Scottish Common Sense Research Articles

‘The Solution of the Enigma of the Universe’: J.F. Ferrier on Heraclitus

A conspicuous trend among physicists in the later twentieth century was the rapid and quite unexpected development of theories that had at the century’s outset generally been associated with Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and Karl Popper (1902-1994), conspicuously in the work of Nobel prize-winner Illya Prigogine. 1 This was now usually termed chaos theory, and was closely allied to concepts of nonlinearity, fractality, and complexity, and has notable ramifications in cosmology and the philosophy of Time. Prigogine himself acknowledged his philosophical predecessors, above all in Bergson and ultimately in Heraclitus. Evidence of the specifically modern continuities of this trend or development can be traced before Bergson to an interpretation of Heraclitus and the Philosophy of Time written by a powerful Scottish Common Sense philosopher of the mid nineteenth century, James Frederick Ferrier. In what follows it will be shown how, very much contrary to his normal tendency of thinking, Ferrier arrived at this interpretation, and just how it relates to Bergson and thence to Prigogine.

Scottish Common Sense and Nineteenth-Century American Law: A Critical Appraisal

One overriding concern I have with Susanna Blumenthal's insightful and stimulating article, “The Mind of a Moral Agent: Scottish Common Sense and the Problem of Responsibility in Nineteenth-Century American Law,” is whether there is anything sufficiently distinctive about Scottish Common Sense philosophy that justifies the role Blumenthal ascribes to it. In a representative passage, she writes:Common Sense philosophy left would-be “moral managers” with a puzzle. If rational and moral faculties were innate and universal, what explained the great conflicts among men concerning matters of belief, manners, and morals … leading some to commit acts that were … patently irrational or downright evil? And to the extent that therewasa common sense about the dictates of reason, propriety, and moral sense, why did some individuals act in defiance of them?

The Mind of a Moral Agent: Scottish Common Sense and the Problem of Responsibility in Nineteenth-Century American Law

Addressing an audience of medical students in 1810, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush recounted a recent call he had made, in consultation with a Dr. Physick, to the residence of “a lady in this city, equally admired for her amiable virtues and elegant accomplishments.” As they were seated in the parlor, she related her medical complaint: “I am blessed with one of the best of husbands, and a family of promising children, whom I love most affectionately,” she began, “and yet, in the paroxysms of my disease, and with the perfect exercise of my reason, I wish for an ax, that I might split open their heads, and lay them all dead at my feet.” Upon hearing this terrible confession, Rush was convinced that he was faced with a case of “moral derangement.” By this, he meant “that state of mind in which the passions act involuntarily through the instrumentality of the will,” a condition he linked to an underlying physical disorder. Since this form of derangement was most clearly manifest in the commission of crime, Rush explained, it was invariably mistaken for ordinary depravity in courts of law, with tragic results. In fact, he reckoned that if his patient were to succumb to her morbid impulses, her fate would be sealed: all her virtues and accomplishments would prove insufficient to save her “from expiating her disease by an ignominious death.” Rush further observed that there was cause for concern on the civil side of the docket as well, for it appeared that the morally deranged were left free to make wholly unnatural dispositions of their estates, to the great injury of their unoffending families. In light of this state of affairs, he charged his students with broader “objects and duties” than simply caring for their patients. It was, he insisted, a physician's civic obligation to extend the benefits of his science “to the protection of property and life” through the cultivation of a distinctly “medical jurisprudence.”

Metaphysics, Moral Sense, and the Pragmatism of the Law

The authors of these insightful and stimulating commentaries all express skepticism about the role I assign to the Scottish Common Sense philosophy in my historical analysis, though their reasons for doing so are strikingly at odds with each other. Sarah Seo and John Witt concede the importance of the Common Sense philosophy at a theoretical level, even as they call attention to certain “competitor theories” of human nature, noting that these darker views of the self may have proved more influential in the framing of the American constitution. However, they go on to contend that all of this philosophizing about the human mind was actually of little consequence in the everyday adjudication of civil and criminal liability, as judges found more practical means of resolving “the otherwise intractable questions of moral responsibility” left unanswered by the Scottish philosophy. John Mikhail, by contrast, appears to be far more sanguine about the tractability of these questions, from a philosophical standpoint, going so far as to suggest that they were more or less resolved by British moralists before the Scottish Common Sense school even came into being. What truly set the Common Sense philosophers apart from their predecessors, and ought to determine their place in this history of ideas, Mikhail concludes, was the manner in which they contributed to the scientific process of tracing out the inner structure and innate capacities of “the moral mind”—a topic that is currently of intense interest in the cognitive and brain sciences.

