language, (Bosingstore: Macmillan, 1991) 21–22, 119. In some ways, Coleridge is reverting here to the valorization of linguistic structures that is characteristic of Reid’s version of Common Sense philosophy (cf. Thomas Reid, Works, 222–24), although the emphasis on metaphor is new. 95. Stewart, Works, 2:193–95. 96. Thomas Brown, Cause and Effect, 111–18 In a discussion of Coleridge’s disagreement with Lawrence over questions of scientific definition, Trevor Levere notes that

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Lawrence was influenced by Brown’s Humean account of scientific causality, Poetry Realized in Nature, 50. 97. Coleridge, Shorter Works, 1:530–32, 532n As Wylie points out, Newton’s conception of ‘‘aether’’ possessed an ambiguity similar to that which Coleridge detects in Abernethy’s invocation of ‘‘electricity,’’ Young Coleridge, 30–32. 98. Coleridge, Lay Sermons, 72–73. 99. Stewart, Works, 2:203–4. 100. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1: 304. 101. Ibid., 1:146–51. 102. Ibid., 1:232n. 103. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–19 on Literature, 1:545. 104. Ibid., 1:131. 105. Ibid., 2:138–40. 106. Ibid., 1:228. 107. Ibid., 1:125. 108. Coleridge, The Friend, 1:46–47. 109. Dendy, 34–35. 110. Coleridge’s insistence at many points in the Biographia Literaria that the imagination is not an essentially deceptive faculty (present for example, in his well-known definition of ‘‘poetic faith’’ as ‘‘the willing suspension of disbelief,’’ Biographia, 2:6) seems to be directed against Stewart’s view that the imagination is always a source of delusion (cf. Works, 2: 150–51). 111. Coleridge, The Friend, 2:115–17. 112. Dendy, 80. 113. Coleridge, The Friend, 2:117–18. 114. Ibid., 2:118. 115. Darwin, 1:24. 116. Burwick, ‘‘Sir Charles Bell,’’ 109. 117. Cf. Abercrombie, Intellectual Powers, 342–43. 118. Berkeley, 1:203–4, 210–13, 225n. 119. Ford, Coleridge on Dreaming, 118–19. 120. See A. A. Luce’s editorial commentary in Berkeley, Essay,1:149–50. 121. Stewart, Works, 2:16. Reid’s discussion of the relationship between touch and sight is significantly more ambivalent on the question of whether visual perception of distance is derived from touch (Works, 146). 122. Thomas Reid, Works, 132. 123. Berkeley, Essay, 3:305–8; Thomas Reid, Works, 146. 124. Thomas Reid, Works, 237, 515–18, 605. 125. Thomas Wedgwood, ‘‘Enquiry Into Our Notion of Distance,’’ 3–4. 126. Berkeley, Essay, 1:186. 127. Coleridge, Letters, 2:706. 128. Coleridge, Notebooks, 4046. 129. Thomas Wedgwood, ‘‘Enquiry Into Our Notion of Distance,’’ 2. 130. Thomas Reid, Works, 146. 131. Berkeley, Essay, 1:215–16, 229–31. 132. Thomas Reid, Works, 127–28. 133. Joseph Butler, Works, 2 vols., ed. W. E. Gladstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), 1:25 (chap. 1, sect. 6).

