Samuel Johnson's General Nature: Tradition and Transition in Eighteenth-Century Discourse

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SAMUEL JOHNSON'S ''GENERAL NATURE''

SAMUEL JOHNSON'S ''GENERAL NATURE'' Tradition and Transition in Eighteenth-Century Discourse

Scott D. Evans

DEi.AWARE

Newark: University of Delaware Press London: Associated University Presses

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Evans, Scott D., 1953Samueljohnson's "general nature": tradition and transition in eighteenth-century discourse / Scott D. Evans. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-87413-69~2 (alk. paper) 1. Johns~m, Samuel, 1709-1784-Philosophy. 2. Philosophy of nature-History-18th century. 3. Philosophy, English-18th century. I. Title. PR3537.P5E73 1999 828'.609-dc21 99-15623 CIP PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

For my father and in memory of my mother

Contents Acknowledgments Preface

9 11

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

21 36 49 71 88

Classical "Nature" Medieval "Nature" "Nature" in Eighteenth-Century Discourse Nature and Value in the Rambler, Idler, and Adventurer Johnson on the Experimental Philosophy Representation, Imagination, and Nature inJohnson's Literary Criticism 7. Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Reductionism

108 130

Selected Bibliography Index

1~ 156 163

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Professor OM Brack, Professor Emeritus John X. Evans, and Professor Mark Lussier, all of Arizona State University, for reading the preliminary version of this manuscript and offering helpful comments and criticisms, and for their invaluable encouragement. I am also indebted to Professor Walter Nicgorski of the University of Notre Dame, whose seminar on "Nature, Political Order, and Modern Democracy" first set me to thinking on the topic of "nature" in relation to its employment by Johnson. Finally, I have profited from the comments and suggestions of the editors, Professor Donald C. Mell and the editorial staff of the University of Delaware Press and the editors of Associated University Presses, and I appreciate their support. In particular, I thank the first reader, Dr. Chester Chapin, for his helpful suggestions and some important criticisms. I rely on the notes to indicate the extent of my indebtedness to the work of scholars past and present, and I here add my sincere thanks.

Quotations from the following works in copyright appear in this volume with the kind permission of the publishers: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2d ed., edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch. Copyright Clarendon Press, 1978. Quotations used by permission of Oxford University Press. Volumes from The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson; quotations used by permission of Yale University Press: Vol. 2, The Idler and The Adventurer, edited by W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell. Copyright Yale University, 1963. Vols. 3-5, The Rambler, edited by W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss. Copyright Yale University, 1969. Vol. 7,johnson on Shakespeare, edited by Arthur Sherbo, introduction by Bertrand Bronson. Copyright Yale University, 1968. Vol. 9, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, edited by Mary Lascelles. Copyright Yale University, 1971. Vol. 16, Rasselas

10

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

and Other Tales, edited by Gwin J. Kolb. Copyright Yale University, 1990. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, edited by George Birkbeck Hill. 3 vols. Copyright Clarendon Press, 1905. Quotations used by permission of Oxford University Press. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Copyright Benziger Brothers, Inc., 1947. Quotations used by permission of Glencoe/McGraw-Hill.

Preface When Samuel Johnson commended Shakespeare 's dramas on the basis of their "just representations of general nature," 1 he invoked in the term "nature" a philosophical concept whose traditional authority was increasingly being questioned. Despite its wide use in eighteenth-century discourse, "nature" was not uncommonly criticized even by those who employed the concept most effectively. Johnson himself, although he uses the term frequently, had in the Dictionary 2 remarked on its vagueness. Similarly, David Hume and Bishop Butler both mention the ambiguity of "nature" but also employ the term prominently in important arguments. 3 For the interpreter of eighteenth-century discourse, the puzzling relation of the ambiguity of "nature" to its apparent indispensability is an intriguing problem, one the interest of which derives not least from the centrality of "nature" in every important eighteenth-century intellectual dispute. To understand the problematic importance of eighteenth-century " nature," it is less useful to begin by examining its ambiguous meaning than by understanding its unitary purpose. For Johnson, Hume, Butler, and their age, "nature" named the definitive philosophical context within which human experience was to be interpreted. Contrasting with this agreement on the importance of "nature" was its diversity of reference, manifested in its application to a variety of philosophical positions whose competition largely defined the course of eighteenth-century intellectual progress. Powerful if not dominant in this progress was a trend toward reduction of the traditional, metaphysical concept of nature to one consistent with philosophical naturalism, a trend prominent in deism and most strikingly represented in the work of Hume. Opposed to this reductionistic tendency there was mounted a defense of metaphysically defined nature, the proponents of which are exemplified by Butler, Alexander Pope, and Thomas Reid. Notable for its breadth and profundity among the defenses of traditional nature was that presented in the works of Samuel Johnson.

12

PREFACE

In virtue of Johnson's engagement in the competition to define and defend the meaning of "nature," his writings provide a unique vantage point from which to interpret the meanings and usage of the term in the eighteenth century. Through his involvement with the complex theological, philosophical, and linguistic issues that comprised this debate,Johnson developed and presented a compelling response to the reduced idea of nature that many of his contemporaries promoted, a response so richly textured and wide-ranging as to evade simple categorization. Johnson's intellectual commitment to the idea of nature manifests itself in a distinctive intellectual presentation founded in ancient metaphysics but uniquely recognizant and respectful of the complexities and subtleties of experienced reality. Al, with any complex intellectual construction that has made its way through a series of cultures and reformulations, the extended ancestry of Johnson's "nature" is the only context within which it may be understood; as Johnson himself noted, "The Reason why the authours which are yet read of the sixteenth Century are so little understood is that they are read alone, and no help is borrowed from those who lived with them or before them. " 4 The value of interpretive context is particularly apparent with reference to "nature" because the word has changed radically in meaning from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, a change that the descriptions of eighteenth-century "nature" that follow will strikingly illustrate. 5 Accordingly, the establishment of intertextual linkages between Johnson's works and those of authors for whom he is known to have had a high regard is emphasized in the method of this study. Particularly pertinent are works known to have been read, owned, and quoted by Johnson such as the dialogues of Plato, the works of Aristotle, Cicero, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas, the Sacred Theory of the Earth by Thomas Burnet, the Trne InteUectual Syst,em of the Universe by Ralph Cudworth, and Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica. 6 An understanding of eighteenth-century "nature" in general, and of Johnson's "nature" in particular, must begin with consideration of the roots of the concept in classical philosophy and medieval theology. "Nature" for eighteenth-century writers is a metaphysical concept whose definition evolved with help from important thinkers from Thales through Newton but whose meaning is largely governed by its derivation from the medieval synthesis of the Christian doctrine of creation with the classical concepts of phusis and natura. Johnson's achievements, aspirations, and interests as a classicist

PREFACE

13

complement the philosophical and theological ong1ns of eighteenth-century nature in mandating that an investigation of those derivations be included in a comprehensive study of Johnson's nature, and such an investigation will begin this study. If the philosophical and literary interest of eighteenth-century " nature" makes its study important, the unique character of the term, chiefly its combination of ambiguity and semantic complexity, renders such a study difficult. To clarify the direction and purpose of this study, therefore, a few comments indicating its limits and focus are in order. In the first place, the notorious ambiguity of "nature" is not from our perspective to be treated as a problem to be defined away, but a quality of interest in its essential relation to the semantic function of the term. Accordingly, one purpose of this study will be to assert and explain the linguistic usefulness and epistemological function of that ambiguity. Second, since the invention of "nature" by the pre-Socratic Greeks, there has always existed a distinction between its two basic meanings: general system (e.g., "the realm of nature"), and essence of a particular being or object (e.g., "human nature"). Of these two meanings, synthetic or universal nature, which Johnson calls "general nature," has towered over particular nature in philosophical importance, constituting, for example, the context of reference of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and the science of Newton. Because of its philosophical interest and centrality in both eighteenth-century discourse and in the works ofJohnson, "general nature" is the focus of this study. While we assert the distinction between general and particular nature, however, we must also qualify it as methodological rather than logical. Beginning, at least, with Aristotle, particular "natures" were not understood to be separate from general nature but to be included within it and, to some extent, to be constitutive of it. The pre-eminent eighteenth-century example of this relationship is illustrated by that subject of intense interest, the concept of "human nature," which was, on the one hand, not equated with "general nature," and on the other, not distinguished from it. Insofar as discussions of particular or specific "natures" such as "human nature" can amplify an understanding of the larger "nature" that is their context of identity, therefore, they will have their place in this study. We conclude with an overview of the argument to follow. Chapter 1 reveals the sources of Johnson's "nature" in classical philosophy. The metaphysical dimension of "nature" was emphasized from the outset in the definition of the term presented by the most influential

14

PREFACE

Greek philosophers. Notably, Aristotle's " nature " was strongly metaphysical in its assertion of the dependence of material realities on inherent energy and tendencies that interdependently moved the entire system towards its realization of an ultimate telos. In contrast to the metaphysical definitions of nature developed by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics were those of materialists like Democritus and Lucretius, who asserted nature to consist ultimately in mere atoms and space. The overview of classical "nature" illustrates the inevitable conflicts engendered by differing interpretations and definitions of the real constitution of nature; overall, however, the different classical versions of nature combine to emphasize the metaphysical assumptions that "nature" inevitably contains. The medieval origination of the "nature" of Renaissance and eighteenth-century humanism in the assimilation of the Greek philosophers' concept of phusis with Christian theology is the subject of chapter 2. The roots of eighteenth-century "nature" are found in the Schoolmen's use of Platonic and Aristotelian "nature" to interpret the Biblical account of creation. Augustine's Neoplatonism, ol:r vious in his emphasis on the forms and immaterial entities embodied in nature, influenced him to interpret reality hierarchically, elevating ideal spirit over matter. Revising Augustine, Aquinas described a dynamic nature whose shape was determined by both Aristotelian teleology and Christian eschatology: inherent in the material world were energy, potential, and purpose, all directed toward the realization of the telos embodied in the eternal divine decree. Despite serio{is conflicts, the basic coherence of the medieval conceptions of reality worked with their substantial agreement with Christian theology to unify their complexities within the metaphysical framework called "nature" that underlay and powerfully affected the intellectual landscape in England from the fourteenth through the eighteenth century. The dominant intellectual influence within the eighteenth century of the medieval synthesis of classical nature and -Christian creation is illustrated in chapter 3 through the consideration of the strategic employment of "nature" in arguments from theology, philosophy, moral theory, science, and literary criticism. Orthodox eighteenth-century theologians agreed with deists that nature exemplified a rational, divine design, but they denied the deists' inference that the capability of human observers for the rational interpretation of nature rendered divine revelation superfluous. Moral theorists debated whether nature contained implicit moral

PREFACE

15

principles or those principles were only the products of an evolving social consensus based on collective experience. Seventeenth-century natural philosophers, presuming that nature exemplified a structured and coherent system consistent with theological explanation, advertised the virtue of science as a religious apologetic, but their methods in the hands of philosophical materialists became a powerful corrosive agent against the intellectual respectability of theology and tradition. Eighteenth-century aestheticians, in affirming that art should follow nature, implied the containment within and existence beyond nature of ideal forms and ineffable essences, but they disagreed vehemently on how such a complex and mysterious nature should be artistically repr-esen ted. The key position of "nature" within all of these debates illustrates its intellectual importance and explains the attempts of philosophical radicals like Hume and George Berkeley to redefine it. Chapter 4 begins the direct consideration of Johnson's conception of nature and its employment by contextualizing his moral writings in the periodical essays within the tradition of rationalistic moral realism. Johnson's concern in the essays is to commend to his readers the pursuit of what is genuinely valuable, a quality which he ultimately locates in the orderly metaphysical structure inherent in and behind mundane appearances. As is particularly evident in his criticism of theodicies based on the "great chain of being," the mysteries of the universe are held by Johnson in the sort of awe that indicates the close affinity that he holds to exist between nature and its Creator. This affinity is emphasized inJohnson's commendations of the value of reason for recognizing and approving the permanent and the good, but also of its ultimate insufficiency, and the consequent necessity that moral epistemology be governed by Biblical revelation. Throughout the essays,Johnson grounds his presentation in a permanent and immutable metaphysical nature while affirming and appreciating the mutability and variety of nature's appearances. In chapter 5, the controversial relation of Johnson's "nature" to eighteenth-century natural philosophy is analyzed. The complexity ofJohnson's understanding and estimation of natural philosophy is indicated by numerous statements in his works approving and commending the investigation of nature that occur virtually alongside equally numerous criticisms and ridicule of scientists. The apparent contradiction is explained by Johnson's presumption that valid knowledge of nature must account for both its material and immaterial constitution. Following Aristotle and Aquinas, among others,

16

PREFACE

Johnson regards nature as embodying metaphysical tendencies and purposes apart from which the material system of the world cannot be adequately understood. For Johnson, legitimate science must endorse not only the knowledge of the material causes and effects respected by scientific materialists, but also the contextualization of that knowledge within an understanding that the natural system is oriented towards development and realization of purposes whose culmination consists in humanity's achievement of their moral and spiritual telos. Johnson's metaphysical contextualization of the investigation of nature was a via media by which he avoided both humanist prejudice against science on the one hand and the incipient materialism of eighteenth-century philosophical culture on the other. The explanation and illustration of Johnson's metaphysical definition of "nature" in chapters 4 and 5 prepare for the presentation in chapter 6 of the aesthetic and literary implications of that definition. Johnson's commendations of "just representations of general nature" in literature and drama are.sometimes opposed by modem critics to his appreciation of literature that embodies creative and imaginative genius. On the contrary, imaginative fictions are not only allowed under Johnson's commendation of "just representations," but they are the subject of it. Johnson, in the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Sir Philip Sidney, and John Milton, understands the essence of nature to be inobvious; representing it, therefore, requires both extraordinary perception and inventive ingenuity. Like Sidney, Johnson commends fictional images that evoke and suggest the value and ethical implications that he understands to inhabit the substance and processes of natural reality. Such images are realized, says Johnson, in the dramas of Shakespeare, which, although they fall short in representing the ethical structures and potentialities that metaphysical nature includes, they strikingly capture other permanent qualities of reality as these are detected in human experience. Johnson's concept of fictional representation is epitomized in his use of the term "genius," the meaning of which includes the capacities both to discern the depths that exist within and beyond nature and to invent images that evoke and display them. The study concludes with a justification of the value of Johnson's "nature" in terms of its relation to the eighteenth-century attempt to define a basis for epistemological certainty, an attempt illustrated and symbolized in the works of Hume, Berkeley, John Locke, and Rene Descartes. 7 As opposed to the implicit reductionism of popular

PREFACE

17

contemporary philosophies, Johnson's endorsement of experience and real knowledge based on and interpreted within the presumption of metaphysical nature constitutes an attempt to account for reality salva veritate, the philosophical validity of which is attested by the similarities between it and, for example, the contemporary criticism of empiricism presented by the Scottish Common Sense philosopher Thomas Reid. Johnson's endorsement of a metaphysically defined nature was no traditionalist prejudice, but rather a rational choice of interpretive contexts, a choice made by Johnson in opposition to what he took to be the Pyrrhonian and reductionistic tendencies implicit within contemporary philosophical and intellectual trends.

