Search Results

David Hume's reputation as the sardonic analyst of common beliefs, and of religious commitment in particular, has survived his own time to symbolize the iconoclasm of a retrospectively construed ‘Enlightenment’. Yet he is not merely the reasonable expositor of irrational prejudice, for his earliest and most ambitious work, the Treatise of Human Nature, addresses itself above all to the limitations of reason. As Hume sees it, passions are what drive humans to all action and achievement; reason and passion cannot even properly be seen as contending for domination with each other. Philosophy describes how illusion and imagination are the supports which nature requires, but it is led to admit that nature will always win out in the end. The philosophical project of theorizing sociability, that which sympathy makes possible, is not an isolated one. The universality of social understanding which Hume's philosophy of ‘human nature’ proposes is precisely what is questioned (and typically rejected) in the novel of sentiment.

In 1779, there appeared through three consecutive issues of the Edinburgh periodical The Mirror a sentimental tale which became known, and much anthologized, as the ‘Story of La Roche’. It was written by Henry Mackenzie, editor of The Mirror, and a man renowned chiefly for the success of his novel The Man of Feeling. It tells of how an atheistic philosopher living in France meets a clergyman (La Roche) and his daughter, how' he comes to admire their simple virtue, and how, when the daughter dies, he learns to appreciate the combined sensibility and religiosity of the ‘good old man's’ reactions. The sceptical philosopher is made to acknowledge the worth of a religion which ‘was that of sentiment, not theory’. In one way, the story is just a minor relic of sentimentalism. When Mackenzie showed it to Adam Smith, he immediately recognized its subject (or target) as David Hume. In Samuel Richardson's fiction, the enemies to affection, however metaphorical, were clearly and cruelly specified.

This chapter focuses on three very different writers whose works all chronicle peculiarly intimate relationships between the texts they produced and the social lives for which they also became known: David Hume, Samuel Richardson, and Laurence Sterne. From the perspective of sentimentalism, all were committed to the resources of a language of feeling for the purpose of representing necessary social bonds; all discovered in their writings a sociability which was dependent upon the communication of passions and sentiments. It is this discovery which was formative of that fashion of 18th-century fiction now called ‘sentimental’. For these authors, the conception of harmonious sociability was dramatized not only in the books they produced, but also in their self-conscious efforts actually to live out models of social being. A biography of any of them records the attempt to make exemplary a social life. It might seem a trivial occupation, as the novelistic vogue of sentiment can appear a facile indulgence; both, however, are historically significant, bespeaking the difficulty which a polite culture was having in imagining the nature of social relations.

The mid-century is a period when the opportunities for the interruption and unfolding of tautologies begin to multiply, and this unfolding attends the collapse of the public and private spheres into each other. The public sphere is menaced by the increasing instability of principle — both as a word and an ideal governing the prescriptive relation of concept to action — particularly in the practice of politics and law. In the private sphere individuals are actuated by various empiricist or associationist judgements which fail to account for ideas and feelings in terms of causes rationally disclosed, only in terms of a double pulse in the brain which imparts to customary impressions — that is, to the sense of the same thing happening over again — the reverberative force incident to the enunciation of an irrefragable principle or rule. By means of the echo or spectral blur caused by this double pulse, experience seems haunted by its own revenant, so that an impression can mediate itself, comment on itself, and supply its own grounds of credibility, claiming the status of an antecedent idea as well as of an immediate sensation. In this way, experience compensates for the loss of determining principles of action in the world at large by an illusion bred of custom that gives the particular event access to the general scheme, and endows private testimony with a public dimension. This chapter begins with David Hume, whose writings are devoted to supplanting providential deductions (such as the theodicies of Pope and Young) with inductions based on nothing more authoritative than personal experience.