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134. Thomas Wedgwood, ‘‘Enquiry Into Our Notion of Distance,’’ 6–8. 135. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–19 on Literature, 1:225. 136. Thomas Wedgwood, ‘‘Enquiry Into Our Notion of Distance,’’ 6–7. 137. Thomas Wedgwood, ‘‘Enquiry Into Our Notion of Distance,’’ 7–8. Wedgwood’s argument that it is possible to acquire more accurate perceptions is paralleled in Thomas Reid, Works, 185. 138. Strictly speaking, the identification of part with whole is metonymy rather than metaphor—but in the context of Coleridgean theories of the symbol, it is arguable that all metaphors turn out to be metonymies, in that they all form parts of a higher immaterial truth, cf. McFarland, ‘‘Involute and Symbol,’’ 42–43. 139. Burke, Reflections, 72. 140. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1: 301–5. 141. Burke, Reflections, 86–89. 142. Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1:423. 143. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1: 82–83. 144. S. T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 15–16. 145. Dendy, 4, 229, 232–33. 146. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2: 211. 147. Gu¨nter B. Risse, ‘‘Brunonian Therapeutics: New Wine in Old Bottles?’’ in Brunonianism in Britain and Europe, (Medical History, Supplement no. 8), ed. W. Y. Bynum and Roy Porter (1988), 48. 148. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Brunonianism in Britain and Europe, (Medical History, Supplement no. 8), ed. W. Y. Bynum and Roy Porter (1988), ix. 149. Ford, Coleridge on Dreaming, 29. 150. Crichton, 2:29–33. 151. Ibid., 2:65. 152. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1: 31–32. 153. Ibid., 2:142. 154. Crichton, 2:29–33. 155. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2:130. 156. Juliet Barker, Wordsworth: A Life (Harmondsworth: Viking, 2000), 162.

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Contributors GAVIN BUDGE is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Hertfordshire. He has published a monograph, Charlotte M Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel (2007), articles and chapters on the origins of the Whitechapel Gallery, the Fleshly School controversy, BulwerLytton and Polidori, and has edited a special issue of the British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies on ‘‘Science and the Midlands Enlightenment.’’ He is currently working on a forthcoming study, entitled Romanticism, Medicine and the Gothic. CAIRNS CRAIG is Glucksman Professor of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen, and Director of the AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies there. He previously held a chair in Scottish and Modern Literature at the University of Edinburgh, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the British Academy. He was general editor of the four-volume History of Scottish Literature (1987–89) and of the determinations series published between 1987 and 1997. His books on Scottish issues include Out of History (1996) and The Modern Scottish Novel (1999). He has also written extensively on modernist literature, most notably in Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry (1982). His study of Associationism and the Literary Imagination was published in 2007. ALEXANDER DICK is Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He has written articles and chapters on William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Jane Austen, and Romantic period drama. He is the editor of Indigenes and Exoticism (2005), Spheres of Action: Performance in Romantic Culture (with Angela Esterhammer, forthcoming), and Theory and Practice in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Writing between Philosophy and Literature (forthcoming). He is currently completing a book on money, literature, and the search for the standard of value in Romantic period Britain. NIGEL LEASK is Regius Chair of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow. He has published widely on Romantic literature, orientalism, and travel writing. He is the author of British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (1992) and Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770– 1840: ‘From an Antique Land’ (2002). He has recently co-edited (with David Simpson and Peter de Bolla) a collection of essays dedicated to John Barrell

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entitled Land, Nation and Culture, 1740–1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste (2004) and is currently preparing (with Philip Connell) another co-edited volume entitled British Romanticism and Popular Culture, forthcoming. He is currently working on a book entitled Scottish Pastoral: Robert Burns and Romanticism. In addition to Glasgow and Cambridge, he has held teaching appointments at the University of Bologna, Italy, and UNAM, Mexico City, and has lectured widely in Europe, the Americas, and India. FIONA PRICE is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Chichester. She has published on eighteenth-century aesthetics, Romantic women’s writing, and Scottish Common Sense philosophy. She is editor of Jane Porter’s novel, The Scottish Chiefs (1810; 2007) and is currently working on the monograph Revolutions in Taste: Aesthetics, Politics and Women’s Writing 1773–1818, forthcoming.