SAMUEL JOHNSON'S ''GENERAL NATURE''

I Classical "Nature" Whether or not the eighteenth century may appropriately be called "neoclassical," 1 there can be no doubt that the classical languages and literatures exerted towering influence over the intellectual issues that arose during the period and on the thinking of the individuals who debated them. Perhaps the most significant form that this classical influence took was the origination, definition, and contribution through literature and tradition of basic terms and concepts that shaped eighteenth-century intellectual inquiry and determined its direction. Among these, "nature" deserves to be given prominence, partly because the word is so frequently used in eighteenthcentury debates in virtually all of the arts and sciences, and partly because the concept occupies a place within those debates of such philosophical importance. More interesting than the frequent usage or importance of eighteenth-century "nature," however, is its semantic complexity, extending even to include inherent contradictions. This complexity has its roots in the classical origin of the concept of nature and the resulting extended contest to define the term. If the eighteenth century was neoclassical in anything, it was in the importation of the classical concept of nature into the center of its intellectual concerns and in the prosecution and extension of the classical attempt to define it. The discussion of the classical origins of eighteenth-century "nature" that follows is appropriately begun by considering two examples of works in which those origins are explicitly recognized. Robert Boyle's Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature (1685) and Ralph Cudworth's True lnteUectual System of the Universe (1678) are notable for their discussions of "nature" because each acknowledges both the importance and the problematic meaning of the term as used in contemporary discourse, and each attempts to solve the problem with an extended discussion of nature's definition. These definitions will be closely considered later in this study, but

22

SAMUEL JOHNSON 'S " GENERAL NATURE"

we note here that the attempts of both authors to define "nature" conspicuously begin with and largely consist of citation and criticism of the definitions of the ancients. Boyle blames Aristotle in particular for propounding a fictional "nature" that is pernicious in virtue of its adverse implications for Christianity. In attempting to refute Aristotle, Boyle quotes him at length, but also cites or refers directly to the works, for instance, of Zeno, Seneca, Hippocrates, Galen, Sextus Empiricus, Epicurus, and Lactantius, not to mention the views attributed to the ancient Chaldeans and the Egyptians and the extensive philosophical digest of ancient philosophy of Diogenes Laertius (100) .2 Cudworth's complicated and massive work likewise both begins with and substantially consists of citations of classical discussions of nature. In contrast to Boyle, Cudworth generally approves of the position of the ancients on nature and arranges them in a sort of debate between the immaterialists like Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Pythagoras and the materialists like Epicurus and Anaximander. 3 Within the use made of the ancients by Boyle and Cudworth there are discernible two indications of the importance of classical "nature" as represented in eighteenth-century discourse: first, the rival eighteenth-century conceptions of nature were all anticipated by classical authors; more interestingly, the tone of critical engagement and discursive competition that characterizes eighteenth-century discussions of "nature," as it does the polemics of Boyle and Cudworth, is a reproduction of the tone within which the classical versions of nature were characteristically asserted, as a look at Plato's Laws and Aristotle's Physics, for instance, will confirm. For an understanding of the source of the competitive and polemical tone of eighteenth-century discussions of "nature," therefore, we must turn to the classical works in which its definition was originally attempted. 4 The controversial tone characteristic of discussions of "nature" can begin to be accounted for by the startling generality of the concept. This generality derived from an expansion -of the original meaning of phusis, the Greek term that referred to the notion of a mature, or permanent, or genuine form or shape. 5 Originally applied to the "shape" of (or, that hidden within) a particular object 0 r concep t , e.g., "th e nat ure o f truth , " or t h e " nature " o f an m · d.1vidual, classical "nature" developed a much grander application in the concept of "universal nature": as the nature of something was to the thing, so universal nature was to everything. This invention of an all-encompassing "nature," apparently by the pre-Socratics, has

1: CLASSICAL " NATURE"

23

been called "astonishing" in its inclusion of " everything" into a single entity. 6 In this usage, the analytical meaning of phusis as the "nature" of a particular thing was combined with the synthetic, philosophicaljudgment that the particulars that constitute visible reality had a "nature" within which the apparent diversity of things was presumed to be metaphysically unified. It is from this combination within "nature" of both the material and the metaphysical that the disputes about its meaning were primarily to be generated. The imputation of both a material and an immaterial constitution to "nature" is implied in the most well-known early occurrences of "universal phusis," exemplified in the titles of philosophical poems by Empedocles and Parmenides, both of whom wrote works entitled Peri phuseos, "About nature. " 7 Phusis in the pre-Socratics' writings commonly means "the intrinsic and permanent qualitative constitution of things, " 8 but phusis as it is used in the title Peri phuseos extends that meaning to refer to universal rather than particular nature. This synthetic emphasis on the general over the particular contrasts with the tendency of the explanations of nature given by most preSocratics to emphasize nature's particulars or to reduce their plurality to a more basic element, a tendency visible in the doctrine of Thales, "the first, some say, to discuss physical problems [literally, problems peri phuseos]," that "water is the universal primary substance. '' 9 The original difference between interpretations of nature emphasizing the general and those emphasizing the particular illustrates the instability of the concept, an instability that may account for the observation of a recent translator of the fragments ofEmpedocles that even up to the time of Plato the notion of universal nature is considered to be "an innovation requiring exposition." 10 In any case, beginning with Plato, the major philosophical schools all developed fully elaborated theories of universal nature, elaborations that either embrace or deny the metaphysical. Because all of these theories either react to or include pre-Socratic ideas, and because they tellingly illustrate the varieties of interpretation to which the concept of universal nature was subject, it will be helpful to review some of them before considering the more fully developed systems. In the Physics, Aristotle divides his characterizations of the pre-Socratics (whom he sometimes calls phusikoi, "physicists") between the monists like Parmenides, who affirm there to be "one principle of Nature," and those like Democritus who affirm "more than one" such principle (184b).11 Particularly distinguished besides Parmenides and Democritus are the Ionian-school philosophers Anaxi-

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SAMUEL JOHNSON ' S "GENERAL NATURE"

mander and Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras with his follower Empedocles. Parmenides (ca. 500 B.C.) explained nature as "Being" that is "ungenerated and imperishable, entire, unique, unmoved and perfect."12 Within this eternal stasis, however, there is an interaction between two basic elements, fire (heat), and earth (cold): fire is a "craftsman" that acts on the "material" of earth (Physics 188a; cf. DL 9.22). Parmenides's monism was similar to that of the earlier lonians, notably Anaximander (611-546 B.C.), who specified an undefined "principle element" of which "the parts undergo change, but the whole is unchangeable" (DL 2.1); however, the element contains a potential for plurality that emerges "out of it" (Physics 187a). Anaxagoras (500-428 B.C.), a pupil of the Ionian Anaximenes, posited a moving principle called Nous (mind); he was "the first who set mind above matter," teaching that in the beginning "all things were together; then came Mind and set them in order" (DL 2.6). The universe is a material system consisting ultimately of an unlimited number of "minute bodies having parts homogeneous to themselves"; these bodies form things according to their different mixtures (DL 2.8-9). Heraclitus (ca. 500 B.C.) identified a primary element, fire, out of which all things are generated by means of the conflict of opposites, a conflict which continues to eternity through constant cycles of resolution and dissolution; the cycles are determined by "destiny." All things are filled with "souls and divinities" (DL 9.7-8). Pythagoras (582-500 B.C.) posited a single basic element, the monad, from which developed the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, and from them, all things. Reality is correlated mystically with numbers. The celestial bodies are all gods, since they contain heat, and heat is the cause of life. The universe is arranged in pairs of opposites: hot and cold, moist and dry, light and dark. The air is filled with genii, spirits who look after humanity. Virtue is harmony, and "all things are constructed according to the laws of harmony" (DL 8.25-30). Empedocles (484-424 B.C.), powerfully influenced by Pythagoras, accepted the idea of four basic elements and taught that the opposite forces of love and strife determine their mixtures and movements. 13 Perhaps the most controversial of the phusikoiwas Democritus (ca. 460-357 B.C.) Like Parmenides, Democritus taught that "being" was eternal and indestructible, but instead of defining "being" monistically, he explained it to consist in an infinite number of atoms

1: CLASSICAL " NATURE"

25

that form an unlimited number of worlds, which " come into being and perish." "In nature [phusis] there is nothing but atoms and void space," and "everything else is only thought to exist." Atoms are "unlimited in size and number" and are whirled about in a cosmic vortex, by which motion they combine to generate everything that exists. Everything happens by necessity. Things in the world manifest what appear to be qualities like color, but these are only discerned according to convention, since only atoms really exist (DL

9.44-45).

The commonalities among these interpretations are as important as the differences. In general, all of the pre-Socratic concepts of nature include the implication of a fundamental stability located in a principle or basic element. They also include a recognition both of particular material contents and of metaphysical structure and shape. The differences among them include the obvious variety of determinations as to where or in what manner the fundamental stability is to be located, in how the metaphysical aspect is related to and manifested in visible nature, and in the relative importance of the material to the metaphysical. To provide the definitive answer to these questions in the face of the considerable philosophical options then available was an important purpose of the works of Plato. As Cudworth implies, the most important classical contributions to eighteenth-century "nature" were the emphasis of its metaphysical constitution by Plato and the extension of its philosophical implications by Aristotle. 14 In the dialogues of Plato, phusis is not a technical term and varies in meaning. 15 Plato's usage of phusis and its relation to his cosmology are important to a consideration of the history of "nature" for two reasons, however. First, Plato's de-emphasis of phusis seems to be a calculated response to the development and emphasis of a materialistic concept of phusis among some of the pre-Socratic phusikoi, notably Democritus; Plato's interpretation of "nature" therefore represents an important moment in the history of the use of phusis. Second, Plato's cosmology was influential in classical and later periods among those like Cudworth for whom "nature" was a central conception. In Plato's Laws, Book 10, the dominant speaker of the dialogue called the Athenian emphasizes the priority of immaterial over material nature in his development of a moral-theological cosmology as a basis for the laws of an ideal state. As a preface to this explanation, the Athenian criticizes those who teach that "the first nature [phusis] of heaven and the other things came into being," and after

26

SAMUEL JOHNSON 'S " GENERAL NATURE"

them, the gods, with the implication that the primary elements of the universe consist in "earth and stones" rather than divine beings (886c-d). 16 According to these phusikoi, fire, water, earth, and air develop first "by nature and by chance," and "the bodies that came after these ... came into being through these" (889b). Everything else, including, finally, "the animals and plants" on earth, develops from the primary elements by the "mixing of opposites according to chance, that arises out of necessity" (889c); thus, all of heaven and earth results not "from intelligence," "nor through some god," but phusei, kai tuche, "by nature and chance" (889c). The Athenian goes on to criticize the moral debilitation that the acceptance of such a cosmology must cause a society, a debilitation resulting inevitably from the perception of the abitrariness of moral principles that is consequent to the presumption of a material nature that, unsupervised by divinities, is purposeless. As the alternative to the material phusis of the phusiologoi, the Athenian presents a cosmology dominated by psuche, or "soul," that is, psychic force, the "primal generation of all things" (899c). By opposing immaterial psuche to the concept of a material and arbitrary phusis, Plato challenges the materialistic definition of "nature" propounded by the phusikoi and lays the foundation for the moral realism that he advocates over their moral conventionalism. 17 In the Republic, Plato says that "it is by and in nature [phusis]" that the "natural begetter" (phutourgon, from phuo) created all things (597d) . 18 This subordination of the natural order to a spiritual agency of creation is consistent with Plato's emphasis on psuche in the Laws, an emphasis which seems to constitute an attempt to redefine "nature" as "soul" in contradiction to the Ionians. 19 The cosmology developed by the Athenian is one in which ultimate reality is metaphysical and hierarchical. Psuche "comes into being before all bodies" and "more than anything else" is "the ruling cause of their change and all their reordering" (892a). So primary is psuche in relation to the universe that "it .would be most correct, almost, to say that [the origination of psuche] is especially by nature [phusis]" (892c). Psuche "manages and resides in all things that are in motion everywhere"; it "drives all things in heaven, on earth, and in the sea through its [voluntary] motions" (896e), and it "drives everything around" (898c); psuche and "the gods" are really different names for the same thing (899a-b). Whether the universe is animated by a single divine psuche or by several is left unclear. 20 The Athenian concludes the description of his cosmology by de-

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veloping its teleological implications. The universe embodies an "order and law of destiny" in conformity with which all things are elevated and by disobedience of which they are debased: no one can elude the justice of the gods (904d-905a). The gods have "the greatest ease of supervision over all things" with regard to the good of the whole: "All generation comes into being for the sake of this: that a happy existence might characterize the life of the whole" (904a, 903c). It is the part of each human being to pursue virtue in accordance with the gods' direction: "Injustice and insolence, together with lack of prudence, destroy us, while what saves us are justice and moderation, together with prudence-qualities which dwell in the soul-imbued powers of the gods" (906b). Plato leaves us with the description of the universe as a moral arena in which the natural world contains a real metaphysical order arranged according to the cosmic tendency toward development of the good. Plato's metaphysical interpretation of phusis is important for the study of eighteenth-century "nature" not only because it originates the concept often referred to by "nature" in that period, but also because Plato's deployment of phusis in support of moral and philosophical principles sets the pattern for similar deployments during the eighteenth century. The polemical employment by Plato of metaphysical phusis is demonstrated in his establishment of two famous distinctions, that between phusis and nomos (nature and conventional law) and that between matter and ideal form. In the Gorgias, Socrates illustrates the social application of the moral realism advocated in the Laws by refuting the moral conventionalism of Callicles, represented in his contention that it is "justice according to nature [phusis]" that "he who is better and more intelligent should rule and have the advantage over baser men" and that the laws that prohibit such exploitation are merely a convention ( nomos) by means of which the weak control the strong ( 483b-c, 490a) .21 Socrates's refutation of Callicles hangs on the existence of a real metaphysical constitution of phusis: by reducing Callicles's major premise ("it is according to nature for the strong to exploit the weak") to the proposition that the highest good is pleasure, Socrates demonstrates that, since "good is not the same as pleasure" ( 497d), then it is more in accordance with nature to consider justice to mean "sharing equally" ( 489b) than a right of the strong to unrestrained exploitation. Socrates concludes: Wise men say, Callicles, that heaven and earth, gods and men, are held together by the principles of sharing, by friendship and order, by self-

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control and justice; that, my friend, is the reason they call the universe "cosmos" [literally, "order"] and not disorder or licentiousness .... It has, in fact, escaped you what a mighty power is exercised, both among men and gods, by geometrical equality. And it is your neglect of geometry which brings about your opinion that one should strive for a share larger than that which other men possess. (508a-b)

Socrates here points out to Callicles that his idea of phusis is disastrously and radically mistaken. Nature is essentially characterized by order and he isotes he geometrike, "the true principle of distributive justice." 22 Thus, "justice, beauty, sobriety and the like" are "in the nature of things" (Rep. 501 b). Implicitly, Socrates and Callicles agree that what is "according to nature" is right. But where Callicles asserts that "nature" accords with appearance in its indication that the strong should dominate, Socrates affirms that nature is defined by ideal principle, kosmos, "world-order" (508a) .23 Callicles's confusion of appearance with reality exemplifies the sort of philosophical and moral blindness that Plato ridicules in the bizarre epistemological allegory of the cave (Rep. Book 7), which, like the Callicles dialogue, is significant for the study of phusis because of the elevated conception of nature that it implies. The shadows on a wall that are seen by the captives in the allegory bear the same relation to the real world behind them as does the apparently "real" world to the objective reality of Plato's forms. It might be inferred that the shadows in the allegory would be identified by Plato with phusis as a world of illusory appearances, but, in fact, phusis is associated with reality, not with the shadows that are its reflection. During the narration, Socrates asks Glaucon to "consider ... what would be the manner of the release and healing from these bonds and this folly if in the course of nature [phusis] something of this sort should happen to [ the captives]," i.e., their release into the real world. Plato here associates "nature" with ontos and onta, "reality" and "real things," rather than the shadows. The implication of this use of phusis, along with the whole allegory in its context, seems to be this: mere appearances are unnatural in their superficiality, and only by turning the "vision of the soul ... towards the things that are real and true" (519b) can "nature" be genuinely understood. Aristotle's contribution to eighteenth-century "nature" builds on Plato's. Presuming the metaphysical nature that was fundamental for Plato, Aristotle developed it by explaining the manner in which the metaphysical affects and inhabits the physical. The momentous

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divergence in emphasis that resulted from the Platonic interest in invisible perfection and the Aristotelian concern with the effect of the invisible on the visible, notably in regards to causation, movement, and purpose, is no less important for its being well-known; because that difference constituted the most important philosophical dispute of the Middle Ages in the conflict between the Augustinians and Thomists, however, its discussion is reserved for the next chapter. Here, we shall examine the roots of the difference in the Physics, in which Aristotle is mainly concerned to provide a conceptual framework for understanding physical nature. His discussion of phusis centers around his key terms, kinesis (movement) and telos (goal): particulars are related to nature by the principle of kinesis and are conceived as changing toward the realization of their natural telos. The "nature" that emerges from its description in the Physics, it will be seen, will become the standard conception of reality in the eighteenth century, underlying discourses as disparate as those of theology, literary criticism, and science. The Physics begins by focusing on and justifying its inquiry into metaphysical nature with the establishment of a Platonic methodological distinction between appearance and reality. Since "to be directly accessible to our cognition" is not the same thing as to be "intrinsically intelligible," the direction of inquiry into nature must proceed from the "more immediately cognizable," that is, the "concrete and particular," to "what is clearer and more intimately cognizable in its own nature," which is the "abstract and general" (184a). The introduction implies Aristotle's double-usage of phusis to mean both "particular nature" and "universal nature," usages often difficult to distinguish. For example, in the definition of phusis that Aristotle supplies in the Metaphysics, phusis can mean the birth, origination, or source of a particular thing, the "primary stuff, shapeless and unchangeable from its own potency," of which an object consists, and the "source from which the primary motion in every natural object is induced in that object as such" (1014b1015a).24 These definitions strictly concern phusis in relation to particulars, but Aristotle's explanations constantly tend to emphasize general or universal nature, 25 as when he concludes his definition of phusis in the Metaphysics by stating that "every essence in general is called 'nature,' " and that "nature ... is the source of motion in natural objects, which is somehow inherent in them" (1015a). The tension between phusis as particular essence and as general agent was noted by Aristotle himself, who explains in the Physics that phusis

