ix Part II. Literary Canons of Addison, Johnson and Emendations of Shakespeare. A Comparison of the Critical Principles of Addi son and Johnson A Comparison of the Criticism of Addison and Johnson Addison's Pleasures of the Imagination and Milton and Paradise Lost.✔ Wit and Humor. Johnson's Criticism of Restoration Wit. 55 58 Addison's General Literary Criticism--------- 71 Tragedy Artifices of the Theatre. English Ballads: Chevy Chase and The Children in the Wood. Fables, Songs. Johnson's General Literary Criticism Literary Forms: Drama, Dramatic Unities, Poetry: Pindaric Ode, Heroic Couplet, Prose: Biography, History, Fiction, Essay, The Lives of the Poets. 73 84 X Johnson's Classicism. Johnson's Attitude towards Romanticism. Burke's Criticism A Comparison of Burke's A Philosophical Part III. The Deepening Consciousness of the 99 Sir Roger de Coverley. Philanthropy. Appreciation of Natural Beauty. Vision of Mirzah. Johnson's Ethical Sense Humor. Moral Sensibility. Lives of the Poets: Imaginative Sympathy; Knowledge of Human Nature; Charit- Figures. Descriptions. Philanthropy. Burke's Sensibility Celtic Love of Color. INTRODUCTION The many-sided life. and thought of the eighteenth century, if it is to be clearly explicable, must be interpreted through the philosophical problem of the age—the problem of knowledge. Given a thinking subject and an object, how can a connection be established? How can I, a thinking essence, have any knowedge of the object? Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding declared that there are no innate ideas, that the ego is passive, a product of ideas originating in the senses. Locke distinguished, however, between the primary and secondary qualities of the object. The secondary qualities, color, heat, etc., are not inherent in the thing-in-itself, but a subjective result of affection of the senses. Berkeley carried the theory farther. If the secondary qualities are subjectively realized, why not the primary qualities? His famous theory of subjectivism was the result. We never know anything except our own perceptions. It is impossible that anything should exist apart from a knowing mind. The universe is thus the content of the omniscient Mind. Nothing exists apart from this eternal reason. Hume, from the same theory of Locke, drew a very different conclusion. If the perception is the only real thing, how can we postulate even a subject except for the moment? How can we establish any causal connection? How can we be sure of any continuity in the thinking subject itself? His philosophy was thus a denial of knowledge. Utilitarian and common-sense thinkers following Hume abandoned the attempt to solve the problem of knowledge and devoted themselves to purely practical considerations. One can at least act and, in a certain sense, do one's duty xi even if one does not know how or why. Well toward the end of the century, however, the vexed question arose again. Kant wrestled with it, and this was his solution. The thinking ego knows the object because he is so constituted as to know phenomena under the forms of space and time. The ego is a transcendental unity, which, constituted to know phenomena under the forms of space and time, can not have scientific knowledge of things-inthemselves. There exists, however, the imagination, which without the intervention of conceptions interprets beauty. Moreover there exists the pure reason, which interprets the moral idea, a thing-in-itself. We may, therefore, reasonably live as if God, the soul, and immortality were realities. There is no reason to deny their being. Naturally with this philosophical background the eighteenth century devoted itself to problems which were definite, limited, and soluble, ethical problems and questions of human relations. Mysticism and enthusiasm were frowned upon. Knowledge, rationality, common sense, judgment were the ideals. Imagination was dangerous. Feeling was untrustworthy. Faith, as the Middle Ages understood faith, was succeeded by institutional and prudential religion, external observance. Conscience was interpreted as human reason, the product of education, therefore not infallible. The literary manifestation of this scientific temper was the prevalence of criticism and of historical study. The age, we say broadly, was an age of prose and of classic standards. Imagination, spontaneity, emotionalism, irregularity, and formlessness were in as much disfavor in the literary world as enthusiasm and mysticism in religious speculation. The interest in humanity, the liking for facts, and the study of history stressed the importance of law and order and regularity. Just as propriety and social decorum had largely supplanted religion, so pre cision and correctness were dominant literary standards. Scepticism and pessimism found their literary parallel in social satire like the Spectator, in realistic studies of men and institutions like Fielding's novels, in philosophic reflection like Rasselas and The Vanity of Human Wishes, in critical inquiries like Burke's Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Subjects that adapted themselves to ratiocination in verse or prose were the popular themes. Literature was objective and as such was capable of highly finished expression. Men and the "town" were the topics of the day. But throughout the century there was a reactionary trend. From the beginning of the century there were mystics like Law, poets like Thomson, who voiced the claims of feeling (Empfindung), who recognized a unity between subject and object, between man and nature, who, only half consciously perhaps, but really were of the genus Romantic that found expression after Kant in the emphasis upon the subjective consciousness. Throughout the century a reaction was preparing in recognition of the fact that man is not altogether scientific and critical, that fact is not all of truth, that consciousness embraces subject and object, that imagination transcends the laws that allow full expression to understanding. From Addison to Burke there was a growth in ethical consciousness. Addison was a cultivated man, interested in the foibles of humanity, desirous to secure decorum. If Johnson was less scholarly, his feelings were deeper. He pressed the claims of reason and morality. But Burke's richer nature extended ethics from the consideration of the individual to the study of the morality of the body politic, from the particular to the universal, from the present policy to the past and future. Ethical vision grew with the century as did sensibility. It is the purpose of this study to make minute investigation of the reaction of eighteenth century philosophy upon the thought of three men, typical of three distinct periods of the century; to investigate in detail the reac |