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Index Abercrombie, John, 16, 99, 163 Abernethy, John, 15, 144, 153, 157–58 Abrams, M. H., 11, 13, 23–24, 30 addiction, 173 Adorno, Theodor, 14 Alison, Archibald, 14, 25, 47–49, 53–59, 68, 100 allegory, 21 Ashton, Rosemary, 23 associationism, 68, 106, 145, 154, 175; and Common Sense philosophy, 13, 25, 27; and education, 89–93, 95–100; and determinism, 76–77; and empiricist psychology, 46–61; and fashion, 102–4; and perception, 164–66, 169–71; and Romanticism, 24, 43–44 attention, 99–101 Austen, Jane, 132 Bacon, Francis, 65, 71 Baier, Annette C., 58 Baillie, Joanna, 97, 105–7 Bain, Alexander, 51 Balfour, Ian, 125 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 90 Barnes, Alan, 23, 142, 163 Baudelaire, Charles, 12 Baumann, Peter, 89 Beattie, James, 16, 18, 22–24, 42, 65, 78, 88 Beatty, Arthur, 24 Beddoes, Thomas, 16 Bell, Charles, 16, 163 Bentham, Jeremy, 50, 156–57 Berkeley, George, 65, 92, 155, 158; and Common Sense philosophy, 22, 27–29, 146, 148, 152; theory of perception, 161, 164–70 Bible: plenary inspiration of, 149

Blackstone, William, 112–13, 116, 123, 136 Blakemore, Steven, 123 body, 21; and Common Sense philosophy, 16–17, 27; embodied condition of thought, 149, 155, 159–61, 163–68, 170; and mind, 142–43, 145–46, 152–53 Boehme, Jacob, 149, 158, 165 Bohls, Elizabeth A., 97 Bolla, Peter de, 104 Boole, George, 15 Boston, Thomas, 66 Boswell, James, 16, 77, 79 Bourdieu, Pierre, 97 Brewster, David, 15 Brown, Daniel, 15 Brown, John, 66, 173–74 Brown, Kirsten, 17 Brown, Lancelot: ‘‘Capability,’’ 96 Brown, Thomas, 12, 31; on causality, 14, 151–53, 157, 160, 168; dualism of, 146– 48, 155 Brunonianism, 16, 173 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 19 Bunyan, John, 66 Burke, Edmund, 147, 170–71; and Common Sense philosophy, 14, 30, 68; on the English constitution, 20, 134, 136–37; and the Revolution debate, 71, 113, 122–27; on the sublime, 29 Burns, Robert, 16, 26, 65–70, 72–76, 79–83 Butler, Joseph, 29, 145, 165, 168 Butler, Marilyn, 107 Butts, Robert E., 15 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 80, 143 calvinism, 66, 76 Campbell, George, 27–28, 31, 88, 92–93, 156–57, 164, 171

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Carlyle, Thomas, 14, 18, 22, 30, 75, 81, 146 Castle, Terry, 145 causality, 41–42, 146, 151–53, 155, 157, 168 Chalmers, Thomas, 29 Chase, Cynthia, 41 Choi, Julie, 89–90 Clark, David L., 15, 17 Clark, Timothy, 24 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 31, 69, 75, 79, 102, 169; and associationism, 47–54, 53–57, 166; on the Bible, 14, 149; Biographia Literaria, 26, 72, 83, 172–75; and Common Sense philosophy, 17, 23–25, 27, 152–53; on genius, 16, 83, 174; health problems of, 143–44; and idealism, 22, 41, 43, 78, 81; on the imagination, 13, 44–46, 60–61, 91; on language, 155–58, 171; and Marx, Karl, 148; on perception, 28–29; on the symbol, 21; and the supernatural, 18, 146–47, 159– 63, 167; and Wedgwood, Tom, 142, 163–65, 168, 170; on Wordsworth, William, 174–75; and vitalism, 15 Collins, Anthony, 29 Common Sense philosophy, 12–26, 28– 31, 81; and attention, 99–100; Berkeleyan position of, 146, 148, 155, 163; and Edmund Burke, 68; and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 152–53, 165, 170; and contract, 121–22; dualism of, 145; and genius, 72; and German Idealism, 43, 65; and Elizabeth Hamilton, 90–92; and language, 154, 156; and perception, 95, 103–4, 107, 164, 167; and radicalism, 88–90 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, 68 Connell, Philip, 70–72 consideration, 116, 119, 123, 135 contract, 19–20, 26, 113–14, 116–29, 131, 134–35, 137 convention, 27, 118–19, 125, 131, 135, 157–58, 165, 167–68, 170–71 Copenhaver, Brian and Rebecca, 12 Cottom, Daniel, 97 counter-enlightenment, 29, 65