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is like "a man being his own physician, ... agent and patient at once" ( 199b). This lack of clear distinction between particular and general phusis illustrates the thematic insistence in the Physics that the two are inseparable and interdependent. Aristotle argues in the Physics that the primary meaning of phusis must include a principle of self-motion towards a goal. As opposed to defining phusis such that ."the nature and substantive existence of natural products resides in their material" (193a), Aristotle emphasizes the metaphysical by arguing that phusis is "the ultimately underlying material of all things that have in themselves the principle of movement or change'' ( 19 3a) . Natural things, the refore, consist of a "principle of movement (or change) and rest" (arche kineseos kai staseos; 192b) enclosed within a "substratum" (hupokeimenos; 192b). The tension between the "nature" of particular entities and universal nature is evident in Aristotle's summary comments, where he distinguishes between "nature itself" and "all things that 'have a nature,' " and states that "it is only in such substrata that nature ever has her seat" (192b). The principle of movement inherent within natural things is explained by Aristotle to be a principle of change and development. All natural things, he notes, change and develop from one form to another. In this process are involved a subject and a form, resulting from the "ultimate determinants and principles" of nature ( 190b); thus, a seed develops into the form of a mature plant. However, since "there is something that underlies all opposites" (191a), an "underlying factor" ( hupokeimene) or "ultimate material" ( arche), then there are really three principles that define natural change: the subject (such as a seed), the form ( the plant), and their underlying principle of commonness (the metaphysical "ground" that connects the seed with the plant) (191a). By describing natural change in such detail, Aristotle lays the groundwork for what most seems to interest him, namely, the sources and energy of change. Natural philosophers, he says, must concern themselves with four "ways of apprehending the 'how and why' of things," which are to refer those things (I) to their essential nature, (2) to what "initiated the movement" of their natural development, (3) to the result of the development, and (4) "to the material" (198a). There are two orders of "principles which direct physical movement," one "unnatural,'' literally, "not phusis," and the other (by implication) natural, which constitutes "the essential characteristic or form in its capacity of constituting the end and aim

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to be reached"; in short, " Nature is purposeful" (198a-198b) . Aristotle is redundant concerning the purposefulness of nature: "There is purpose ... in what is, and in what happens, in Nature" (199a); "when a thing is produced by Nature, ... the operation is directed by a purpose" (199a); "it is absurd to suppose that there is no purpose" ( 199b). The purpose of nature is the attainment of the telos. "form" ( morphe) is the "goal" ( telos) of nature; th us the "form" imposed by nature, or nature itself, is the "final cause" or "goal-directed cause" of natural development (199a); "nature is the universal determinant of order" (252a). Behind the moving principle of nature, Aristotle infers the existence of a single "something," the "prime" or first "mover" (proton kinei,; 258b), itself unmoved, that "causes the movement of the first set of moving things [the celestial spheres], and they pass it on to the others" (259a). Movement in nature is "intermittent" rather than (as for the prime mover) "constant" and eternal, because natural things receive their impetus not directly from the prime mover itself but indirectly through agents that, because they are themselves in motion, do not incite uniform movement (260a). This accounts for the phenomenon of imperfect development in the natural world. Along with the phusis of Aristotle in terms of its eighteenth-century influence should be ranked its linguistic and philosophical successor, the natura of the Stoics, a concept less sophisticated than Aristotle's but more spectacular in, for example, its anthropomorphism. From Zeno (ca. 342-270 B.C.) through Seneca (4 B.C.-A.D. 65), the Stoics emphasized that physical nature was animated by a divine force that intelligently directed the universe. To live in harmony with this intelligent force, that is, "according to nature," was the Stoics' ethical imperative. In its inclusion of moral principles and reason within the domain of metaphysical nature and in its emphasis, following Aristotle, of nature's primitive energy, Stoic natura was an important presence in the eighteenth century, constituting, for example, the guiding principle of much eighteenth-century moral theory and the "dear, unchang'd, and Universal Light" that is the center of artistic inspiration in Pope's Essay on Criticism. 26 Anticipating Pope, the Stoics considered the essence of natura to be a sort of metaphysical fire that is no mere physical phenomenon but a "vital force" that "pervades the whole world," 27 "holds the whole world together and preserves it," is "possessed of sensation and reason," and is, in sum, "the most excellent of all things and

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the most deserving of authority and sovereignty over all things" (ND 2.29). Zeno called natura the ignis artificiosus, "craftsmanlike fire." Emphasizing the creative reason contained in nature, he taught that "the nature of the world itself, which encloses and contains all things in its embrace, is styled ... not merely 'craftsmanlike,' but actually 'a craftsman,' whose foresight plans out the work to serve its use and purpose in every detail" (ND 2.58). The world is so governed by nature's providence that its "structure ... in all its parts is such that it could not have been better whether in point of utility or beauty," and "anyone who essays to improve some detail will either make it worse or will be demanding an improvement impossible in the nature of things" (ND 2.87). With respect to its intelligent guidance of the universe, nature was ca11e d l ogos or " reason " ( t h e terms " nature, ,, " reason, " "C.1ate, " "providence,'' "Zeus," and "god" or "the gods" are synonymous in Stoic doctrine) .28 In all living things, there is a material "soul" (psuche) that is part of the soul of the universe (DL 7.56). In human beings, this soul is rational; thus, "life according to reason" is "the natural life,'' i.e., it allows (and obligates) human beings to pursue their "ultimate ideal of perfection" (ND 2.35; DL 7.86-87). This ideal involves "living virtuously,'' an ideal which, since "our individual natures are parts of the nature of the whole universe,'' is the same thing as "living in accordance with experience of the actual course of nature" (DL 7.87-88). The Stoic ethical imperative was embodied in the so-called "telos---formula" 29 zoe kata phuseos, "life according to nature": "The end [telos] may be defined as life in accordance with nature" (DL 7.87-88). Because "nature" was the "ultimate reference of all evaluation" and embodied the principle of reason, inferences drawn from observation of nature were for the Stoics both descriptive and evaluative: anticipating Johnson's advocacy of moralistic fictional realism in Rambler 4, the Stoics taught that true accounts of "natural events" should describe both "what is" and what "should be the case." 30 Human society is corrupted by conventionalized "bad habits,'' but the gift of "right reason" ( recta ratio) that is given by nature to everyone allows for the discernment of virtues such as justice: ''Justice is inherent in Nature"; therefore, for those with right reason, "Nature is the source of justice. " 31 The moral worth of good and wise acts is not only "intrinsically desirable" due to its association with logos, but it is, in fact, the only good; other things, such as health and wealth, are "preferable,'' but not truly valuable. 32 Despite the fact that the

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Stoic reluctance to recognize human reality, represented in the preference of metaphysical virtues over a basic need like physical health, was severely ridiculed in the eighteenth century, the basic Stoic presumption that the realm of "nature" contained and, in a sense, prescribed universal moral principles was an eighteenth-century mainstay of moral theory and debate. 33 The cultural and intellectual eighteenth-century opposition to the supernaturalism of traditional Christianity has its ancient correlate in the conception of nature of the Epicureans, which rivalled Stoic "nature" for influence in antiquity. For Epicurus (ca. 342-270 B.C.), the gods existed "immortal and blessed," untroubled by caring for human beings or maintaining the earthly system of natural phenomena (DL 10.123; ND 1.44-45). Epicurus, therefore, was the original deist, and his "nature" was a materialistic conception that maintained itself according to physical laws. The natural system of Epicurus, in contrast with Stoic "nature," is simple. Its basic principles derive to some extent from Democritus: nothing can come into existence from what does not exist, and what does exist consists entirely in bodies and space. 34 All bodies are either simple and indivisible (the "atoms," DL 10.41), or composites made of the simple bodies. The different shapes of composite bodies are accounted for by the different kinds of shapes of atoms that combine to create them (DL 10.42-43). The atoms are in constant motion (DL 10.43), and their combinations and collisions are what cause things to come into being and events to occur. Consistent with his materialism, Epicurus accounted for sight and thoughts of objects by positing material "outlines or films" that objects continually give off in imitation of themselves. Similar mechanisms account for the senses of smell and hearing (DL 10.45, 53-54). The complete conception of "the body as a whole" consists in the object as characterized by the qualities (e.g., size, color) that "give the body its own permanent nature" (DL 10.69). The souls ofliving beings consist of fine particles (DL l 0.63), and even the gods are made of tenuis (fine, delicate) material substance. 35 Natural phenomena are all accounted for by the functioning of mechanistic nature: "Where we find phenomena invariably recurring, the invariableness of the recurrence must be ascribed to the original interception and conglomeration of atoms whereby the world was formed" (DL l 0. 77). True knowledge of nature comes, as for John Locke, from "feelings and sense perceptions" and from the "analogy of things within our experience" (DL l 0.82, 59). "To ar-

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rive at accurate knowledge of the cause of things" is "the business of natural science": "happiness depends on this," because "without the study of nature," we must "live in dread of what the legends tell us" (DL l 0. 78, 143), that is, in fear of the supernatural and the irrational. As unlike the Stoics' "nature" as the Epicureans' was in its hostility to metaphysics, the two systems were alike in justifying their accounts of value and purpose in life through an appeal to their conceptions of nature, exemplified in the case of the Epicureans in their avoidance of the mechanistic determinism of Democritus by arbitrarily insisting that atoms in their natural course do not just stream down, but also swerve. 36 Given the importance for eighteenth-century humanist and literary culture of Christian influences along with classical, it might seem appropriate at this point to compare classical "nature" with a corresponding concept drawn from Biblical literature. Such a comparison is impossible, however, because the concept of "nature" virtually does not exist in the Bible, a fact that eighteenth-century critics of classical "nature" like Boyle and George Berkeley were quick to point out. 37 Classical Hebrew has no word equivalent in meaning to phusis or natura, and the King James Version of the Old Testament does not contain the word "nature." The Hebrew word closest in meaning to "nature" is probably eretz, meaning "land" or ground," but eretz is never generalized or abstracted in the manner of phusis or natura to mean the essence of anything, singular or collective.38 Phusis does occur in the Greek text of the New Testament, but rarely, and the usages that occur mostly have the meaning of "particular quality," as when in 2 Peter 1 :4 Christians are called "partakers of the divine nature [phusis] ." Very few New Testament usages of phusis seem to refer to "general nature." An important exception, which was to figure in eighteenth-century theological debate,39 occurs in Romans 2:14, where the Apostle Paul writes that "when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature [phusis] the things contained in the law," then they are "a law to themselves." Possibly, the use of phusis can be accounted for here by its being employed "stoically and rationalistically in terms of natural law" in order to communicate with an audience educated in Greek concepts, a usage which does not necessarily imply the Apostolic endorsement of the concept of universal nature. 40 The exceptional nature and scarcity of such usages of phusis signify, at least, the unimportance of the concept in New Testament theology, and they

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emphasize the association of "nature" with its context of origin in Greek philosophy. Although there was no primitive Christian or Hebrew counterpart to classical "nature," the concept of nature inherited by the eighteenth century was generally understood to contain substantial Christian meaning. This theological content was acquired by classical "nature" in virtue of its transmission to the eighteenth century through the medium of Scholastic theology and philosophy. If the notion of classical nature was complicated because of the variety of philosophical perspectives that phusis and natura had been appropriated to represent, the "nature" that emerged from the medieval attempt to synthesize Greek philosophy with Christian doctrine was more complicated still.

2

Medieval "Nature" The classical conceptions of nature entered eighteenth-century discourse through two modes of transmission. Most obviously, the literature of antiquity that contained them was made directly available to eighteenth-century readers through the "great archaizing movement"1 of Renaissance humanism, whose preoccupation was the recovery and preservation of classical languages and texts and the institution of their ideals within European culture. 2 A more influential form of classical "nature" even than that directly available through the classical authors, however, was the "nature" incorporated within medieval patristic exegesis and Scholastic theology and philosophy, a concept whose determinative influence within eighteenth-century thought derived not least from the fact that its long historical presence in European philosophy had made its presumption "unconscious," as Alfred North Whitehead noted. 3 Coincidentally legitimizing classical "nature" under the aegis of orthodox theological doctrine, medieval philosophers amplified, focused, and refined the concept through their use of it to interpret Christian doctrine in a philosophically defensible manner. 4 The medieval formulation of a concept of nature, however, was marked by the same tensions that had characterized the classical development of the concept, tensions that the addition of Christian content to "nature" both incorporated and aggravated. Indeed, the great philosophical disputes that defined the course of Scholasticism, notably those between the Augustinians and Thomists and between the realists and nominalists, all found substantial common concern in their attempts to define "nature" and to articulate an epistemology that was coherent with it. Transmitted to the eighteenth century through both orthodox Christian theology and the philosophical traditions that substantially derived from it, medieval "nature" carried with it both the powerful authority acquired through centuries of official religious and intellectual endursement

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and also the central complexity and ambiguity that had characterized the notion of "nature" from the beginning. In the examination of medieval intellectual life in general, and of medieval "nature" in particular, St. Augustine, for many reasons, merits primary consideration. Before turning to his writings, however, we shall introduce them through a seventeenth-century example of their influence on discussions of "nature" in order to emphasize their eighteenth-century influence. In answer to Hobbesian materialism, Ralph Cudworth, in his True Intellectual System, 5 posited the existence of "plastick nature," the "Manuary Opificer that Acts subserviently under the Architectonical Art and Wisdom of the Divine Understanding," an immaterial entity that "Acts Immediately upon the Matter, as an Inward and Living Soul or Law in it" (156, 156 [sic]). 6 Cudworth reflects the Neoplatonist interpretation of phusis as developed by Plotinus: "What is called nature [phusis] is a soul, the offspring of a prior soul with a stronger life ... nature is at rest in contemplation of the vision of itself, ... [but] there is another, clearer for sight, and nature is the image of another contemplation. " 7 The doctrines of the Neoplatonists profoundly influenced Augustine's acceptance and interpretation of Christianity, as he himself declares: "Having then read those books of the Platonists, and thence been taught to search for incorporeal truth, I saw Thy invisible things, understood by those things which are made; and though cast back, I perceived what that was which through the darkness of my mind I was hindered from contemplating. " 8 That the concept of "incorporeal truth" as taught by the Neoplatonists profoundly influenced Augustine's philosophy will be amply manifest in the review of his concept of "nature" and natural knowledge which is to follow; Cudworth's "plastick nature" is a result and a reflection of Augustine's emphasis of the reality of the metaphysical structures that inhabit nature. 9 The influence of Platonism on Augustine's conception of nature is perhaps most apparent in the ontology that he developed in order to explain the Christian doctrine of creation and defend it from subversion by Manichean materialists. Augustine distinguishes between the original being of God and the derivative being of all else: "I beheld the other things [cetera, "the rest"] below Thee, and I perceived that they neither altogether are, nor altogether are not [nee omnino esse nee omnino non esse], for they are, since they are from thee, but they are not, because they are not, what Thou art" ( Conf 7. 17). Augustine subordinates all being to, and makes it ontologi-

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cally dependent upon, divine Spirit. Physical being and spiritual 10 being coexist hierarchically: "Spirit is obviously superior to body." Material objects consist of matter and form, modes whose creation was simultaneous (Gen. 1.15.19). In Augustine's thought, matter is of so low a status in relation to spirit as to be regarded as "nearly nothing." 11 However, the matter of nature is valuable insofar as it manifests its Creator, in whose ideas its true form originally exists: "All things in [the One Word of God, i.e., the original creative act] are originally and unchangeably simultaneous." Their forms exist eternally in the divine mind: "In [ the creative divine Word, all] things have not been, nor are they to be, but they only are." 12 Augustine's view of the relationship of spirit and matter in nature is illustrated in his doctrine of the "causal reasons" (rationes seminales) by which he explains organic growth and natural processes in the world: "The motion we now see in creatures ... , as each one fulfills its proper function, comes to creatures from those causal reasons implanted in them, which God scattered as seeds at the moment of creation" ( Gen. 4.33.51). He continues: In the earth from the beginning, ... God created what was to be in times to come .... For who now creates these things unless it is He who is working even now? But He now creates from what already exists, whereas in the beginning creatures were made by Him when none of them existed at all. (5.4.11)

Augustine assigns to the causal reasons the function of continuing the divine creative act on earth, a function with which that of Cudworth's "plastick nature" is parallel. What is most important to note about the causal reasons is their exemplification of the permeation of the material world by the spiritual, but also of the distinction of spirit and matter: despite the superiority of spirit to matter for Augustine, both modes of being constitute "nature." The Platonic shape of Augustine's ontology is emphasized in his epistemology, which distinguishes science (scientia), or knowledge gained by natural means, from wisdom (sapientia), or divine illumination: "To wisdom belongs the intellectual cognition of eternal things, but to science the reasonable cognition of temporal things." The distinction between the two modes of knowledge is "very clear," and "no one doubts that the former is to be preferred to the latter" (Trin. 12.15.25). Knowledge of things consists of images of bodies produced in the soul. Anticipating both the epistemological dualism