The Measure of Mind

The Measure of Mind J. David Hoeveler (bio) John Carson. The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750–1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. xvii + 401 pp. Charts, notes, and index. $39.50. It is a simple proposition: democratic and republican governments function on the principle that all citizens deserve equal treatment. And it is a difficult question to answer: how, then, can such governments justify the inequality that derives from the disparity of intelligence and talents among individuals? In a study that ranges over two centuries and two nations that pioneered in republicanism, and among a great array of theorists and practitioners, John Carson takes up these questions. His work will give any reader much to think about. For indeed, any reflecting citizen must form some conclusions about these matters. Does nature arrange that some individuals or human types are inherently superior to others, or is society or special privilege mostly responsible for these effects? If nature is decisive, how far should a democratic state go in allowing a social elite to exercise power? Does it merit that power? Should the talented have an education different from the rest? And what are talents and intelligence anyway? How do we define and measure them? What understanding of these terms befits a democracy, such that it can properly justify the inequalities that derive from them and prevail in the social order? At the outset Carson himself seems to endorse some notion of collective intelligence, as his sprawling introduction might suggest. But he has read very widely and his ample endnotes will benefit any persons interested in this subject and peripheral ones. The Measure of Merit is an impressive piece of scholarship. Of course, many studies in intellectual history have tackled this question, mostly by examining political theories and social philosophies.1 Carson hopes to shed more light by looking at mental philosophers and psychologists among a larger group that has explored the subject of mind and intelligence. Doing so, of course, places great expectations on this group of thinkers, and it is not always the case that they intended their explorations of mind to have social readings or yield political policies. Carson, to his credit, is sensitive to social and political context and relates his subjects to the changing worlds of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. And his study [End Page 573] takes on much interest when he does. But sometimes he builds a bridge too easily traversed from the scientific realm to the social. Carson finds John Locke a useful starting point for his discussion. Indeed, Lockean ideas had considerable influence in both the countries he examines. In France Carson finds Lockean schools of associationists and sensationists, and also the influence of the (partly) Lockean rivals, the Scottish Common Sense philosophers. The author brings under review the French Enlightenment thinkers—Condillac, Condorcet, Helvétius, Rousseau. Together they reflected a concern of their movement, that the ancient regime faced a crisis of legitimacy: the old order could no longer be justified, but how might they reclaim a place for elites within a reformed system? Even with this concern as a background commonality, Carson finds much difference among the philosophes, as here and throughout his study he reads the texts with great sensitivity. Thus, for example, Condorcet may have insisted that all people, even the most savage, are natively equal, and with such confidence, he could call for a comprehensive system of education, available to all, but becoming progressively selective. Such a system would develop the talents of a new elite, trained in the sciences. A more skeptical view came from Voltaire, however: "No one will convince me that all minds are equally suitable to science," he wrote, "and that they differ only in regard to education. Nothing is more false" (p. 25). Americans also make an appearance in this first chapter. Thomas Jefferson set the terms of discussion for the young republic in articulating his concept of a natural aristocracy and his preference for it. That "natural aristocracy among men," rooted in virtue and talents as opposed to wealth and birth, Jefferson believed, could secure democracy on a safe foundation. John Adams had...

The Roots of the Modern Trial: Greenleaf's Testimony to the Harmony of Christianity, Science, and the Law in Antebellum America