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Cousin, Victor, 12 Craig, Cairns, 22, 24–25 Crichton, Alexander, 16, 143–45 Currie, James, 15–16, 26, 68–74, 76–83 D’Israeli, Isaac, 81 Dallas, Eneas Sweetland, 14 Darwin, Charles, 17 Darwin, Erasmus, 16, 23, 142, 146, 163– 64, 170 Davie, George, 26, 65–66 deconstruction, 13, 17, 146 Dendy, Walter Cooper, 150–51, 153, 160–61 Derrida, Jacques, 17, 20, 148 Descartes, Rene´, 65, 92 desynonymization, 156–57, 171 Dick, Alex, 19–20, 26 Dickens, Charles, 136 drama, 158, 160, 173 dualism, 19, 21, 145–47, 155 economics, 18–19, 71, 122, 128, 132–33, 147–48, 156 Edinburgh Review, 31, 147–48, 163, 170 education, 90–91, 93, 96, 98, 100, 107 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 12 empiricism, 28, 137, 142, 170; and Common Sense philosophy, 14, 18, 94; and idealism, 11, 24, 41; and imagination, 46, 61 Empson, William, 73 Engell, James, 24, 43–44 Engels, Friedrich, 97 Esterhammer, Angela, 18 evangelicalism, 29, 148–49 Fabricant, Carole 97 fashion, 97–100, 103–7 Ferguson, Adam, 72 Ferrier, James Frederick, 24 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 41 Ford, Jennifer, 142, 146, 164 French Revolution, 68, 71, 88, 90, 113– 14, 122–27, 130, 136–37, 146 Fundamentalism, 29 Fuseli, John Henry, 14

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gender, 134, 138 genius, 16, 27, 69–70, 72, 75, 80–81, 83, 157, 173–74 Gillman, James, 144 Gilpin, William, 103 Godwin, William, 71, 88, 95, 101, 107, 124–25 gothic, 173 Hallam, Arthur Henry, 49–50 Hamann, Johann Georg, 12 Hamilton, Elizabeth, 25–28, 31, 88–91, 93–107 Hamilton, Paul, 24 Hamilton, William, 12, 22, 52 Harrison, Anthony, 30 Hartley, David, 47–49, 76–77, 142, 145, 154 Hays, Mary, 95 Hazlitt, William, 18, 61 health, 17, 143, 162, 174 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 13, 20, 41 Henning, Martha L., 28 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 12 Holmes, Richard, 49 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 15 Horkheimer, Max, 14 Hume, David, 11, 18, 19, 65, 113, 147; associationism of, 44–49, 58–59, 76–77; on causality, 14, 153, 157; on contract, 20, 118–21, 123, 125; determinism of, 78–80; on imagination, 54–55, 60–61; Kant’s critique of, 41–43; Reid’s critique of, 21, 25, 28, 89, 91–92, 94, 131, 154, 168; skepticism of, 13, 20, 22, 71– 72, 82, 88; on taste, 73 Hunter, John, 144–45 Hutcheson, Francis, 78, 92 Hutton, Richard Holt, 29 idealism, 11, 15, 17, 21–24, 28, 46, 48, 54, 81, 165, 170 Imagination, 91, 95, 101–3; associationist theories of, 47, 54–55, 59–61; Coleridge’s biological model of, 142, 171– 72, 174; Coleridge’s conception of, 13, 43–46, 49, 152–53