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of Descartes and the idealism of Berkeley, Augustine asserts that images of bodies are not produced by the bodies themselves, since the mind is a "spiritual nature" and, being "prior in nature" and "more excellent" than bodies, cannot be affected by them. Instead, "the spirit produces [images of bodies] within itself" (Gen. 12.16.33), and, because of the superior nature of mental substance, mental images of things are "more excellent" than the bodies that they represent. Above both spiritual vision and the corporeal vision that depends upon it is a third sort of knowledge called intellectual vision, by which value judgments are made and "those realities are beheld which are not bodies and have no forms similar to bodies: such as the mind itself and every good affection of the soul" ( Gen. 12.24.50). Ultimately, whatever true understanding that creatures attain is bestowed by its divine source ( Gen. 12.31.59). Augustine's "nature" can be summarized as a hierarchical combination of matter and spirit in which spirit, in the shape of divinely imposed forms, dynamic tendencies, and the pervasive divine presence and life, determines the mode of natural existence. Before proceeding to review some examples of the powerful influence of Augustine's nature on medieval literature, we must supplement our understanding of the Augustinian conception by viewing it in opposition to the Thomist view of nature that officially replaced it. The Thomist conception is appropriately introduced and historically contextualized by means of a description of its most important early modern intellectual descendent, the philosophical paradigm of nature presumed by Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. 13 Just as Thomist "nature" differed in its interpretion of reality from Augustinian "nature," so Boyle's nature contradicted Cudworth's "plastick nature." In deliberate opposition to Cudworth's reification of nature as a "plastick" 14 and vital metaphysical entity, Boyle described nature as "the Aggregate of the Bodies, that make up the World, framed as it is, considered as a Principle, lJy virtue whereof, they Act and Suffer according to the Laws of Motion, prescrib'd lJy the Author of Things" (Enquiry, 71). 15 Where Cudworth emphasizes a real spiritual entity that carries out the divine purposes in nature, Boyle locates "nature" in the general functioning of the "present structure and constitution of the world," in virtue of which the "Bodies, that compose it, are inabled to act upon ... each other" (72). The contrasting natures of Cudworth and Boyle reflect the contrasting "natures" of their medieval predecessors: contrasting with Augustine's perspective that nature is a material container for the divine ideas and

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presence, Aquinas emphasized the inherent dynamism of nature resulting from the complex unity and inseparability of physical substance and metaphysical form. Aquinas's definition of nature is distinctive (and distinctly Aristotelian) for its virtual conflation of the ontological and the teleological: the categories in terms of which Aquinas discusses ontology are also those by which he discusses natural development and the purpose and goal of the creation. This conflation is apparent in the definition of "nature" that is presented in the course of Aquinas's appreciation in the Summa theologi,ca of Augustine's rationes seminal,es: Because living things are generated from a principle united to them, as fruit from a tree, and the offspring from the mother, to whom it is united, consequently the word nature has been applied to every principle of movement existing in that which is moved. 16

The equation of nature with a collective "principle of movement" reflects the dynamism that Aquinas attributes corporately to created beings, a quality that is simultaneously actual and potential. The actus of a natural thing is its present location in its process of development towards its final form: "In so far as a thing has achieved stability or perfection it is in actu." 17 The potencia of a thing is its capacity for further movement towards completion or perfection. The "principle of movement" in Aquinas's definition of nature illustrates the subtlety and complexity of his ontology: it is the final form designed for and inherent in each created thing in relation to which the thing is both an "act" of accomplished development and a "potency" capable of further development. To account for the inherent dynamism of nature, Aquinas contextualizes it within a Biblical teleological schema, replacing Aristotle's impersonal "first mover" with the personal Christian God. He writes, [God] brought things into being in order that His goodness might be communicated to creatures, and be represented by them; and because His goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, He produced many and diverse creatures.

In other words, both the existence of nature and its complex character are underlain by divine benevolence. Further, the natural diversity of the creation contributes to the development of the whole towards its designated end: the universe "participates the divine

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goodness more perfectly, 18 and represents it better than any single creature whatever" (l.47.l.resp.) The dynamic complexity of Aquinas's nature is illustrated in his ontology, most notably in his doctrine of the composite character of natural being. A created thing, which Aquinas calls an "agent" (agens) in virtue of the potential for development inherent in nature, consists of form and matter. Matter is an indeterminate substrate that embodies form. Although form is superior to matter and can be conceptually distinguished from it, the two attributes are inseparable in reality: Aquinas asserts against Augustine and Plato that even in the divine mind, where "matter has its idea," the idea does not exist "apart from the idea of the composite" real object whose form the matter embodies (1.15.3 ad 3). The form, or essence, of a thing is inherent in the thing by nature and corresponds to the "principle of movement" that Aquinas equates with "nature": "The natural agent acts by the form which makes it what it is" (1.47.1 ad l; cf. 1.15.1 resp.) Physical objects, therefore, cannot be abstracted from their teleological context in the natural schema or from the metaphysically definitive form from which they each receive their identity and character: both their context in the world and their composite nature contribute to their reality. That the form of a thing is its dynamic impulse of development implies that God does not directly cause all natural events, but instead builds secondary causation into the natural system. For Aquinas, natural developments are linked together with the original creation by a hierarchical chain of causation, just as Aristotelian process begins from the impulse of the first mover: "In those things which proceed from one according to a natural order, as the first is the cause of all, so that which is nearer to the first is, in a way, the cause of those which are more remote" (1.77.7 resp.) Natural development proceeds from the progress of divine ideas: the divine mind contains the "typal ideas" according to which the different kinds of things were created. These general ideas or forms were implanted in "the elements of the world" "at the beginning," where they function as "universal causes." In tum, the "things which, in the succession of time, are produced by universal causes" contain "particular causes." Finally, the causal forms are implanted in the seeds of the plants and animals that contain the particular causes. Aquinas's view of causation is summarized in his description of fate: whatever in nature that is subject to secundae causae, that is, to participation in nature's chain of causation, is subject to fate, which Aquinas, like

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Boethius, defines as "the ordering of second causes to effects foreseen by God" (1.116.4.resp.) The inseparability for Aquinas of the substance of nature from its form is reflected in his epistemology. Anticipating Lockean empiricism, he explains, "The proper object of the human intellect, which is united to a body, is a quiddity or nature existing in corporeal matter." Further, it is only by inference from knowledge of visible things that knowledge of invisible things is possible. A form or "universal nature" can only be apprehended in its embodiment in matter, that is, in its status as a composite entity ( 1.84. 7 resp.) Correcting Platonic idealism, Aquinas emphasizes the real character of knowledge, which he explains in relation to the "double implication" of the expression, "the thing actually understood": "the nature itself" of anything, that is, its form, that is "understood, abstracted or considered as universal is only in individuals; but that it is understood, abstracted, or considered as universal is in the intellect" (1.85.2 ad 2; emphasis added). In other words, "Truth resides primarily in the intellect, and secondarily in things according as they are related to the intellect as their principle"; thus, "it is from the fact that a thing is or is not, that our thought or word is true or false .... The being of a thing ... is the cause of truth in the intellect" (1.16.1 resp., ad 3). By emphasizing that knowledge is fundamentally derived and inferred from apprehension of the composite unity of nature, Aquinas elevates perception and reflection over Platonic intuition and affirms the validity of natural knowledge and experience. 19 To complete this survey of medieval "nature," it is necessary to contrast a third philosophical conception with those of Augustine and Aquinas: the "nature" implicit in the nominalism of William of Ockham. Ockham's nominalism is important not only because of its historical reputation for opposing and ending the "golden age of scholasticism," but because it is considered to be the direct ancestor of British empiricism. 20 Ockham's "nature" in relation to that of Augustine and Aquinas can be epitomized as follows: against the Augustinian view of nature as ideal presence within material containers, and against the Thomist view of nature as an interlocking and goal-directed system, Ockham asserted that universal terms had no real referrent, but that they described mere mental contents which could be predicated of real things: in other words, for Ockham, the universal called "nature" did not exist outside of language. Ockham's criticism of "nature" is aptly introduced by and illustrated in the seventeenth-century view of Nicolas Malebranche,

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who asserted it against the Thomist " nature " of Boyle and the Augustinian "nature" of Cudworth: If the nature of pagan philosophy is a chimera, if this nature is nothing, we must be advised of it. ... [Many] thoughtlessly attribute to it the works of God, who busy themselves with this idol or fiction of the human mind, and who render to it_the honors due only to the Divinity. They would have God be the author of miracles and certain extraordinary effects, which in one sense are little worthy of His grandeur and wisdom, and they attribute to the power of their imaginary nature the constant and regulated effects that the wise alone are able to admire. 21

In his insistence on the direct divine causation of natural phenomena and the subjectivity of "nature," Malebranche transmits the tradition of Ockhamist nominalism. With Augustine and Aquinas, Ockham accepted the reality of the physical world, but the context in which he interpreted the creation was radically different. Ockham established as his central principle that "everything that is not God is radically contingent." 22 Thus, although natural causation seems to occur, in reality "God is the immediate cause of all things," since beyond any apparent indirect, natural causation, "all things essentially depend on God." 23 The creation consists only of particular, individual things comprised of matter and form, but eis ipsis unrelated to each other by any real common identity within generic categories. 24 "Universal" forms exist not in nature but exclusively in the mind. 25 The significance of Ockham's radical denial of the reality of universals is directly epistemological but ultimately ontological. 26 In the realistic epistemology of Aquinas, the ideas or forms that originated in God really inhabited natural things, and these ideas and forms could really (but imperfectly) be apprehended by a perceiver. According to Ockhamist nominalism, however, the universal forms exist not in nature but only in the mind of a knower: "No substance outside the mind and no accident outside the mind is such a universal. "27 Therefore: Properly speaking, the science of nature is not about corruptible and generable things nor about natural substances nor about movable things.... [but it is about] mental contents which are common to such things, and which stand precisely for those things in many propositions.28

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According to Ockham himself, his conception of nature transfers the locus of natural knowledge exclusively to the subject. Ockham's location of universal forms in the mind rather than in nature is the aspect of his philosophy that would be reputed to have a "dissolving influence" within medieval Scholasticism. 29 George Berkeley's incorporation of a nominalist view of universals, along with Hume's de-emphasis of natural causation, would upset eighteenth-century views of knowledge in a manner similar to the medieval effect of Ockham's nominalism. The "natures" of Augustinian idealism, of Thomist realism, and of Ockhamist nominalism manifested themselves profoundly in the assumptions underlying eighteenth-century discourse. As important as they were, however, these conceptions were not the only medieval contributions to eighteenth-century "nature." Along with the characterizations of nature produced by the medieval philosophical imagination, there must be considered the literary and scientific conceptions that derived from them: specifically, the personified "mother nature" whose inspiration was Augustinian Platonism and the empirical natural science fostered by rationalistic Thomist realism. The personification described slightingly by Johnson as the " imaginary being supposed to preside over the material and animal world" 30 and more respectfully by Chaucer as "the vicaire of the almyghty Lord," 31 a character whose imaginative appeal is indicated by her presence even in the austere prose of Richard Hooker, 32 was no pagan intruder into medieval thought and literature like the goddess Fortuna. In contrast, Natura "received her essential shape and characterization" in the twelfth century through the efforts of Bernardus Silvestris and Alan of Lille. 33 In her similarity to Augustinian and Platonic conceptions, Natura illustrates the popular understanding of Augustinian "nature," and in her dramatic presence in important medieval works such as the Romance of the Rose and the Parliament ofFowls she illustrates its attractiveness to the imagination. Both this attractiveness and the philosophical coriception that underlies it are exemplified in Natura's original twelfth-century depictions. In Bernardus Silvestris's creation allegory the Cosmographia (earlymid twelfth century), Natura acts as an ordering force between Noys (i.e., Nous, the divine mind) and the physical creation. Natura "care[s] for heavenly properties and essences with all the zeal of unflagging devotion," yet she also is called the mater generationis,

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"mother of generation, " out of whose womb the earth receives its fecundity; 34 prefiguring Cudworth's "plastick nature," Natura functions in ways that relate her to both heaven and earth, but she belongs exclusively to neither place. The two specific actions that Natura performs in the Cosmographia illustrate both her functional attachment to the terrestrial and celestial realms and her lack of identity with them. First, she complains to Noys about the "numerous and uninterrupted concourse of natures" that exist (70), causing him to divide and order the creation. This incident portrays Natura's ambivalent relation to the world: she is concerned about order, but she has no direct part in establishing it. Her second act is to assist two other goddesses, Urania and Physis, with the creation of humanity. In this task, Physis (i.e., Phusis), almost the double of Natura, creates the body, Urania creates the soul, and Natura unites their efforts. The point seems to be that Natura represents an ordering force, but not really a creative one: she is the ambiguous but indispensable point of connection between the physical and the metaphysical. De planctu naturae, "The Plaint of Nature" ( ca. 1160-1165), by Alan of Lille, depicts Natura to be more prominent, exercising a legal as well as a creative role in overseeing the universe as God's "vice-regent. " 35 The creative power of Natura is represented in De pwnctu by a long, symbolic description of the goddess (Prose 1) that emphasizes the beauty, variety, and vitality of the creation in images such as her "kaleidoscopic" dress (85-86). Alan emphasizes her normative and judicial role, however, introduced by Natura' s display of the conspicuous rips in her garments, evidence of the attacks by certain human beings who are the objects of Natura's complaint. Natura's purpose in delivering her complaint is to denounce moral deviation from her standards and to restore order by excommunicating the unrepentant from her presence. She complains most directly against homosexuals, who "[invert] the rules of Venus by introducing barbarisms in [the] arrangement of genders" (133), and more generally against all who violate "the pattern of morals, the norm of chastity," and "the love of modesty" (67), including gluttons, drunkards, and the avaricious. At the conclusion of the work, Natura's priest, Genius, representing divine grace, 36 acts at her behest to declare the separation of impenitent lawbreakers from "the kiss of heavenly love," "Nature's favour," and the "harmonious council of the things of Nature" (220). Although she is nominally Christian, Alan's Natura endorses the Platonic view that "the uni-

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verse and its harmonious order reveal the ideal patterns on which human life and virtue are founded." 37 In sum, medieval Natura is emphatically associated with order, a principle to which her creative power is subordinate. She is active and positive, reflecting the etymological connection of natura with "birth." However, as befits her metaphysical origins, she is also of ambiguous status, directing but not accomplishing the formation of matter into living creatures and inhabiting neither heaven nor earth. As Natura amplified Platonic "nature," so medieval natural philosophy amplified Aristotelian "nature." Collectively, medieval natural philosophers reinforced and illustrated the "nature" of Aristotle and the Thomists that was characterized by its emphasis on nature's dynamic complexity and the mechanistic interdependence of its elements. In their endeavor to account for that interdependence and to describe it in detail, medieval scientists recorded significant findings concerning the function of material nature, findings that characteristically resulted from the empirical and mathematical investigative procedures to which a later scientific age laid claim. For example, Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1168-1253) investigated problems in physics, optics, and astronomy from the perspective that physical nature contains a regular mathematical framework whose causal explanations could be deduced from the observation of natural phenomena. He attempted to explain the rainbow, for instance, with reference to observations of simple instances of the reflection and refraction of light. 38 Grosseteste's pupil Roger Bacon (ca. 1214-1294) used the mathematical and experimental methods learned from Grosseteste to investigate optics, meteorology, and alchemy, and, incidentally, prophesied the invention of the automobile, airplane, and blimp. 39 Fourteenth-century natural philosophers such as Walter Burley and Thomas Bradwardine employed the combination of mathematics and empirical investigation as it was developed and advocated by Grosseteste and Baco_n to refine and interpret Aristotelian explanations of kinetic and dynamic phenomena. Bradwardine developed a sophisticated conception of velocity and anticipated in his analytical methods some elements of Newtonian mechanics and the calculus. The intensive investigation of the causes of motion was continued by the "Paris terminists," among them Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme, who revised the concept of impetus and explained the acceleration of falling bodies. On the basis of these examples and others, William A. Wallace claims that

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by the end of the fourteenth century " a considerable body of new knowledge had become available that was basically Aristotelian" but had been sophisticated by advances in physics and mathematics. 40 It is worth a digression at this point to affirm the positive association of religion with medieval science, a clarification that will be valuable for the discussions of the new science as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The digression is necessary because of the opposition of medieval philosophy and theology to science that has been asserted and emphasized since the Renaissance,41 signified for all time in the unfortunate events surrounding the end of the scientific career of Galileo. Standing in contrast to this alleged opposition of medieval religion and philosophy to science is the substantial modern consensus that medieval theology, philosophy, and science are most accurately understood as a unified and mutually reinforcing endeavor rather than one characterized by a disparity and conflict of emphases: "Religion was the matrix in which science was shaped in medieval times. " 42 To this matrix, which we may roughly call Thomism, a number of necessary enablements for medieval (and modem) science may be traced, such as the emphasis on the empirical character and source of knowledge, the identification of material, natural objects as real things rather than mere containers for ideas, the delineation of a structured, independently functioning, and rationally designed natural system, the focus on cause and effect, and the centrality of the study of motion as exemplified in Aquinas's designation of material objects as agentes, "actors." Perhaps most significant was the general Thomist emphasis on the validity of knowledge about the world gained through reason. 43 The significance of all this for the understanding of the practical implications of medieval "nature" is indicated in the observation ofJohn M. Ellis that "what is really important in science is the imaginative conceptual thought that comes before science begins. " 44 Medieval "nature," in virtue of the coherence and susceptibility to rational analysis that its theological origins contributed, constituted the conceptual and imaginative precondition for the progress of medieval science. Although the emphases among the medieval conceptions of nature were diverse enough to precipitate the philosophical conflicts between their adherents for which the age is notorious, 45 the conceptions were bound together by remarkable and powerful consistencies that were to prove more important than their differences. For example, the Aristotelian emphasis on a teleological character-

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ization of nature corresponded with the linear Christian view of history and an eschatology that insisted on the divine purpose of the creation, a purpose that would culminate in the telos of a divine intervention in nature and human civilizations. 46 Further, the divinely established order of nature that was explicitly affirmed by both Aristotle and Plato coincided with the implicit rationality of the Biblical God who "laid the foundations of the earth" and "the measures thereof, " 47 a rationality that was increasingly confirmed and illustrated through the investigations and experiments of medieval natural philosophers. Finally, the Platonic and Stoic conceptions of nature supported the Christian view that the ultimate originator of the material creation and the physical principles that bound it together was also the source and guarantor of the moral laws and principles that bound together human societies and that, therefore, human laws ought to approximate laws that were "natural" and divinely instituted in the creation. The consistencies among the variety of classical and Christian interpretations of nature that were combined by the Schoolmen account for the persistance of that combination in European thought through, at least, the eighteenth century. Those consistencies did nothing to harmonize the different and even contradictory emphases contained in the ideas for which they supplied the coherence, however; instead, the differences among the various conceptions of nature were suspended in static opposition. Thus, for instance, the metaphysical stasis emphasized by Platonists was joined, though not reconciled, to Aristotelian kinesis, and the Platonic approbation of spirit over matter was placed uneasily but permanently next to the Mosaic affirmation that the Father of spirits considered his material creation to be "very good. " 48 In providing the basic context of reference and interpretation for the discourse to follow, therefore, medieval "nature" made available a set of philosophical incompatibilities whose disclosure and exploitation would enliven eighteenthcentury debate.