The Christian is part of our common law, with the very texture of which it is interwoven.Simon Greenleaf (1834)Simon Greenleaf's life and legacy have been quietly influential even if overshadowed by the Websters and the Storys of American law. An accomplished lawyer, Greenleaf (1783-1853) served with Justice Joseph Story as a founding father of Harvard Law School, won the celebrated Charles River Bridge case against Daniel Webster before the Supreme Court, and wrote a masterful legal treatise that earned acclaim in Britain while remaining authoritative in American courts into the twentieth century. Yet, one who researches Greenleaf today will find him best remembered by evangelical Christians. And what draws evangelicals is a curious, oddly evocative essay published in 1846, entitled An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists (hereinafter, Testimony), in which the Harvard law professor investigate [d] the of [the Christian] religion by applying the Rules of Evidence Administered in Courts of Justice. If those rules, Greenleaf reasoned, yielded the of facts all right-thinking Christians knew to be indisputably true as a matter of faith, the same rules could be relied upon to determine a wide range of factual or historical disputes. Greenleaf chose the title carefully; he did not purport to stage a trial of the evangelists, but sought rather to display the rules of evidence as a science of proof that could be used wholly apart from courtroom proceedings.1Greenleaf's Testimony merits reappraisal for four reasons. First, it provides unique insights into the interrelationship of antebellum law and religion, which is often dominated by narratives of increasing secularization and church/state separation. The Testimony evinces something quite different. Religion remained in the law not as residue or artifact; rather, Greenleaf resolutely believed, as quoted above, that Christianity was interwoven with the common law. And as a devout evangelical, an ardent Whig, and a chief architect of the common law of evidence, Greenleaf consciously threaded his beliefs about Christianity and science into the very rules and doctrines that are still used in today's courts.2Second, and related, it offers a unique perspective in the debate over the hegemonic influence of evangelical Christianity in antebellum culture and politics, a debate that has largely ignored the law except when confronting church/state issues. Through the Testimony as well as his influential legal scholarship and teaching, Greenleaf strove to make the modern trial a for the that merited approbation on religious (specifically, evangelical Christian) as well as scientific grounds. The core of the modern trial drew from methodological and epistemological assumptions rooted in the Scottish Common Sense tradition, which dominated antebellum scientific thinking in most fields while finding much favor among evangelical Christians. Indeed, Greenleaf so completely and skillfully adopted mainstream thinking that some reviewers found the Testimony disappointing, yet by broadly borrowing common sense thinking Greenleaf guaranteed the legitimacy (popular acceptance) of modern judge-controlled trials dominated by rules that radically delimited a jury's power. Oddly, GreenleaPs originality resided in showing law's conformity with conventional thinking.3Third, in Greenleaf we see how Whig politics and ideology affected the law. Distrustful of popular decision making, Greenleaf was nonedieless firmly committed to moral improvement, social uplift, and a commercial economy. He also reflected Whiggery's strong evangelical chord. The Whig penchant for elite leadership and institution building is strikingly evident in his reconceptualization of trials as judge-dominated proceedings in which jurors had no say in determining the law and an increasingly circumscribed role in finding facts. The search for the truth would be conducted under the protocols of a new legal science. …

Reid, Tetens, and Kant on the External World

Building on the research of Manfred Kuehn, the author argues that, whatever influence the Scottish Common Sense Philosophy of Thomas Reid may have had on the development of Immanuel Kant's refutation of idealism, it was filtered through the thinking of Kant's largely forgotten German contemporary, Johann Nicolaus Tetens. While the importance of Tetens for understanding Kant is examined in connection with only one idea, the aim is to demonstrate that Tetens is a figure worthy of serious historical consideration.

Legal Positivism and Scottish Common Sense Philosophy

This paper identifies a volitional theory of meaning common to speech act theory and legal positivism, represented by Hart and Kelsen. This model is compared and contrasted with the model of social operations developed by Reid, a Common Sense Enlightenment philosopher. Whereas the former subscribes to the view that meaning is generated by acts of will, the latter finds meaning to consist of the dual elements of sign and ‘directedness’.The ability of positivist theories to provide a structural account of the difference between legal rules and other rules is inextricably linked to this commitment to the volitional theory of meaning. The commitment to the volitional view however leads to problems in requiring that some kind of authority be presupposed in for plain rules to attain legal force. Such authority can only be established with recourse to further rules (thus falling into a malign infinite regress) or must be accepted as a matter of faith. Reid's criterion of direction however vitiates the need for an authority, instead accounting for social communication in general, and rules in particular, in terms of sociological factors. Although no comprehensive critique of the volitional theory is proposed, Reid's model is preferable on the grounds of explanatory richness.The core claims of the paper are that: (a) legal positivism necessarily subscribes to the volitional theory of meaning; (b) rejection of the volitional theory necessarily entails rejection of the positivist view that legal and non-legal rules can be differentiated on structural grounds (c) another counter-model exists which avoids some of the pitfalls of the volitional theory; (d) if the volitional theory is rejected then the existence of rules can only be accounted for in a 'strong' sociological sense and legal theory must accordingly accept the dominant role of sociology in conceptualising the nature of rules.