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INDX

indigestion, 142, 144–49, 155, 162, 172, 175 Irving, Edward, 29 Jackson, Noe¨l, 25, 28 Jacobi, Freidrich Heinrich, 13 Jeffrey, Francis, 27, 56–59, 74–75, 175 Jessop, Ralph, 22, 66, 75 Johnson, Samuel, 16 Kallich, Martin, 93 Kames, Henry Home Lord, 93 Kant, Immanuel, 13, 15, 17–18, 22–24, 41–46, 54–55, 59–61, 65–66, 78 Keats, John, 61, 155 Keble, John, 14, 29 Kelly, Gary, 88, 93 Kingsley, Charles, 146 Klancher, Jon, 83 Knight, William Angus, 23 Kramnick, Jonathan Brody, 97 Krell, David F., 17 Kuehn, Manfred, 22, 65 language: in associationism, 53; in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 26, 171; in Common Sense philosophy, 17, 20, 28–29, 120, 156–58, 167–68; in law, 113, 118; and print culture, 147; in Revolution debate, 122–25; in William Wordsworth, 27, 82 Lavatar, Johann Kaspar, 16 law, 19–20, 26, 112–13, 115–19, 122, 125, 129, 135–36, 156, 171 Law, Jules David, 28–29 Lawrence, Thomas, 15, 144, 153 Leask, Nigel, 16, 26 Leopardi, Giacomo, 12 Leslie, John, 14 Levere, Trevor, 142, 152 Locke, John, 50, 65, 92, 126, 167–68, 171 Luther, Martin, 149, 161–63 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, 13 Mackenzie, Henry, 68, 72, 83 Mackintosh, James, 68 madness, 79, 143, 145, 161–63, 172–73 Malebranche, Nicolas, 92 Man, Paul de, 21, 28

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Manning, Susan, 80 Mansfield, William Murray, 20, 116–17, 125 marriage, 134–36 Marx, Karl, 20–21, 97, 148 Maturin, Charles, 159, 172 Maurice, Frederick Dennison, 29 McCulloch, John Ramsay, 115–16 McGann, Jerome, 41 medicine, 15–17, 70, 79, 142–43, 145, 147–49, 152, 155, 162–63, 172–74 Mee, Jon, 69, 82 metaphor, 29, 147–48, 150, 153–61, 163– 64, 166–68, 170 Mill, James, 47, 51 Mill, John Stuart, 17, 22, 50–53, 115 Millar, John, 68 Miller, William, 115 Milnes, Tim, 25 More, Hannah, 89 Morton, Timothy, 21 Muirhead, John Henry, 48 Myers, Mitzi, 89 nationalism, 13–14, 30, 61 naturalism, 30, 168 nerves, 16, 80, 144, 159–60, 162, 173–75 New Historicism, 13 Newman, John Henry, 14, 29–30 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 17, 21 Olson, Richard, 15 Oswald, James, 42, 65, 78 Paine, Thomas, 70, 113, 124–26 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 12 perception, 30, 95, 142–43, 146, 152, 161– 64, 166–72 performativity, 17–18, 21, 118, 125 Phillipson, Nicholas, 67 Pocock, J. G. A., 70 Poe, Edgar Allan, 12 Polidori, John, 19 Porter, Roy, 12 Price, Fiona, 25–28, 31 Price, Richard, 89, 124–25 Priestley, Joseph, 15, 17, 47, 65–66, 76– 80, 145, 154 print culture, 147