3 "Nature" in Eighteenth-Century Discourse Although an acquaintance with classical and medieval "nature " is mandatory for understanding Johnson's "nature," it is not sufficient. Besides its constitution from its philosophical and theological antecedents, Johnson's conception of nature was shaped by its formulation and deployment within a complicated intellectual environment in which the discourse of virtually every important discipline was characterized by a competition among interpretations of nature. These interpretations, while they differed in emphasis, were fundamentally connected by their origin in the medieval Christian-classical synthesis. 1 However, although the debt of eighteenth-century "nature" to its philosophical ancestors is mostly obvious in its similarity to the classical concepts, the arguments in which the idea is contained are distinctive in their relation to the powerful intellectual currents that they helped to constitute. The importance of "nature" that manifests itself in the ubiquity of the word in eighteenth-century prose was not infrequently the subject of contemporary comment. Reference has already been made to Boyle's Free Enquiry Into the Vulgarly Receiv 'd Notion of Nature, which he wrote in order to correct the "dark" subject of the too-free use of a word with no clear meaning. 2 About fifty years later (1738), David Hume repeated Boyle's observation concerning the ambiguity of "nature" in the Treatise, calling it "a word ... than which there is none more ambiguous and equivocal. " 3 In the fourth edition of the Dictionary, Johnson both echoes Boyle and quotes him: describing "nature" as a word that "occurs so frequently, with significations so various, and so difficultly defined," Johnson follows his own thirteen definitions with eight definitions reproduced from Boyle's Enquiry. 4 The remarkable phenomenon noticed in all these quotations of the coincidence of the frequent usage of "nature" and its instability of definition demands explanation. To understand the origin and effects of that coincidence in eighteenth-century discourse, it will be

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helpful to begin by considering the three main alternative meanings of eighteenth-century "nature." In its combination of metaphysics with mechanism, the definition of nature proposed by Boyle was characteristic of the "nature" most often presumed in eighteenth-century arguments. Boyle defines '' universal nature'' as '' the Aggregate of the Bodies, that make up the World, framed as it is, considered as a Principle, uy virtue whereof, they Act and Suffer according to the Laws of Motion, prescrib'd uy the Author of Things" (Enquiry, 71). The very complexity of this definition is instructive. Boyle seems to mean that nature is a gestalt: the "aggregate" of the material constituents may be considered a "principle" because the relations of those constituents cause them to manifest a functional order that is "natural" by virtue of the design of things but that is ultimately of divine origination. Later, Boyle clarifies that nature consists less in ''things'' than in their relations; that is, nature is both a mechanism and a context of identities: "An Individual Body, being but a Part of the World, and incompass'd with other parts of the same great Automator_,,, needs the Assistance, or Concourse, of other Bodies, (which are external Agents) to perform divers of its operations, and exhibit several Phenomena's, that belong to it" (79-80). Further, though Boyle emphasizes the orderly functioning of the world as an "Automaton" or an "Engine as comprises, or consists of, several lesser Engines" (81), he also insists that the system manifests an ultimate metaphysical dependence: "This most Potent Author ... of the World ... does still Maintain and Preserve it," "regulating" the movements of the planets as well as "extend[ing] his Care and Beneficence to particular Bodies, and even to the meanest Creatures.'' 5 The most important rival to Boyle's conception of nature was Cudworth's "plastick nature," a notion that Boyle wrote the Enquiry to oppose. As Boyle describes Cudworth's concept, it is "a plastick Principle of all the Mundane Bodies" (74), a substantial but "Immaterial Creature" (357) that performs and directs. natural operations.6 Cudworth himself, arguing in the True Intellectual System that "Life, Cogi,tation and Understanding' are the "Peculiar Attributes and Characteristicks of Substance Incorporeal' ( 146), and against the idea that "all the Effects of Nature come to pass by Material and Mechanical Necessity" ( 148), asserted that there is "a Plastick Nature under [God], which as an Inferior and subordinate Instrument, doth Drudgingly Execute that Part of his Providence, which consists in the Regular and orderly Motion of Matter" under the direction of a

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"Higher Providence" (150). Plastic nature "governs the Motion of Matter . .. according to Laws," and disposes of matter "in the Formation of Plants and Animals and other things, in order to that Apt Coherent Frame and Harmony of the whole Universe" (151); nature is the divine "Arl it self, acting immediately on the Matter, as an Inward Principle" (155). Although not conscious in the normal sense of the word, plastic nature is a living "creature," the "Lowest of all Lives" (162-63). In short, plastic nature is a vital, ordering, animating force subordinate to God that controls the material world. The diffence between Boyle's "nature" and Cudworth's is essentially the difference between the "natures" of Aquinas and Augustine: Boyle locates natural order in the relations and laws inherent in nature, while Cudworth locates it above or within matter in a distinct immaterial being. A third conception of nature active in eighteenth-century thought was the negative definition presented by Malebranche in the seventeen th century and adopted and refined by George Berkeley and Hume in the eighteenth. 7 Berkeley disdained plastic nature as a "vain chimera, introduced by those heathens who had not just notions of the omnipresence and infinite perfection of God," and he defined "nature" in conformity with his philosophical immaterialism as "the visible series of effects or sensations imprinted on our minds, according to certain fixed and general laws. " 8 Those laws are not located in the "mighty Machine of Nature," which consists in ideal divine projections whose "being [literally and exclusively] is to be perceived or known" (67), but in the divine mind: "The set rules or established methods wherein the Mind we depend on excites in us the ideas of sense, are called the laws of nature" (79). That such laws exist testifies to the "intimate presence of an All-wise Spirit, who fashions, regulates and sustains the whole system of beings" (143). In obvious contrast to the mechanistic nature of Boyle and the animate nature of Cudworth, Berkeley locates causal relations outside of and distinct from the natural system: since "one idea cannot be the cause of another," then "the connexion of ideas does not imply the relation of cause and effect"; such connection is rather a term in the "Language (if I may so call it) of the Author of Nature," who is the immediate cause of all natural events (97-98). Conflicts among the positions based on the views of nature held by Boyle, Cudworth, and Berkeley characterized and made turbulent the course of eighteenth-century thought. Berkeley's Ockhamist and Malebranchian de-emphasis of causation in the hands of

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Hume, for example, became a powerful weapon against positions based on an assumption of Boyle's Aristotelian "nature." Turning to the implications of "nature" for eighteenth-century discourse, we can most sensibly begin from what the conceptions of nature of Boyle, Cudworth, and Berkeley most obviously had in common, namely, a theological context: Boyle wrote against the practice of "ascribing to Nature, and some other Beings, ... things that belong but to God," that is, against "Polytheism and Idolatry" (Enquiry, 84); Cudworth wrote to defend theism against philosophical materialism and atheism ( True Intellectual System, A4r); Berkeley wrote against materialist skepticism. 9 The association of nature and theology exhibited by these writers indicates that eighteenth-century thinkers considered nature to have powerful theological implications, and it is to the consideration of those implications that we must now turn. The eighteenth-century connection between theology and nature is signified in their relation in the greatest poem of the age, Paradise Lost. Milton's depiction of created nature as the arena for the divine redemption of humanity was reiterated by later Christian apologists who founded their arguments on the unavoidable fact that nature was the context within which theological concepts, or anything else, had to be understood. Bishop Butler pointed out in the Analogy of Religion that, to introduce God, the Bible must begin with nature: [Scripture] begins with an account of God's creation of the world, in order to ascertain and distinguish from all others, who is the object of our worship, by what he has done; in order to ascertain who he is, concerning whose providence, commands, promises, and threatenings, this sacred book all along treats; the Maker and Proprietor of the world, he whose creatures we are, the God of Nature. (289)

Consistent with the seventeenth-century emphasis on justification and evidence, orthodox Christian apologists commonJy cited nature as the ground or starting point for moral and religious belief. Richard Hooker, justifying tradition against the Puritans, had stated the position succinctly: The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself. For that which all men have at all times learned, Nature herself must needs have taught; and God being the author of Nature, her voice is but his instrument. 10

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Hooker's endowment of nature with active agency and female gender links his conception with those of Aquinas and Alan of Lille; his "Nature" is a vice-regent who acts in behalf of God on earth. The eighteenth-century rationalistic defense of Christianity based on nature reached its highest level of sophistication in Butler's Analogy (1736). Butler argued that comparing "the known constitution and course of things with what is said to be the moral system of nature" and comparing "the acknowledged dispensations of Providence, or that government which we find ourselves under, with what religion teaches us to believe and expect" support the probability that nature and Christian doctrine "are ... analogous, and of a piece" (89): since God created both visible nature and its metaphysical government as depicted in precepts of morality and religion, it is logical, argued Butler, to expect the latter to resemble the former. Central to Butler's argument is his definition of nature: Though one were to allow any confused undetermined sense, which people please to put upon the word natural, it would be a shortness of thought scarce credible to imagine, that no system or course of things can be so, but only what we see at present; ... The only distinct meaning of the word is, stated, fixed, or settl,ed; since what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent agent to render it so, that is, to effect it continually, or at stated times, as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once. And from hence it must follow, that persons' notion of what is natural will be enlarged, in proportion to their greater knowledge of the works of God, and the dispensations of his Providence. (105)

From this argument, Butler infers: Thus, when we go out of this world, we may pass into new scenes, and a new state oflife and action,just as naturally as we came into the present. (104)

For Butler, "nature" is a perspective more than a "thing": immaterial things will seem as "natural" to immaterial beings as material things seem natural to us. The mysteries of the Christian revelation constitute no valid reason to disbelieve it, says Butler, because much of visible nature is unexplained or mysterious, as well. Further, it is arbitrary to presuppose stability in nature unless a generative metaphysical agency for that stability is assumed: "nature" is therefore "require [d] and presuppose [d]" to be fundamentally metaphysical.

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In sum, Butler employs the ambiguities of "nature" in order to problematize deistic rationalism and to disarm empiricist objections to Christianity by erasing the boundary between nature and supernature. Whatever was its effectiveness in support of orthodox Christianity, the interpretation of nature from the perspective of theological rationalism ironically prodt1ced what was regarded as the greatest eighteenth-century threat to orthodox belief, namely, deism.II If nature was God's handiwork that could be rationally interpreted to yield an understanding of the divine will for mankind, then the revelation that was presumed to found orthodox Christianity was superfluous: so argued Matthew Tindal in Christianity as old as the Creation, subtitled The Gospel a Republication of the Religi,on of Nature. Exploiting Samuel Clarke's orthodox view that "from the eternal, and necessary Differences of Things [i.e., from Nature], there naturally arise certain moral Obligations," Tindal draws a highly unorthodox conclusion: If Christianity, as well as Dei,5m, consists in being govern'd by the original Obligation of the moral Fitness of things, in conformity to the Nature, and in Imitation of the perfect Will of God, then they both must be the same; but if Christianity consists in being govern'd by any other Rule, or requires any other Things, has not the Dr. himself giv'n Advantage to Dei,sm? 12

The significance of Tindal's "nature" lies in its implication for human life. Whereas orthodox theology taught a radical disability to discern spiritual truth without divine assistance, Tindal argues that the moral implications of nature interpreted with respect to the "Wisdom, and universal Goodness of God" (362) presuppose the ability to understand those implications and the capacity to follow their guidance. The benevolent nature and the human capability of interpretation implied in Tindal's argument were pqwerfully to affect the eighteenth-century imagination. Eighteenth-century discussions of moral theory were just as much related to the concept of nature as were theological discussions, but moral theory was an object of more general concern and interest: theology was of paramount importance to those interested in it, but was increasingly disregarded by those such as the deists whose cultural and intellectual project it was to subvert or replace the influence of orthodox Chistianity and its insistence on the necessity of

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revelation. Moral theory, on the other hand, was subject to intense scrutiny by those representing virtually all eighteenth-century viewpoints.13 What in the eighteenth century was thought to be the traditional view of the relation of morality and nature paralleled exactly the orthodox rationalists' conception of the relation of theology and nature: the standards of right and wrong that ultimately derive from God also inhere in his creation and are discernible by reason. The classic statement of this rationalistic moral realism that was echoed repeatedly by eighteenth-century moralists had been provided by Aquinas: Since all things subject to Divine providence are ruled and measured by the eternal law, ... it is evident that all things partake somewhat of the eternal law, in so far as, namely, from its being imprinted on them, they derive their respective inclinations to their proper acts and ends. Now among all others, the rational creature is subject to Divine providence in the most excellent way, in so far as it partakes of a share of providence, by being provident both for itself and for others. Wherefore it has a share of the Eternal Reason, whereby it has a natural inclination to its proper act and end: and this participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is called the natural law. (Summa theologi,ca II.91.2.resp.)

Most striking in this statement is the idea that natural things are "imprinted" ( impressio) by providence in a way that determines their basic identity in the schema of creation as stamping determines the value and configuration of a coin. Because, for Aquinas, teleology virtually equals ontology, "form" determines both purpose and identity. Therefore, he means, the impression of providence on all things makes them what they really are. Further, the definitive impression of providence on natural things extends to the highest natural faculty, reason, which Aquinas, echoing Stoic theology, calls an extension of the divine mind itself. Aquinas follows the explanation of the relation of reason and nature with its practical implication: Just as, in the speculative reason, from naturally known indemonstrable principles, we draw the conclusions of the various sciences, the knowledge of which is not imparted to us by nature, but acquired by the efforts of reason, so too it is from the precepts of the natural law, as from general and indemonstrable principles, that the human reason needs to proceed to the more particular determination of certain matters. These particular determinations, devised by human reason, are called human laws. (II.91.3.resp.)