Rethinking the Victorian Sage: Nineteenth‐Century Prose and Scottish Common Sense Philosophy

AbstractThe label of the ‘Victorian sage’ has been employed increasingly widely in recent criticism to describe the tradition of oracular rhetoric in nineteenth‐century prose deriving from Carlyle. This ‘sage discourse’ has up till now only been defined in formalist terms, as consisting of certain characteristic assumptions about the use and validity of rhetoric. This article suggests that it is possible to historicize the notion of the ‘Victorian sage’ by linking it to the Scottish tradition of ‘Common Sense philosophy’ that was extremely influential in Britain up till the 1870s. The key feature of Common Sense philosophy from this perspective is the importance it attaches to the use of language in philosophical argument. Rhetoric in the Common Sense school's view embodies an implicit form of knowledge, an attitude which the article suggests also underlies the markedly rhetorical forms of argument used by ‘Victorian Sages’. Common Sense philosophy assesses philosophical arguments from an ontological perspective, namely what kind of relationship to a thinker's social environment a philosophy promotes, and this perspective can be seen to underlie the turn to biographical and autobiographical modes of writing in nineteenth‐century prose.

'Scottish Commonsense' about Memory

Reid rejects the image theory --the representative or indirect realist position--that memory-judgements are inferred from or otherwise justified by a present image or introspectible state. He also rejects the trace theory, which regards memories as essentially traces in the brain. In contrast he argues for a direct knowledge account in which personal memory yields unmediated knowledge of the past. He asserts the reliability of memory, not in currently fashionable terms as a reliable belief-forming process, but more elusively as a principle of Commonsense. There remains a contemporary consensus against Reid's position. I argue that Reid's critique is essentially sound, and that the consensus is mistaken; personal memory judgements are spontaneous and non-inferential in the same way as perceptual judgements. But I question Reid's account of the connection between personal memory and personal identity. My primary concern is rationally reconstructive rather than scholarly, and downplays recent interpretations of Reid's faculty psychology as a precursor of functionalism and other scientific philosophies of mind.

When Hens Crow: The Woman's Rights Movement in Antebellum America

In 1852 the New York Daily Herald described leaders of the woman's rights movement as hens that crow. Using speeches, pamphlets, newspaper reports, editorials, and personal papers, Sylvia Hoffert discusses how ideology, language, and strategies of early woman's rights advocates influenced a new political culture grudgingly inclusive of women. She shows the impact of philosophies of republicanism, natural rights, utilitarianism, and the Scottish Common Sense School in helping activists move beyond the limits of Republican Motherhood and the ideals of domesticity and benevolence.When Hens Crow also illustrates the work of the penny press in spreading the demands of woman's rights advocates to a wide audience, establishing the competence of women to contribute to public discourse and public life.

A Defence of Scottish Common Sense

I provide a reading of Reid as an ‘encyclopaedist’, in Alasdair MacIntyre's sense, that is, as a scientist who conceives of himself as part of a broader scientific community, and who aims to make a contribution through work in a particular field. Reid's field is pneumatology. On this conception, Reid's recourse to ‘common sense’ is of a piece with the postulation, by any scientist, of a natural endowment for members of the same ostensible kind. Reid should therefore be understood as rejecting the classical tradition of epistemology and any conception of epistemology as first philosophy. His view resembles, rather, the modern position of ‘natural epistemology’, though admittedly, on account of his doctrine of active power, he is not committed to ‘naturalism’ in the contemporary sense.

Democratizing Taste: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and Elizabeth Hamilton

Democratizing Taste: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and Elizabeth Hamilton

Skepticism and American Faith: Infidels, Converts, and Religious Doubt in the Early Nineteenth Century