This chapter describes the unlikely pairing of Johnson and Omai, the Tahitian brought to England by Cook's party. Omai set out on his long journey to Europe whilst Johnson and Boswell were actually in the midst of their journey, and he became a familiar figure to the Club and what might be termed the extended Johnsonian circle, including Hester Thrale and Fanny Burney. This chapter also discusses the debate about the nature of concepts such as the primitive, the savage, and the barbarian. This was an area of intellectual concern which had become the particular property of Scottish Enlightenment figures, among them David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson.

This chapter deals with Scotticism, which is a markedly idiomatic use of the language by Scots, either in writing or in speech. Boswell was not alone in his worries over Scotticism. It plagued authors as distinguished as David Hume, and it arrogated the attention of an august body of Edinburgh illuminati known as the Select Society. Nevertheless, Boswell's linguistic worries were compounded by his mixed feelings about his own nationality, as Hume's, for instance, were not. The tour he made with Johnson was, inter alia, a way of testing his own Scottish identity, and only a short step separates issues of linguistic uncertainty from issues of political and cultural nationhood in the aftermath of Culloden.

This chapter discusses the issue hovering behind the Journey — that is, the moral panic which grew up in England in the third quarter of the eighteenth century on the subject of Scottish influence. This phase of anti-Scottish feeling is a familiar datum in histories of the period, since it finds expression in diverse fields such as politics, literature, painting, and architecture. But there is no connected treatment of the issue in its most specific aspects when one considers that figures such as David Hume, John Wilkes, the Earl of Bute, Tobias Smollett, and others of comparable stature are involved in the story. More pertinently, there is a direct link here with the content and reception of Johnson's own Journey, and again with Boswell's own anxieties.

In a more specific account of changes between the first and second editions, William Godwin attributed his recognition of the emotional springs of action to a reading of David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature in 1795. However, in fact his debt to Hume remains ambiguous and difficult to separate from his general assimilation of the ideas of the other British moralists that led him to declare in 1797: ‘Not only the passions of men, but their very judgements, are to a great degree the creatures of sympathy’. Godwin continues to reject Hume's notion of the operation of sympathy through an endless flow of passions and sentiments in which reason is virtually powerless. Instead, crucially for his theory of fiction, he retains his primary commitment to private judgement. The scepticism of Godwin's later studies of character in history both extends and undercuts his early conviction of the intrusion of government into private life.

This chapter discusses a re-examination of the question of Samuel Johnson's religious ‘prejudice’. It is believed that this prejudice reflects a profoundly conservative habit of mind typical of the orthodoxy that Hume and other sceptics had assailed. One of the questions posed in this chapter is how Christians of Johnson's generation probably viewed Hume's attack at mid-century.

The most marked trend in the English popular novel of the 1790s is its resolute rationality, its suspicion of the uncontrollable workings of the unconscious mind. No feature is more common in novels of any ideological complexion during the revolutionary era than an unremitting hostility to that central plank of Henry Mackenzie and other leading sentimentalists, the intuitional psychology of David Hartley and David Hume. Conservative critics of the novel see that the true threat to orthodoxy lies in the moral relativism implicit in the sentimental movement. It is therefore cunning of them, though inaccurate, to ascribe to the ‘jacobins’ of the 1790s subjectivity, emotionalism, indulgence towards human weakness, and belief in sexual freedom, all of which the jacobins explicitly renounce. For the time being, the English progressive novelist speaks resolutely to the Reason. Sentimentalism has many critics in the period, but no one who is juster, more penetrating, more whole-hearted, than William Godwin.

As a novelist, Jane Austen draws at large on the literature of her century. She uses the insights and techniques of many earlier writers, not all of whom are by any means conservative. Poets of a philosophical temper, like Thomas Gray and William Cowper, historians like David Hume and Edward Gibbon, admire the wise man who stands aside from events both because he cannot influence them, and because they are not worth influencing. Austen's novels contain central characters more given to reflection than fictional heroes and heroines of the first part of the century, and she makes it clear how much she values the probings of the rational moral intelligence. Even the sentimentalists, whom she criticizes both for their opinions and for their execution, presumably bequeathed to her a new awareness of the reader's special relationship with the hero, and an example of how it might be influenced.