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In short, Aquinas authorizes human law by asserting its derivation from created nature. The Thomist conception of the relation of nature to moral and legal principles can be traced from the medieval philosophical tradition through Renaissance Anglicanism in Hooker 14 to the rationalistic moral realism of the eighteenth century. For example, William Wollaston 's The Religi,on of Nature Delineated is thoroughly Tho mist in its commendation of a moral theory based on a theistic interpretation of nature. Wollaston's assumptions are evident, for example, in his exposition of the "great law" of the religion of nature. In Wallaston's view, religion is founded on "the distinction between moral good and evil," a distinction discerned in "the respect, which mens acts bear to truth," that is, the expression of things "as they are in nature." The presumption of moral obligation in nature implies a religion "which is founded in nature," and whose "great law" as laid down by its "Author" is "that every intelligent, active, and free being should so behave himself, as l,y no act to contradict truth; or, that he should treat every thing as being what it is," i.e., what it is as defined by its context in nature. 15 What Wollaston's discussion lacks in clarity, it regains in emphatic repetition: "nature" is a divine construct within which the value of human action is determined by its congruency with the metaphysical structure that contains it. The development of eighteenth-century moral theory largely occurred within the context of the assault on rationalistic moral realism by two rival views, sentimental moral realism and moral conventionalism. The former position, held by the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, presumed the same moral content of nature as did the rationalist view but criticized the effectiveness of reason to determine moral principles. The latter view, held by Thomas Hobbes, Hume, and Adam Smith, attacked the basis of moral principles in metaphysical nature and substituted a radically different conventionalist view of nature in its stead. Motivated by an awareness of the fallibility of reason and pressure from moral conventionalists like Hobbes to establish a firm basis for objective moral principles, theorists beginning with the Earl of Shaftesbury posited an innate human capacity distinct from reason that detected and appreciated good and rejected evil. Francis Hutcheson, for example, implying the absurdity of having to "reason so nicely to apprehend the Evil in Cruelty, Treachery, Ingratitude" or needing ''the Reflection of CUMBERLAND or PUFFENDORF to admire Generosity, Faith, Humanity, [and] Gratitude," 16 asserted that a

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natural moral sense enabled anyone to assess or appreciate moral qualities. After defining the moral sense as "that Determination to be pleas'd with the Contemplation of those Affections, Actions, or Characters of rational Agents, which we call virtuous," Hutcheson relates it to nature: The AUTHOR of Nature has much better [ than with reason] furnish' d us for a virtuous Conduct, than our Moralists seem to imagine, by almost as quick and powerful Instructions, as we have for the preservation of our Bodys. He has made Virtue a lovely Fann, to excite our pursuit of it; and has given us strong Affections to be the Springs of each virtuous Action. (xv)

Hutcheson's eroticizing of the pursuit of the "lovely form" of virtue is not characteristically Thomist; however, his contextualizing of moral action within theistic nature is consistent with the Thomist idea that moral principles exist objectively within the framework of nature. Hutcheson later reinforces the implication: There is abundant Probability [ that the DEITY is morally good], deduc' d from the whole Frame of Nature, which seems, as far as we know, plainly contriv'd for the Good of the Whole; and the casual Evils seem the necessary Concomitants of some Mechanism design'd for vastly prepollent Good. Nay, this very moral Sense, implanted in rational agents, to delight in, and admire whatever Actions flow from a Study of the Good of others, is one of the strongest Evidences of Goodness in the AUTHOR of Nature. (303-4)

Hutcheson's teleological argument for the divine goodness presumes the inherent goodness of nature, a presumption everywhere evident in his work. The version of moral theory that was most powerfully opposed to moral realism in eighteenth-century thought was moral conventionalism, the view that the intersubjective moral consensus that formed or was constructed within a society constituted the only real basis for morals. The view was popularized by Hobbes in Leviathan, 17 but was most powerfully expressed by Hume. Preparatory to his exposition of conventionalism, Hume criticized the realists' nature in a famous passage: In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, ... the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning ... when

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of a sudden I am surpriz' d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. ... [It] seems inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. (469)

Hume's subtle but powerful implication regarding nature is obvious: from what merely "is," there is no necessary connection to what "ought" to be; nature, per se, can therefore imply no precepts of moral obligation. Hume's point is arresting and deserves detailed consideration. In its context in the Treatise, Hume's separation of "is" from "ought" amounts to a denial of the theological implications of nature, a denial that exposes the tendency of the moral realists' argumentation. Natural law metaphysics, from Plato's Laws through the Summa theologi,ca, were always theologically contextualized. The eighteenth-century moral realists remained aware of the dependency of their moral arguments on implicit theological commitments: Cudworth, for example, concludes his argument for the existence of an "eternal and immutable morality" by making his theological commitments explicit: "It is not possible that there should be any such Thing as Morality, unless there be a God, that is, an Infinite Eternal Mind that is the first Original and Source of all Things." 18 Hume's separation of mere existence from moral obligation, however, suggests that by 1738, if not before, the rationalists' polemical insistence on the rationality and inherent morality of nature per se had disengaged the concept from its theological framework. Hume exploits this disengagement in order to ignore traditional, metaphysical nature and to point out, rightly, that to assert that morality somehow inheres in mere brute, material nature is absurd and philosophically incoherent. Hume demonstrates in the Treatise, however, that he is not interested in correcting or clarifying the metaphysics of_ "nature" but in replacing them. Posing the question "whether we ought to search for [moral] principles in nature" (473), Hume, noting the ambiguity of the word (474), proceeds to clarify his usage of it by defining a "naturalistic" foundation for morality that is radically different from the "nature" of the moral realists: As no principle of the human mind is more natural than a sense of vir-

tue; so no virtue is more natural than justice. Mankind is an inventive

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species; and where an invention is obvious and absolutely necessary, it may as properly be said to be natural as any thing that proceeds immediately from original principles.... Tho' the rules of justice be artificial, they are not arbitrary. Nor is the expression improper to call them Laws of Nature, if by natural we understand what is common to any species, or even if we confine it to mean what is inseparable from the species. ( 484) 19

Redefining "nature" as social rather than metaphysical, Hume bases his moral theory on a radical philosophical naturalism. He does not forbid a possible theological connection, but his silence regarding such a possibility is weighty. Morality for Hume needs no supernatural sanction but is manufactured intersubjectively from the "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" ( 490). Justifying and accounting for moral principles solely in terms of prudential self-interest as manifested in the collective judgment of societies, Hume confines "nature" to "human nature." In concert with Hume's redefinition, natural philosophy powerfully affected the meaning of "nature" in the eighteenth century by de-emphasizing its moral and teleological implications. The rhetorical query of Dryden's Crites exemplifies the popular estimation of the effect of eighteenth-century science on "nature": Is it not evident, in these last hundred years (when the study of philosophy has been the business of all the Virtuosi in Christendom), that almost a new Nature has been revealed to us?-that more errors of the school have been detected, more useful experiments in philosophy have been made, more noble secrets in optics, medicine, anatomy, astronomy, discovered, than in all those credulous doting ages from Aristotle to us? 20

Dryden's "last hundred years" is roughly the age of Kepler, Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes, a group whose endeavors culminated in effect in the publication of Newton's Princi,pia in 1687. By the "new Nature" that these "philosophers" would reveal, Dryden primarily means, no doubt, the heliocentric nature of Copernicus; however, a concomitant proposition exemplified in the investigations of the new science that would have huge impact on the conception of eighteenth-century "nature" was, as Galileo put it, that "this grand book, the universe ... is written in the language of mathematics," 21

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that is, nature is fundamentally mathematical, thus measurable and, implicitly, material. This impulse toward philosophical materialism provided by the new science must not be understood as an erasure of metaphysics, however, so much as a diminishment. Not only did the most important scientists of the era such as Boyle and Newton presume a "nature" that included a complex superstructure of philosophical and theological definitions, but even the philosophical paradigm of nature that was implied and endorsed by the very method of the new science itself was essentially metaphysical in its presumption of the coherence of nature and its availability to rational investigation. 22 Insofar as the investigation of physical nature became the focus of interest, however, "nature" tended to be increasingly regarded as material. An investigation of the metaphysics of the new science appropriately begins with Descartes, considered both in his time and ours to be a father of the new philosophy. In order to establish a "firm and permanent structure in the sciences," 23 Descartes proceeded from universal doubt to the insight that doubting required a doubter: "After having reflected well and carefully examined all things, we must come to the definite conclusion that this proposition: I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it" (21). Knowledge of extended space and material objects is "dubious," however (29), due to the fallibility of the senses: "What do I see from the window but hats and coats which may cover automatic machines? Yet I judge these to be men" (27). From his own existence, Descartes infers the being of a God, providing an ontological argument by which the divine existence "is grounded on the highest evidence" (43). Accepting the divine existence confirms for Descartes the real existence of corporeal nature: "Since [God] has given me . .. a very great inclination to believe that [sense impressions] are sent to me or that they are conveyed to me by corporeal objects," and since God's perfection eliminates the possibility of his deceitfulness, then "we must allow that corporeal things exist" (64). The metaphysical substantiation of material nature developed by Descartes in the Meditations is foundational in his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences. 24 Descartes's metaphysics are included and their importance emphasized in contemporary popular explanations of the new philosophy, of which that of William Wotton is typical: Since [logic] is, indeed, the Foundation of all Knowledge, I ought to take notice, that my Lord Bacon and Des Carles were the two Great Men,

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who both found Fault with the Logick of the Schools, as insufficient of it self for the great Design of Logick, which is the Advancement of real Learning; and got Authority enough to persuade the World ... that other Methods must be taken, besides making Syllogisms; ... So that the Moderns have enlarged the Bottom; and by adding that Desideratum which the Ancients either did not perfectly know, or, which is worse, did invidiously conceal, namely, the Method of discovering unknown Truths. 25

The method and metaphysics of Descartes, Wotton implies, have helped enlarge the "Bottom" of philosophy to facilitate empirical investigation; they thus constitute an inherent part of the "Foundation of all Knowledge" upon which the new philosophy was presumed to rest. Although it was grounded in metaphysics, the new science contained a methodological tendency toward philosophical materialism that conflicted with the presumption of metaphysical nature and created the potential for philosophical incoherence. A statement from Wotton exhibits this tendency: The new Philosophers, as they are commonly called, avoid making general Conclusions, till they have collected a great Number of Experiments or Observations upon the Thing in hand; and, as new Light comes in the old Hypotheses, fall without any Noise or Stir. So that the Inferences that are made from any Enquiries into Natural Things, though perhaps set down in general Terms, yet are (as it were by Consent) received with this Tacit Reserve, As far as the Experiments or Observations already made, will warrant. (301)

As a method for verifying propositions about the corporeal world, Wotton's emphasis on "Observations" of "Thing[s]" is unimpeachable, but it is inherently corrosive with regard to knowledge of the unobservable, particularly the metaphysical superstructure of traditional "nature." Turned against moral realism and orthodox theology by those inclined towards materialism, the scientific method, impelled by its own logic, relentlessly eroded the foundations of metaphysical nature during the eighteenth century. Ironically, however, the empirical methodology of the new philosophy gave it potency not only against metaphysical nature as traditionally conceived, but against its own metaphysical foundations, such as the presumed connection of cause and effect, the validity of reason, and the idea of the real existence and rationally deducible constitutions of things and their relationships in nature. The two

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most vulnerable points of the metaphysics of the new philosophy were its implicit presumption of epistemological dualism in separating matter and mind and its reliance on causal explanations. Founding knowledge in the mind, Descartes had problematized knowledge of extended space and of material objects by implying the fundamental difference between res cogitans and res extensa, "mental stuff" and "extended stuff." 26 Following Descartes,John Locke compounded the epistemological problem by minimizing the importance of the theological ground that Descartes presumed to unite the perceiver with the perceived. Locke asserted that "since the Mind, in all its Thoughts and Reasonings, hath no other immediate Object but its own Ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident, that our knowledge is only conversant about them," 27 and he proceeded from this premise to ground knowledge in psychology and probability, rather than in a presumed objective unity whose existence was underwritten by theology. Hume took the epistemological dualism regarding nature of Descartes and Locke to its logical conclusion. Beginning with Locke's assumption that knowledge could at most be probable, he further problematized epistemological judgment by demonstrating that cause and effect, whose presumption constitutes the basis of virtually all natural knowledge, are mere customary designations whose necessary connection is neither rational nor observable: There is, then, nothing new either discover'd or produc'd in any objects by their constant conjunction, and by the uninterrupted resemblance of their relations of succession and contiguity. But 'tis from this resemblance, that the ideas of necessity, of power, and of efficacy, are deriv'd. These ideas, therefore, represent not any thing, that does or can belong to the objects, which are constantly conjoined. ( Treatise, 164)

Hume's displacement of the relation of cause to effect from reality to custom resembles a similar move by Ockham, Malebranche, and Berkeley. Where these philosophers had located the relation of cause and effect in the spiritual rather than the physical in an effort to promote a radically theocentric view of nature, however, Hume attributed the notion of causation merely to customary observation; that is, he made "causation" a social fiction. In his de-emphasis of the real coherence of nature that perception seems to confirm, Hume forcefully exemplifies the historical irony that the method of the new philosophy, invented both as a means to natural knowledge

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and as an enhancement to theology, would in the eighteenth century turn against both. 28 The tendency implicit in the new philosophy to problematize knowledge of the very nature that it presumed to explain suggests a more interesting explanation for the notorious opposition of Augustan humanists to some manifestations of the new thinking than is provided by the traditional imputation to them of traditionalist prejudice. When Jonathan Swift describes the Moderns in the Battl,e of the Books, for example, his portrayal of their disorganized, shabbily equipped, and viciously destructive "army" arguably constitutes a protest against the philosophical incoherence implicit in the opposition of the materialist methodology of the new science to its metaphysical foundation, with the tendency of the former to dissolve the latter and thus destroy knowledge and meaning. The tendency was also observed by Alexander Pope, who in the conclusion of the 1742 Dunciad attributes the malaise that he perceives to be overtaking English intellectual and cultural life to the materialist reductionism and antimetaphysical tendency of the new philosophy: Philosophy, that lean'd on Heav'n before, Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more. Physic of Metaphysic begs defence, And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense! See Mystery to Mathematics fly! In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die. Religion blushing veils her sacred fires, And unawares Morality expires. 29

Implicit in Pope's satire is a vivid philosophical protest against the attack on metaphysical nature that he understands to be made by philosophical materialism, deism, and moral conventionalism. Not only did eighteenth-century humanists protest what they perceived to be the philosophical destructiveness of the new philosophy, but they also objected to the tendency implicit in empiricism to revalue the components of metaphysical nature by elevating the visible to a level with, or above, the invisible. The clearest statement of the humanists' objection to the revaluation of nature is presented in the famous paragraph by Samuel Johnson in the Life of Milton wherein he points out that human beings are "perpetually moralists," but "geometricians only by chance": The truth is that the knowledge of external nature, and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or the fre-

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quent business of the human mind .... Prudence and justice are virtues and excellences of all times and of all places.... Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary and at leisure. 30

Johnson's paragraph has several levels of significance, and we shall return to it later in this study. It is important to note here, however, the implication of his elevation of "intellectual" over material nature: apparently, the notion that "speculations upon matter" are of critical importance, even in relation to moral and religious knowledge, was a popular enough viewpoint to attract Johnson's opposition.31 Even more important for our purpose, though, is the implicit definition of "nature" that the paragraph contains. Johnson defines a nature fully consistent with the composite physical and metaphysical "nature" of Plato and Aquinas, a nature in which the "external" component of "matter" ranks in importance far below "intellectual nature," described by precepts of "religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong." In its emphatic assertion of the real metaphysical constitution of things,Johnson's "nature" as described here is a conception that any eighteenth-century humanist, moral realist, or orthodox theological rationalist would have endorsed. It will have been noticed by now that references to nature in eighteenth-century discourse have a semantic interconnectedness by which the interdisciplinary uses of "nature" affect each other. This connection of references to nature in their varied con texts of science, philosophy, theology, and moral theory, evident, for example, in Johnson's distinction of material from intellectual nature and his prioritization of moral over scientific knowledge, helps explain otherwise confusing passages from eighteenth-century writers that discuss nature in more than one context. When Locke, for example, asserts that "moral Knowledge is as capable of real Certainty, as Mathematics" (565), he presumes a common and stable reality, susceptible to examination by means of the methods of the ,new philosophy, in which principles of both morality and mathematics are consistently exemplified. This disciplinary interdependence of references to nature is emphasized in the importance of the concept in eighteenth-century aesthetics and literary criticism. Although, it was believed, a Newton was necessary to investigate the depths of material nature, it required a Shakespeare, Milton, or Pope to signify the multiple levels of significance that nature contained. "Nature," of course, is at the center of every eighteenth-century

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discussion of literary criticism and aesthetics: " [Modern writers] draw not therefore after [the lines of the Ancients], but those of Nature," says Dryden; 32 "First follow Nature, and your Judgment frame / By her just Standard, which is still the same," advises Pope; 33 "Nothing can please many, an~ please long, but just representations of general nature," pronounces Johnson. 34 If eighteenth-century critics insisted unanimously on the importance of nature as a literary model, however, they disagreed constantly on how nature was actually represented. For instance, Johnson located Shakespeare's genius in his ability to represent "common humanity" and its "general passions and principles" (62), but his critic William Guthrie found that genius in Shakespeare's depictions of singular individuals. 35 An issue similar in its arousal of contentions to that of the right representation of nature in literature was the right discernment of that representation through the faculty of taste. Joseph Addison, for example, in a famous issue of the Spectator where he defends the literary merit of the ballad Chevy Chase, commended the artistic judgment of the "Rabble of a Nation," who could detect the "peculiar Aptness" of a great literary work "to please and gratify the Mind of Man," 36 but Lord Karnes asserted on the contrary that "those who depend for food on bodily labour, are totally void of taste. " 37 The eighteenth-century disagreements regarding literary representation of nature are best understood with reference to the historical complexity of their philosophical content: "nature," a construction made of a variety of metaphysical ideas drawn from different traditions, is obviously susceptible to numerous interpretations, because the semantic content of "nature" itself is nothing but a mixture of diverse traditions and emphases. More interesting than this general explanation of the relation of "nature" to eighteenthcentury literary debates, however, is the assumption about the relation of literary art to nature that the explanation reveals: underlying all eighteenth-century critical debate was the premise that literature and art were able to represent the essence of nature in its mysterious depth and complexity with a level of accuracy that ordinary linguistic description could not reach. The archetypical explanation of the capacity ofliterature to represent the deeper realities of nature had been provided by Philip Sidney. Representing nature in words, it was recognized, required not only negotiating the problems of the fallibility of human perception and judgment, but, more fundamentally, bridging a semantic chasm between the two different orders of nature and language. As John-

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son, paraphrasing Samuel Madden, put the same point in the Preface to the Dictionary, "words are the daughters of earth," but "things are the sons of heaven." 38 Connecting the divine creation of nature with the human creation of language was, Sidney asserted, supremely accomplished by the poet. Sidney explains: Only the poet, ... lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature . .. so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit. ... [Nature's] world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden. 39

Sidney strategically denigrates obvious "nature" in relation to poetry in order to elevate real, metaphysical nature. He in fact contrasts the physical appearance of nature with the "golden world" of the poets in order to emphasize that nature as we customarily observe it is not the metaphysically-significant "nature" as conceived by the classical/Christian synthesis. The real depths of nature are truly revealed by poetic imitation: "That imitation whereof poetry is hath the most conveniency to nature of all other" (40). This arresting claim rests on the poet's imaginative and artistic ability to portray the moral and aesthetic dimensions of nature through the use of striking images: poets "bestow that in colours upon you which is fittest for the eye to see" and thus "range ... into the divine consideration of what may be and should be" (26). Poetic images display what is "fittest" in nature by suggesting the moral and aesthetic norms that comprise its invisible contours. The importance of nature in eighteenth-century poetic theory and the capacity of literary art to depict it are vividly illustrated in Pope's Essay on Criticism. Justifying his advice to poets to "follow Nature," Pope presents a striking description of it: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One dear, unchang'd, and Universal Light, Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart, At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art.