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progress, 72–73, 157 property, 112–13, 115–17, 128 Proust, Marcel, 12 providentialism, 30, 104, 161, 168 Quincey, Thomas de, 15, 81 Radcliffe, Ann, 172 radicalism, 31, 67–69, 80, 88–92, 98, 101, 107, 147–48, 156, 164 Rajan, Tilottama, 15–17 Rathbone, William, 70 rationalism, 14–15, 18, 150, 152–53, 160– 61, 163, 165 Redfield, Marc, 19 Reid, Ian, 21 Reid, Thomas, 15, 16, 68, 69, 72, 82, 99, 104, 113, 142; and Burke, Edmund, 29; appeal to Common Sense, 14, 20, 26, 67, 96; and Common Sense school, 12, 18, 22–24, 30–31, 42, 107, 148, 165; critique of Hume, David, 21, 25, 28, 47– 48, 65–66, 88–89, 91–92, 94, 118, 154; on perception, 100, 152, 167–68; reviewed by James Currie, 76–80; on social nature of language, 17, 120–23 religion, 18, 29, 79, 151–52, 157, 160–61, 163, 168 Repton, Humphrey, 96 rhetoric, 28–30, 113 Richardson, Alan, 11 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 13 Roberts, Daniel Sanjev, 81–82 Robertson, Frederick William, 16 Robertson, John, 70 Roscoe, William, 70, 72 Rousseau, George, 145 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 28, 96 Rushton, Edward, 70 Ruskin, John, 14, 28, 30, 51 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 17, 23–24, 41 science, 14–15, 25, 151–53, 155, 157, 168 Scotland, 81 Scott, Walter, 14, 20, 149, 152, 160–61 Shakespeare, William, 149, 159–60 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 31, 156 Shepherd, William, 70

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Sheridan, Thomas, 29 signs, 28, 52, 58, 95, 120, 156, 158, 164, 167–68 Simpson, David, 12, 20, 24–25, 88, 122 skepticism, 91–100, 104, 120, 151, 154 Smith, Adam, 19, 67, 71–72, 115 Smith, Charlotte, 19, 113–15, 117–18, 122, 126–37 Southey, Robert, 81, 148 spectrality, 19–21, 125, 133–34, 145–49, 152, 159, 161, 163–64, 172 Spencer, Herbert, 17 Stewart, Dugald, 30–31; and associationism, 44, 164; and Thomas Brown,151; and Robert Burns, 67–70; and Common Sense school, 12, 14, 146–48, 163, 170; and James Currie, 71; and economics, 18–19, 71; and genius, 72; and Elizabeth Hamilton, 26–27; and Francis Jeffrey, 74; on Immanuel Kant, 43; and language, 82, 150, 153–58; on perception, 167–68; and Thomas Reid, 47–48; rationalism of, 165; and Walter Scott, 152 stimulants, 16, 80, 82, 106, 173 Stirling, James Hutchison, 41–43, 45, 59 supernatural, 18–19, 145, 149–53, 155, 159–61, 163, 167 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 158, 165 symbol, 30, 45, 56, 61, 152, 160–61, 163–64 taste, 27, 43, 48–49, 72–73, 89–91, 95–98, 100–103, 105–7, 172–73 Tennyson, Alfred, 49 theology, 30, 149, 151–53, 165, 168 Toland, John, 29 Tooke, John Horne, 146

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INDX

touch, 142, 164–69 Tractarianism, 29 Tracy, Destutt de, 12 Transcendentalism, 12, 53 Turk, Christopher, 51 Tuveson, Ernest, 14 typology, 14, 30 utilitarianism, 22, 24, 104 Vickers, Neil, 25, 143 vitalism, 30, 142, 144–45, 148, 152–53, 155–58, 168, 171, 174–75 Warburton, William, 29 Watts, Isaac, 99 Wedgwood, Tom, 23, 29, 142–43, 149, 163–72 Weineck, Silke-Maria, 21 Wheatstone, Charles, 15 Whewell, William, 15 White, Deborah Elise, 18 will, 16, 79, 99–100 Winch, Donald, 71 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 89–91, 94–95, 101–2, 107 women’s writing, 28, 137 Wordsworth, William, 49, 50, 79, 143; and associationism, 53–54; and Robert Burns, 75–76, 81–83,; and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 41, 152, 172, 174–75; and economics, 148; on fashion, 97; and idealism, 21–23, 43; and imagination, 91; ‘‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,’’ 16, 26– 27, 72, 81–83, 106–7 Yeo, Richard, 15 Yonge, Charlotte M., 28

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