In the spring of 1839, Abner Kneeland left Boston for good. The infamous freethinker, a former Baptist and then Universalist minister who had renounced Christianity, had spent sixty days in jail for blasphemy the previous summer. In that same year William Miller, formerly a skeptical deist and now a Baptist preacher, gave his first Boston lecture, arguing that Christ would return to earth in 1843. As Kneeland shook the dust of Boston from his shoes and Miller proclaimed that the end was near, Boston lawyer and politician Horace Mann extended his public crusade for education reform and struggled privately with religious doubt. By 1839, another Bostonian, Orestes Brownson, had already been a Presbyterian, a Universalist, and a freethinking socialist. The thirty-six-year-old editor of the Boston Quarterly Review was by now a staunch Democrat in a Whig city and a Unitarian in the orbit of New England Transcendentalism. Few writers of the period wrote with more sustained attention to the problem that concerned all four men: the challenge of religious skepticism to the grounds of American faith.1 In an era we have come to associate with evangelical revivalism, religious reformers, Emersonian optimism, and the consolidation of the Bible belt, Brownson argued that is not much open skepticism, not much avowed infidelity, but there is a vast amount of concealed doubt, and untold difficulty. Those religious doubts have remained hidden because of the stories we tell about the country's religious past. Scholars who have applied the secularization thesis to American religious history, a model that often assumes a waning significance of religion in the modern world, have always struggled with the American case, where religious affiliation and belief in God have remained very high compared to other industrialized nations. Secularization in the United States, some scholars explain, has been structural rather than psychological. Non-religious institutions and discourses have taken over functions once performed by churches and God talk, but this has not been accompanied by a significant rise in the proportion of the population that doubts or rejects religious truth claims. According to this modification of the secularization thesis, religious belief and practice have not withered away in the face of modem rationality and secular agnosticism; religion instead has been privatized. Structural change, not religious skepticism, is at the center of this story.2 Since the early 1980s, other scholars have moved from the secularization model to narratives stressing American religious vitality. The religious doubts of people like Brownson, Miller, Kneeland, and Mann are not especially important to these interpretations either. By the 1830s, most religious histories tell us, the radical implications of Enlightenment thought had been discredited by the French Revolution, David Hume's skepticism had been answered by Scottish Common Sense Realism, and the popular religious infidelity of rabble-rousers like Ethan Allen, Thomas Paine, and Elihu Palmer had been crushed by Christian polemics and evangelical activism. Visionary freethought reformers like Robert Owen and Frances Wright were foreign hothouse plants unable to bear fruit in God's American Canaan. If the origins of later unbelief can be found in some of the religious debates of this period, the great age of religious doubt lay ahead, in the post-Darwinian era of William James and Henry Adams. From this perspective too, it is not surprising that the few skeptics and freethinkers who did speak out earlier in the nineteenth century are consigned to the footnotes in studies of revival and reform.3 To pay more attention to both open infidelity and concealed doubt is not to argue that either is more important than the surging, protean religiosity in early nineteenth-century American life. Perhaps critical deists like the early Miller, closet skeptics like Mann, and vocal freethinkers like Kneeland and (briefly) Brownson do not deserve more space in surveys of American religious history. …

Godwin's Suspicion of Speech Acts

WILLIAM GODWIN DOES NOT TRUST WORDS TO DO THINGS. BECAUSE OF this, his contributions to the theory of language and its function in society have an unexpectedly conservative ring, compared with other ideas about language that arose at the end of the eighteenth century. Philosophers and historians of linguistics have recently begun to stress the extent to which Godwin's contemporaries, in Britain and on the Continent, were developing pragmatic approaches to theory.(1) Rather than studying language as a system of signs that stand for things or thoughts, philosophers of the 1780s and 1790s increasingly regarded language as primary. They sought (as the French Institut National put it, in the question it advertised for its essay prize in 1796-97) to determine the influence of words and other signs on the formation of ideas. And rather than pursuing the historical origins of language, as did their predecessors, thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries tended to analyze language as it is actually used, focusing on dialogue, context, and the relationship of speakers to hearers. Contrary to the claims of the traditional Romantic ideology, in fact, philosophy of the romantic period often gave interpersonal or intersubjective relationships priority over the relationship of the individual mind to the world. This tendency toward an intersubjective pragmatics shows itself in the work of the leading philosopher of the Scottish Common Sense school, Thomas Reid, who believed that the most important function of language is to perform such as promising, commanding, contracting, or testifying. It is present in the work of the legal philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who interpreted laws as verbal utterances exchanged between sovereigns and subjects, and called attention to the role of language in constructing the linguistic fictions of obligation, right, privilege, and so on, that we habitually mistake for social reality. Among their German contemporaries, a theory of language as both mental and social action was most thoroughly developed by Wilhelm von Humboldt, although related ideas appear throughout the work of J. G. Herder, J. G. Hamann, A. F. Bernhardi, Novalis, and the Schlegel brothers. In the philosophy produced between 1780 and 1830, therefore, one constantly encounters concepts that can productively be compared to (although they are not identical with) what we now call speech acts or performative utterance. Godwin participates in this tendency insofar as he also views language in terms of its interpersonal functions, including the uses to which it is put in literature and the transmission of scientific knowledge, as well as in everyday communication. As with Reid or Humboldt, therefore, there are definite points of contact between Godwin's theory of language and modern pragmatics. But Reid enthusiastically identifies social action as the primary and direct intention of language,(2) and Humboldt marvels at how the system of language itself, as well as a certain construction of reality, arise from the verbal interactions between speaker and hearer.(3) Godwin, meanwhile, insists that language maintain its traditional, secondary status as a representation of thought and external realit-y, for its only legitimate purpose is the communication of truth. In British philosophy, in particular, we find a fascination with the interpersonal speech act of promising, which can probably be traced to the fact that the promise, compact, or covenant lies at the heart of the social contract tradition going back to Locke and Hobbes. As a political and social theorist, Godwin analyzes the function of the promise both in its own right and as a component of political systems. What I propose to examine in this essay is his denunciation of promises in the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, where he nevertheless describes them in terms that strikingly anticipate the work of speech-act theorists like J. …