(ll. 70-73)

Pope ' s description of nature as virtually divine reveals its affinity both to the Stoics' "nature" and to medieval Natura: indeed, Pope's

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"Nature" resembles the divine vice-regent of Alan of Lille's Complaint, promoted to Muse. Like Sidney, Pope locates the vitality of poetry in its connection to nature: A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit With the same Spirit that its Author writ, Survey the Whole, nor see, slight Faults to find, Where Nature moves, and Rapture warms the Mind.

(II. 233-36)

In the activity and life that he attributes to nature, Pope reflects both the metaphysical agency characteristic of the classical concept and the relation of nature to its Creator as defined in Christian theology.40 Paradoxically, many neoclassical theorists insisted that the exuberance of nature could only be represented in literature through conformity to certain static principles. Pope begins his description of the literary education of Virgil with an endorsement of these principles. Writing the Aeneid, the poet "perhaps ... seem'd above the Critick' s Law." But when t'examine ev'ry Part he came, Nature and Homer were, he found, the same: Convinc'd, amaz'd, he checks the bold Design, and Rules as strict his labour' d Work confine, As if the Stagyrite o'erlooked each Line.

The point is obvious, but Pope makes sure: Learn hence for Ancient Rules a just Esteem; To copy Nature is to copy Them.

(II. 132-40)

Pope's insistence on both the vitality of nature and the necessity of "Ancient Rules" to guide its representation raises an obvious question: if nature shines "divinely bright," then why must the rules for representing it be learned from Aristotle? The answer is at least as old as Plato, who implied it in Socrates's assertion against Callicles in the Gorgi,as that "a mighty power is exercised, both among men and gods, by geometrical equality" (83-84). Callicles errs because he ignores "nature," that is, the metaphysical structure symbolized by "geometrical equality" that underlies visible reality. The reason

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for Callicles's neglect is this: "geometrical equality" is invisible and can only be deduced by the few who possess the capacity and interest to do so. As is the case with geometrical principles, so it is with neoclassical rules of art. Pope explains: Those Rules of old discover'd, not devis'd, Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz 'd; Nature, like Liberty, is but restrain'd By the same Laws which first herself ordain' d.

(11. 88-91)

These laws are freely exemplified in nature but are perceived and verbally instantiated only by those who can, notably, the "mighty Stagyrite'': He steer'd securely, and discover'd far, Led by the Light of the Maeonian Star. Poets, a Race long unconfin 'd and free, Still fond and proud of Savage Liberty, Receiv'd his Laws, and stood convinc'd 'twas fit Who conquer'd Nature, should preside o'er Wit.

(11.647-52)

In short: the dynamic qualities of nature are universally present and apprehensible; however, representing nature in a way that faithfully depicts the metaphysical principles that underlie it is possible only for those with rare talent. The depth of Pope's "nature" is suggested in another neoclassical paradox, signified in his qualification of his endorsement of artistic principles: rules, for all their importance, are ultimately deficient, because nature cannot finally be "Methodiz 'd'': Some beauties yet, no Precepts can declare, For there's a Happiness as well as Care. Musick resembles Poetry, in each Are namel,ess Graces which no Methods teach.

(11. 141-44)

Therefore, "Great Wits sometimes" may rise "From vulgar Bounds with In-ave Disorder part, / And snatch a Grace beyond the Reach of Art" (154-55). The essence of this artistic license and the expanded capacity of the "Wits" that it suggests had been explained by Sidney.

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Enumerating the historical precedents that illuminated the importance of poetry, Sidney mentions the Roman tradition: "Among the Romans a poet was called vates, which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or prophet ... so heavenly a title did that excellent people bestow upon this heart-ravishing knowledge [i.e., poetic skill]" (21). Poets, Sidney says, are characterized not only by extraordinary imagination, but by extraordinary vision. In the context of Sidney's argument, the presentation of poet as vates implies that the poet can create striking representations partly because he can see farther into nature than anyone else. This imputation of uncommon vision to poets is implicit in Pope's Essay: In Wit, as Nature, what affects our Hearts Is not th'Exactness of peculiar parts; 'Tis not a Lip, or Eye, we Beauty call, But the joint Force and full Result of all.

(11. 243-46)

Inferior poets represent nature in terms of "single parts," but the genuine artist sees and represents the true relations and propertions within nature: "No monstrous Height, or Breadth, or Length appear;/ The ¾'hole at once is Bold, and &gulai' (251-52). The difficulty of apprehending the real texture of nature and the attribution to poets of a special capability of perception together emphasize that, for Pope and the neoclassicists, nature was ultimately, and unfathomably, mysterious. The quality of mystery that is emphasized in the "nature" of neoclassical aesthetics leads us back to a question implied since the beginning of this study in the coincidence of the ubiquity of "nature" with its vague, indeterminate, and variable meaning, namely, why was such an ambiguous notion as "nature" found to be virtually indispensable by eighteenth-century writers? The answer to this question, as will have become apparent in even so brief a survey of the discursive uses of eighteenth-century "nature" as this chapter has been able to present, is that, far from being a semantic liability, the ambiguity of eighteenth-century "nature" was a positive asset because it allowed both the recognition that reality is fabulously complex and, simultaneously, the precise designation of the indefinable but permanent metaphysical ground that was presumed to underlie truth and knowledge. 41 If we grant the observation ofJohn M. Ellis, therefore, that "a language represent[s] an agreement between its

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speakers to analyze the world in a certain way," 42 then we may understand the ambiguity of nature, as implied in the mystery of neoclassical nature, the metaphysical coherence of nature that underwrote the exploratory enterprise of eighteenth-century natural philosophy, or the supernatural context for nature that was presumed by theologians and religious apologists like Butler, to be highly significant. That significance lay in the agreement exemplified throughout eighteenth-century discourse in its usages of "nature" that the randomness and unpredictability that characterized human experience of the world did not ultimately characterize that world: that behind or within the variety and flux that the world superficially presents lies a coherence and stability sufficient to support rational investigation and multifaceted definition. "Nature," in short, names the eighteenth-century consensus that reality appears to be elusive and baffling, but that its foundations, however inaccessible, are solid. We conclude this survey by noting that eighteenth-century "nature" provided not only the occasion for the considerable disagreements over definition, but also the sustaining conditions for those disagreements, in the form of presumptions of nature's ultimate coherence and susceptibility to analysis and characterization. In tension with this presumption of the unity of "nature," however, was the divergence of its interpretation between those who emphasized nature's materiality and mathematical uniformity and others who insisted on the priority of nature's metaphysical significance in terms of its moral and teleological implications. In the remainder of this study, we shall consider the arguments that characterized this interpretive disagreement over the meaning of "nature" and the huge importance of what the proponants of both sides saw to be at stake, by examining the case for a traditional and metaphysical "nature" that is embedded in the works of its most profound eighteenth-century advocate: Samuel Johnson.

4 Nature and Value in the Rambler, Idler, and Adventurer The eighteenth-century polemics whose arguments were founded on and shaped by different conceptions of nature comprise a discursive matrix from which the interpretation of the writings of Samuel Johnson must not be separated.Johnson's usage of "nature" aligns with that of eighteenth-century humanists like Pope, with that of medieval philosophers like Aquinas and Alan of Lille, and with the classical tradition as represented by the Stoics, Aristotle, and Plato, all of whom defined "nature" to include both physical and metaphysical dimensions. Against an impending philosophical materialism, Johnson presumes and asserts throughout his writings a complicated traditional "nature" that serves as his criterion not only for verifying truth but also for justifying value. Nowhere in Johnson's works is his philosophical dependence on a traditional, metaphysical conception of nature more apparent than in the periodical essays, and nowhere is his usage of it more original. Exploiting the ambiguity of metaphysical nature, Johnson capitalizes rhetorically on its philosophical authority even as he connects with it terms and concepts associated with contemporary philosophical and theological debates; as Johnson puts it, he "[familiarizes] the terms of philosophy by applying them to popular ideas'' (5.319).1 The source of both Johnson's authoritative philosophical stability and his versatility and variety of application is his uniquely insightful and rhetorically powerful explanation of "nature." Indeed, that explanation is so important in the essays that their theme is appropriately summarized as the elucidation and discovery of the real value that nature, as the context oflife and society, manifests and supports. 2 Johnson's use of the word "nature" in the essays is deceptively simple. When the Roman biographer Sallust is called "the great

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master of nature " (3.321), for example, or when we are warned against paying blind obedience to fashion "without consulting nature or wisdom" (3.351), it seems obvious that "nature" in both contexts means something like, "the way things are, as human beings perceive them." The problem, and the richness, of the term begins to be revealed only ifwe proceed to ask, "What, for Johnson, is 'the way things are,' and how can human beings perceive them as such?" Asking these questions reveals a more complicated "nature" than the commonness of the term leads us to expect: Sallust must be called a "great master," we must infer, because adequate description of nature is a task of awesome difficulty; similarly, consulting "nature" with a view towards gaining wisdom is challenging, at least, for creatures who habitually wander not in a starkly delineated realm of "nature" but in "the clouded Maze of Fate." 3 In short, Johnson's use of "nature," reflecting classical usage, subtly forces us beyond the apparent and superficial and toward the consideration of ultimate and essential reality. That reality is in Johnson's explanation multiform. To begin with, it is, as delineated in the Life of Milton, both material and "intellectual"; that is, nature is a composite of the tangible and the ideal similar to the Thomist composite of form and substance. Johnson is concerned to give both material and intellectual nature their due. Material nature is an "inexhaustible stock of materials" provided by "the sovereign author of the universe" for the benefit of humanity (3.28-29). Commending those "who are searching out new powers of nature" so that the parts that "lie yet waste" may be productively cultivated (2.433-34) ,Johnson implies the potential for practical good that material nature embodies. His main concern, however, is the relation of humanity to invisible, intellectual nature. Consisting of "the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong" and of principles of "Prudence and Justice" and the other virtues, 4 intellectual nature constitutes for Johnson the essential and definitive context of human life: "In moral and religious ques~ons only, a wise man will hold no consultations with fashion, because these duties are constant and immutable, and depend not on the notions of men, but the commands of Heaven" (2.486). Distinguishing "only" moral and spiritual duties by their transcendence of custom, Johnson signifies that their performances are realizations of the very defining principles of nature. The permanence and stability inherent in intellectual nature provide the philosophical ground ofJohnson's presentation of value in

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the essays, 5 a ground summed up in the proposition thatJohnson's "nature" is ultimately theocentric. Since "infinite goodness is the source of created existence" (3.239) both originally and presently, there exists in consequence a "real state of things," the character of which is defined and established in relation to its Creator such that "no man can become venerable but by virtue, or contemptible but by wickedness" (2.386). The permanent foundation and consequences of this "real state" are detailed in Adventurer 95. "Right and wrong are immutable"; consequently, "the relations of social life, and the duties resulting from them, must," despite the existence of "some petty differences," "be the same at all times and in all nations" (2.425-26). Moral principles and social relations can be normatively defined because of the real existence of a "settled and unalterable nature of things" ( 4.377). Therefore, things in the context of nature, including human life, have a "real value" and "real use" (2.465): The utmost excellence at which humanity can arrive, is a constant and determinate pursuit of virtue, without regard to present dangers or advantage; a continual reference of every action to the divine will; an habitual appeal to everlasting justice; and an unvaried elevation of the intellectual eye to the reward which perseverance only can attain. (5.209)

Johnson recommends, in short, the conformity of life to those principles that define the essential nature and relations of things. The permanent foundation of nature that is defined or implied throughout Johnson's essays anchors them in a theocentric ontology, but the varied and flexible superstructure that Johnson constructs on this foundation accounts for the essays' interesting versatility; as Paul Fussell puts it,Johnson is usually "less an annunciator of 'views' and conclusions than a complicator of the apparent. " 6 The rich multiplicity of appearances that nature presents derives from its divine origin: "The philosopher has the works of omniscience to examine; and is therefore engaged in disquisitions, to which finite intellects are utterly unequal" (4.288). As the products of an omniscient mind, "the works and operations of nature are too great in their extent, or too much diffused in their relations ... to be reduced to any determinate idea" ( 4.300). The results of this complexity for human beings are both enriching and baffling. On the one hand, "the productions of nature [are] an inexhaustible

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stock of materials" that human beings can enjoy and use (3.28). Further, the diverse character of nature that is manifested in human society is perpetually interesting: by means of "the inexhaustible variety of images and allusions" exhibited in society, "curiosity may always find employment, and the busy part of mankind will furnish the contemplative with the materials of speculation to the end of time" (2.429). On the other hand, since "the connexion of important with trivial incidents ... is not only common but perpetual in the world" (5.69), it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the one from the other, and interpretations of nature's aspects often conflict: Two men examining the same question, proceed commonly like the physician and the gardener in selecting herbs, or the farmer and the hero looking on the plain; they bring minds impressed with different notions, and direct their inquiries to different ends; they form, therefore, contrary conclusions, and each wonders at the other's absurdity. (2.442)

The result of an awareness of the abundance and complexity of nature and of the fallibility of interpretation promoted by such variety must be an excruciating sense of the uncertainty of life: "A thousand dangers hover about us, and none can tell whether the good that he persues is not evil in disguise, or whether the next step will lead him to safety or destruction" (5.205). The vast complication and unpredictability that Johnson senses in nature, along with the moral and spiritual dangers that are posed by the risks of the misinterpretation of reality and disobedience to its inherent laws, cause him typically to portray nature as a place of bewilderment and danger in which a man must "roll darkling down the Torrent of his fate" ( Vanity, I. 347). Johnson's depiction of nature as a permanent metaphysical structure inhabiting a shifting array of complicated appearances is emphasized in his emphatic endorsement of reason. To human beings negotiating the confusing environment of terrestrial nature, the Rambler repeatedly recommends that they employ rational judgment: "Of [the pains and pleasures of life,] the proportions are partly allotted by providence, and partly left to the arrangement of reason and of choice. As these are well or ill disposed, man is for the most part happy or miserable" (3.360); "He ... that would govern his actions by the laws of virtue, must regulate his thoughts by those of reason" (3.46).