John Quidor and the Demonic Imagination: Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman (c.1828)

John Quidor and the Demonic Imagination: Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman (c.1828) Rebecca Bedell (bio) John Quidor’s (1801–1881) works are closely linked to the writings of Washington Irving. Nearly two-thirds of his extant canvasses depict scenes drawn from Irving’s tales of old Dutch New York. Such marked allegiance to a single author would seem to suggest that Quidor found in Irving’s work plots, characters, and themes which admirably suited his own artistic ends. As many scholars have noted, however, Quidor was rarely content merely to illustrate Irving’s tales or echo his themes. 1 He rather used the stories as a base from which to explore ideas more distinctively his own. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. John Quidor (1800–1881), Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman. Oil on canvas; 225/9” x 30 1/6”. Yale University Art Gallery; Mabel Brady Garvan Collection. This is certainly the case with Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman of about 1828, a painting inspired by Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (figure 1). In none of Quidor’s other works does he distance himself so far from his literary source; in none of his other literary paintings does he suppress the narrative or subvert the themes of the text to the extent that he does in this, his earliest extant treatment of an Irving subject. In transferring the tale from printed page to canvas, Quidor altered both its mood and its message. Although both Irving and Quidor take the imagination as a central theme of their work, the painter offers a far bleaker, more frightening vision of this cerebral faculty. In the early nineteenth century, suspicion and hostility tinged American attitudes towards the imagination. 2 In a nation founded on Enlightenment principles, adhering to the doctrines of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, and committed to progress, rationality, and practicality, indulgence in imaginative endeavors was widely regarded as an avoidance of responsibility, as an activity that could render one incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction, and, hence, as a significant threat to the social order. Such attitudes deeply affected the way American artists and writers felt about their calling, evoking responses that ranged from defensive defiance to guilt and anxiety. Since their feelings about imaginative activities were central to their sense of their own self-worth and the value of their productions, it is hardly surprising that many explored them in their works—as Irving and Quidor did in their differing ways. Bryan Wolf, in his brilliant comparison of Quidor and Irving in Romantic Revision, has drawn out Quidor’s conservative attitude towards the imagination; the painter seems to have internalized his pragmatic society’s fear and distrust of it. Irving, on the other hand, while sharing some of Quidor’s trepidation, also saw positive uses for the imagination, deploying it to combat, in his own rather mild way, [End Page 111] what he saw as the relentlessly rationalist and materialist tenor of his times. 3 A comparison of Quidor’s Ichabod with Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” brings the distance between the two men into sharp focus. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is one of the tales from Irving’s The Sketch Book (1819–20). Set a decade or so after the Revolutionary War, the story takes place in a drowsy Dutch village on the eastern shore of the Hudson River. The slim plot revolves around a rivalry between the Yankee schoolmaster Ichabod Crane and the burly local hero Brom Bones, both of whom are set upon winning the hand of the plump Dutch coquette Katrina van Tassel. Through his delineation of the hapless Ichabod, whose name means “inglorious” or “without honor,” 4 Irving lampooned contemporary Yankee American culture—its restlessness, its instability, and, above all, its crass materialism. 5 Ichabod’s desire for Katrina, for example, was less an affair of the heart than a passion of the pocketbook. Her rosy cheeks and dainty feet, though appealing, roused him less than the thought of her paternal domain. This, he imagined, could “be readily turned into cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land, and...

Dangerous Sentiments: Sympathy, Rights, and Revolution in Stowe's Antislavery Novels

Uncle Tom9s Cabin and Dred do not offer sentiment as a nonlegal or antilegal alternative to the law of slavery. Instead, drawing upon the natural rights tradition of Locke, the Scottish Common Sense philosophers, and the founders of the American republic, Stowe9s antislavery fiction argues that moral sentiment functions as a necessary barometer of legal legitimacy. In portraying and evoking natural rights sentiments of benevolent sympathy and revolutionary outrage. Stowe attempts to invoke a moral foundation for American law that is immune to factional self-interest and emotionally powerful enough to move Americans to eradicate the legal tyranny of slavery. However, the pluralistic promise of Stowe9s notion of sentiment is contained by her inability to fully imagine natural rights as the moral consensus and fundamental entitlement of a racially diverse community, and it is undermined by an unresolved tension in her notion of natural rights sentiment between expiatory sympathy and revolutionary anger.

Thomas Reid on the animate creation: papers relating to the life sciences

Best known as a moralist and one of the founders of the Scottish Common Sense school of philosophy, Thomas Reid (1710-96) was also an influential scientific thinker. Here his work on the life sciences is studied in detail, bringing together unpublished transcripts of his most important papers on natural history, physiology, and materialist metaphysics. Part I provides the first published account of Reid's reflections on the highly controversial theories surrounding muscular motion and the reproduction of plants and animals and relates them to the broader Enlightenment debates on these issues. It also contains the first systematic reconstruction of Reid's opposition to materialism and views his polemics against the noted Dissenter Joseph Priestley in terms of their differing interpretations of the Newtonian legacy, their conflicting philosophical assumptions, and the cultural politics of Common Sense philosophy in the 1770s. Part II reproduces a selection of Reid's most significant papers on the life sciences, including his Glasgow Literary Society discourses on muscular motion and on Priestley's materialism, as well as other manuscripts that document the development of his scientific ideas.

"The Artist of the Beautiful": Crossing the Transcendent Divide in Hawthorne's Fiction

To examine how the narrative structure of "The Artist of the Beautiful" leads up to the climactic moment of the butterfly's appearance is to recognize Hawthorne's endorsement not only of Owen Warland but also, more significantly, of the transcendent power of imagination over the empirical orientation of nineteenth-century America. When the tale is analyzed in relation to its contemporaneously composed counterpart, "Drowne's Wooden Image," it becomes clear that Hawthorne believes that imaginative art can make believers out of observers whose typically no-nonsense version of reality aligns them with Locke and the Scottish Common Sense philosopher. This belief extends to careful readers of Hawthorne, who can, with the help of Wolfgang Iser's work on the fictive and the imaginary, cast aside their dependence on mimesis and allow the momentous butterfly to work its magic.

Sentimental Twain: Samuel Clemens in the maze of moral philosophy

In Sentimental Twain, Gregg Camfield examines the major and minor works of Mark Twain to redraw the boundaries between sentimentalism and realism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Beginning by taking the reactions to the question of race in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a test case, Camfield reveals that sentimental ethics persist, though buried, in American culture, and he argues that Americans' ambivalent responses to sentimentalism explain some of the continuing controversy surrounding Mark Twain's work. Specifically, he contends, insofar as the liberal agenda remains substantially sentimental - especially when dealing with issues of race - today's readers of Twain participate in the same dialectic between sentimental compassion and realistic cynicism that Twain himself confronted. Camfield then traces the cultural development of this ethical dialectic and follows Mark Twain's reactions to it, showing that Twain was a closet sentimentalist whose public attacks on sentimentalism veiled a deep longing for a more compassionate world. Throughout, Sentimental Twain is grounded in a discussion of philosophical contexts of nineteenth-century American sentimental literature, paying particular attention to the Scottish Common Sense philosophers, but looking forward to the Pragmatism of William James.