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It is important to note that Johnson's conception of reason presupposes a transcendent, normative order that the human faculty reflects and to some degree incorporates: "Reason is the great distinction of human nature, the faculty by which we approach to some degree of association with celestial intelligences" (5.95). The combination of the right perception of real values and their relationships to things in nature, combined with the capacity for analysis and synthesis, constitutes Johnson's "reason." Analysis divorced from the right estimation of value is merely "speculation" (3.289-90); reason, on the other hand, assumes and proceeds from the awareness of genuine value and order: "A constant residence amidst noise and pleasure inevitably obliterates the impressions of piety, and a frequent abstraction of ourselves into a state, where this life, like the next, operates only upon the reason, will reinstate religion in its just authority" (3.40). Rightly employed, reason has the capacity to discern something even of the metaphysical foundations of reality. 7 Johnson's emphasis on the value of reason does not indicate his dogmatic endorsement of an exclusive practical reliance on it, however. In addition to reason as a guide to conduct, Johnson occasionally recognizes a moral sense: "Many moral sentiments likewise are so adapted to our state, that they find approbation whenever they sollicit it";just as "reason and experience are always ready to inform us of our real state," so also the "great author of nature has decreed" that certain "sentiments" will be "the concomitants or followers of good or bad actions" (2.44 7, 450; 3.44). Johnson's endorsement of moral sentiments does not so much qualify his strong endorsement of rationality as it does clarify the field within which reason works. In Johnson's explanation, sentiments, like reason, presuppose a natural structure whose "author" conforms those sentiments to the real state of things. Not only does Johnson's insistence on a role both for reason and for sentiments in the determination and support of virtue separate him from doctrinaire rationalists and sentimentalists alike, but also, his validation of human experience of both the rational and the emotional varieties emphasizes his basic conception that the validity of that experience is founded in its contextualization within a vast but ultimately coherent natural order. An important corollary ofJohnson's respect for reason is his conviction of nature's irreducibility to a theory or system. For Johnson, reason, although practically indispensable, is ultimately limited, because the apparent complexity of nature combined with its ultimate

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grounding in theological mystery do not allow of comprehensive theoretical explanation. The criticism of speculative moral systems in Rambler122 reflects Johnson's estimation of overly ambitious theories: It is never easy, nor often possible, to comprise the series of any process,

with all its circumstances, incidents, and variations, in a speculative scheme. Experience soon shews us the tortuosities of imaginary rectitude, the complications of simplicity, and the asperities of smoothness. (4.287)

In short, "Art and nature have stores inexhaustible by human intellects" (4.299), an inexhaustibility that renders them ultimately unpredictable. Johnson's general lack of respect for theoretical enterprises frustrates some commentators, notably Leslie Stephen, who, discussing Johnson's considerations of "the ultimate foundations of morality as placed beyond reach of speculation," complains: Qohnson] leaves the question [of the origin of evil] practically insoluble, without troubling himself as to why it is insoluble, or what consequences may follow from its insolubility. Speculation, in short, though he passed for a philosopher, was simply abhorrent to him. 8

We shall consider Stephen's specific criticisms later, but it is important to note here that there is a more satisfying explanation for Johnson's dislike of systematization than Stephen's imputation of temperamental prejudice. Where Stephen's criticism implies that nature is entirely manageable in its susceptibility to rational explanation (or that a philosopher ought to consider it so), Johnson's distrust of theorizing is better explained not as the dislike for theory as such, but as a consequence of the philosophical presumption that nature is boundless. Johnson's suspicion of theoretical representatiQns of nature and human experience includes the recognition that both contain modes of being that are undefinable and ineffable. However antipathetic this open-endedness seemed from the perspective of Stephen's Victorian rationalism, it was consistent with both the classical and Christian antecedents of eighteenth-century "nature." Plato, for example, had located the place where "Reality lives" at "the back of heaven," a place of which "no one of our earthly poets has ever sung, nor will any ever sing worthily. " 9 Paul the Apostle located

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the telos of "all things ... both which are in heaven, and which are on earth" in the "mystery" of the universal culmination of them "in Christ." 10 Endorsing this tradition, Thomas Reid infers that ultimate mystery lies behind natural phemonena: Upon the theatre of nature we see unnumerable effects, which require an agent endowed with active power; but the agent is behind the scene. Whether it be the Supreme Cause alone, or a subordinate cause or causes; and if subordinate causes be employed by the Almighty, what their nature, their number, and their different offices may be are things hid, for wise reasons without doubt, from the human eye. n

From the perspective represented by Reid, Johnson's insistence on the inadequacy of theory is correctly understood to be an insistence on epistemic and propositional accuracy: because "finite intellects are utterly unequal" to "[engage] in disquisitions" on "the works of omniscience" (4.288); because, as subjects within nature, "every step in the progression of existence changes our position with respect to the things about us" (3.232); and because, therefore, we "very often find the most specious and pleasing theory falling under the weight of contrary experience" (3.69), exhaustive theoretical systems must for Johnson be considered reductive mechanisms that constrict the perception and understanding of reality. Johnson's skepticism concerning the adequacy of closed theoretical systems to represent nature leads to a larger question: can languages, each a "system," adequately represent nature? Johnson's answer to this is equivocal, but his ultimate verdict in favor of the practical adequacy of language has more to do with the stability of context provided by metaphysical nature than it does with the practical adequacy of any linguistic system per se. In the first place, Johnson admits the ambiguity of words that results from the difficulty of relating them to things: words are "often admitted to signify things so different, that, instead of assisting the understanding as vehicles of knowledge, they produce error, dissention, and perplexity, because what is affirmed in one sense, is received in another" (5.287) . 12 The difficulty of presenting truth by relating words to things, however, is for Johnson no excuse for skepticism, which he lampoons in Rambler 95, written in the persona of Pertinax, a reformed skeptic whose "habit of considering every proposition as alike uncertain" left him "with no test by which any tenet could be tried," that is, "without principles of reason, or motives of action"

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(4.147). Outweighing the inherent weakness of perceptual faculties, interpretive judgments, and linguistic constructions, certain principles are considered by Johnson to be indubitable foundations on the basis of which true propositions can be asserted. These principles amount in large part to the real existence, ultimate stability, and rationally discernible structure of nature. Not only are the various appearances of nature underlain. by a "settled and unalterable nature of things" (4.377), the propositions signifying which can be inferred from "evidence and reality" (4.148), but also, correspondingly, "human nature is always the same" (2.431), "the anatomy of the mind, as that of the body, must perpetually exhibit the same appearances," and "the interests and passions, the virtues and vices of mankind, have been diversified in different times, only by unessential and casual varieties"; therefore, "writers of all ages have had the same sentiments, because they have in all ages had the same objects of speculation" (2.427, 425). 13 Johnson's positive judgment of the possibility of truth and of real natural knowledge, we may infer, is a deduction from the stable context of reference provided by nature and the meanings that are supported by its metaphysical structure. The philosophical importance ofJohnson's "nature" in the periodical essays indicates its centrality within the definition of their purpose. From the many inferences concerning that purpose that are possible to make from the wide field of reference that is represented in the essays, two central emphases assert themselves. First,Johnson means to transcend provincialism in order to present "useful truths," "most" of which are "universal, and unconnected with accidents and customs" (2.206). Second, he means to give those truths their "lawful attraction" by means of clear explanation of their essence combined with "innocent compliance and fashionable decoration"; in other words,Johnson aims for both philosophical clarity of general ideas and the practical contextual embodiment of them in specific cultural references (2.486, 492) . Both of these goals depend fundamentally on "nature" for Johnson, because in his tradition nature is both metaphysical and meta-ethical. 14 When Johnson asserts, for example, that "it ought to be the first endeavour of a writer to distinguish nature from custom, or that which is established because it is right, from that which is right only because it is established" (5. 70), he affirms a philosophical dependence on the concept of a fundamental and stable order of existence within which value inheres and in relation to which ideas and cultural practices can be measured. Accordingly, legacy-hunting is immoral (Rambler

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197-98), speculation pursued in disregard of practical affairs is foolish (Rambler 199), and Stoic moral philosophy is ridiculous (Rambler 32): the first, because its inherent deception violates truth and the laws of the Creator of nature; the second, because it elevates the trivial in nature over the useful; and the third, because it ignores and misinterprets genuine experience of the real nature of things. 15 Comparing Johnson's "nature" as presented in the periodical essays with competing ideas reveals the explanatory power of the traditional conception and Johnson's flexibility in using it. Perhaps the most controversial representation of nature in the early eighteenth century was presented by Thomas Burnet in his Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684). Drawing from both theology and natural philosophy, Burnet synthesized an account of the origin, significance, and destiny of the earth. Although Burnet's explanation was consistent with current science, he provoked philosophical controversy by distinguishing radically between the antediluvian and postdiluvian earth: where the former was a "wonderful libration and expansion ... over the face of the waters," the latter, on account of "holes," "broken rocks," and other irregularities, has "rather the face of a ruine, than of wisdom." 16 As Burnet interprets 2 Peter chapter 3, there "is a plain antithesis, or opposition made betwixt the Heavens and the Earth of old ( ver. the 5th) and the Heavens and the Earth that are now ( ver. the 7th)" (392). There have been, in fact, two natures (392), the former manifesting providential goodness, and the latter, divine judgment. Burnet's presentation provoked heated controversy, because, as Michael Macklem has shown, it appeared at a cultural moment in which the benevolence of both the world and of humanity was increasingly emphasized: Newton, preeminently, had revealed the order immanent in nature, an order that corresponded with the presumption of a benevolent divine providence, and moral sentimentalists such as Hutcheson implied the natural benevolence of humanity in the assertion of an inherent moral sense that detected and commended moral goodness and condemned evil. 17 At issue was the question of the moral significance of nature and the radical implications that such significance carried for moral philosophy. Macklem explains: The replies to Burnet rationalized a new conception of the earth as a product of the causal wisdom of God .... The new assumptions ... implied that the effects of the Fall were confined to the moral estate and ... to the belief that the earth is representative not of the disorder of original sin but of the order of divine law. 18

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Johnson 's estimation of the moral implications of nature displays his attachment to facts over theory and his willingness to exploit seemingly contradictory rhetorical currents in the interest of a larger moral purpose. In Idler 89, Johnson asserts the basic premise of Burnet: "The depravation of human will was followed by a disorder of the harmony of nature" (2.275). Following Burnet, and reminiscent of Butler, Johnson emphasizes that the physical evil found in nature does not define the fundamental condition of existence, because present "nature" is not normative: the context of human life begins with nature but extends far beyond it. Godliness, or piety, is elevation of the mind towards the supreme being, and extension of the thoughts to another life. The other life is future, and the supreme being is invisible. None would have recourse to an invisible power, but that all other subjects had eluded their hopes. None would fix their attention upon the future, but that they are discontented with the present. (2.277)

In the human condition, "of what virtue there is, misery produces far the greater part," because "in a world like ours, where our senses assault us, and our hearts betray us, we should pass on from crime to crime, heedless and remorseless, if misery did not stand in our way, and our own pains admonish us of our folly" (2.278, 276).Johnson here evokes the predicament of humanity within a heedless and dangerous nature in order to force the Christian realization that such a nature is a temporary condition imposed partly to correct human moral disability. He concludes: Physical evil may be therefore endured with patience, since it is the cause of moral good; and patience itself is one virtue by which we are prepared for that state in which evil shall be no more. (2.278)

In apparent contradiction to Burnet and his own Idler 89, however, Johnson not uncommonly takes the view that ·nature is a beneficent gift for which humanity owes gratitude. As the allegorical figure Religion admonishes the ungrateful in Rambler 44, Look round and survey the various beauties of the globe, which heaven has destined for the seat of the human race, and consider whether a world thus exquisitely framed could be meant for the abode of misery and pain. For what end has the lavish hand of providence diffused such innumerable objects of delight, but that all might rejoice in the privilege

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of existence, and be filled with gratitude to the beneficent author of it? ... Remember that the greatest honour you can pay to the author of your being is by such a cheerful behaviour, as discovers a mind satisfied with his dispensations. (3.239, 242)

Johnson's apparent abandonment of systematic consistency in endorsing both the destructiveness and the beneficence of nature is evidence of his commitment to a deeper consistency with both the facts of human experience and the theological assurance of ultimate harmony. 19 Life is composed of "different ... colours" (3.365), sometimes resembling heaven, other times, its opposite. Rejecting the simplistic systematizing that implies the possibility of maintaining a uniform perspective on nature,Johnson refers to the different faces of nature in order to make accessible the understanding of what underlies all natural appearances, the divine goodness and benevolence. Johnson supplemented some theories, like Burnet's, when he considered them incomplete, but he rejected others that he judged simplistic, arrogant, and perverse. The most famous of these rejections is Johnson's contemptuous critique and dismissal of the correspondence of the contents of nature to a hierarchical order within a "great chain of being." 20 This criticism, contained in Johnson's review of Soame Jenyns's Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, is famous; less known, but at least equally important for a study of Johnson's "nature," is his approving discussion of Jenyns's definition of the essence of moral obligation, a discussion that constitutes Johnson's definitive statement of the relation of morality to nature. To understand what that relation is, however, we must begin by considering the preceding criticism of the "great chain" theory that sets forth what it is not. Jenyns attempts to answer the question often asked of theists, no less by others than by themselves: "If God is a good and benevolent being, what end could he propose from creation, but the propogation of happiness? and if happiness is the end of all existence, why are not all creatures that do exist happy?" 21 Jenyns answers that the hierarchy of values that inheres in nature must include evil: These real evils proceed from ... that subordination, without which no created system can subsist; all subordination implying imperfection, all imperfection evil, and all evil some kind of inconvenience or suffering; so that there must be particular inconveniences and sufferings annexed

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to every particular rank of created beings by the circumstances of things, and their modes of existence. (58) Jenyns justifies evil by redefining it in relation to a schematic nature embodying graduated levels of value. To the degree that something of lower value lacks what the entities above it include, the lower entity is relatively imperfect. Therefore, imperfection is essential to the system of nature. From the human perspective, imperfection is experienced and perceived as evil and pain, but, in fact, "God has exerted all his omnipotence to introduce all possible happiness, and, as far as the imperfection of created things would permit, to exclude all misery, that is, all natural evil, from the universal system" (80). Human beings lack the perspective that would allow them to understand the relation of the divine benevolence to their pains and troubles, but Jenyns is "persuaded, that there is something in the abstract nature of pain conducive to pleasure; that the sufferings of individuals are absolutely necessary to universal happiness" (67).Jenyn's master, Pope, put it more memorably: All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is, and God the soul; All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; All Discord, Harmony, not understood; All partial Evil, universal Good: And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite, One truth is clear, "Whatever is, is right." 22 The conclusion that must be drawn from this view is expressed literally in Pope's notorious final line: evil is apparent, not real. Johnson's logical criticisms of a theodicy built on the "scale of being" are as famous as is his ridicule of it. Collectively, his moral criticisms ofJenyns's and Pope's system amount to an allegation that the system, far from justifying the ways of God, renders nature immoral. 23 Johnson dispenses with the alleged logical consistency of Jenyns's system by pointing out its fundamental incoherence. If, for example, nature consists of a full complement of graduated entities, would not omniscience be able to determine spaces between those entities where other entities would have to be placed, and so on, ad infinitum? And, would not the distance between the infinite God

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himself and the first created being have to be infinite, by definition? Vastly more compelling than these logical quibbles, however, are Johnson's moral criticisms: From [original Edenic] perfection, whatever it was, he thinks it necessary that man should be debarred, because pain is necessary to the good of the universe; and the pain of one order of beings extending its salutary influence to innumerable orders above and below, it was necessary that man should suffer; but because it is not suitable to justice that pain should be inflicted on innocence, it was necessary that man should be criminal. This is given as a satisfactory account of the original of moral evil, which amounts only to this, that God created beings whose guilt he foreknew, in order that he might have proper objects of pain, because the pain of part is, no man knows how or why, necessary to the felicity of the whole. (541)

Beyond its logical incoherence, Johnson implies, Jenyns's system is morally repugnant in its reduction of pain and evil to errors of perception. To so trivialize human experience and moral intuition is for Johnson to deny their reality and seriousness; to impute to nature a sort of nourishment or delight deriving from human suffering is to impugn as a sadistic instrument the benevolent divine creation. As Leslie Stephen noted,Johnson's rejection of a graduated metaphysical nature as the basis for an explanation of evil raises the question whether his own explanation, or lack of one, is any more respectable than what he rejects. IfJohnson can explain physical evil in relation to the moral good that it produces, as he does in Idler 89, then his condemnation of Jenyns for subordinating physical evil to universal good is compromised by the apparent special pleading of the Idler essay. Johnson's explanation is indeed morally superior to that of Jenyns, however, as Nicholas Hudson makes clear. Hudson contrasts the necessary place of suffering in the systems of the "universal optimists" like Jenyns with the remedial function of suffering that orthodox theological explanations of divine government like that in Idler 89 typically included. In the traditional explanation, instead of the reduction of suffering and evil to mere appearances through an appeal to hypothetical gradations of existence, suffering and evil were justified in relation to horizontal extensions of the present into the past and the future: suffering is deserved because of the fall, and is remedial in relation to the future in signalling to humanity the real imperfection and danger of human existence and the need for reform and conversion. 24 If the orthodox explanation

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affronted human dignity in its imputation of the radical need of human nature for moral and spiritual correction, it also maintained the integrity of human experience by endorsing the irreducible reality of suffering and moral evil. Johnson's presumption that answers to metaphysical puzzles such as the origin of evil are "out of the reach of human determination" is consistent with his view that nature is not exhaustively knowable. 25 To Stephen's assertion that Johnson not only denies the possibility of explaining the origin of evil but also neglects to explain the reasons for and consequences of that impossibility (318-19), it must be answered that Johnson no doubt assumes that we know those reasons, which, since "evil" is finally a religious category, are religious rather than philosophical: Christian theology entails that some things are "equally hidden from learning and from ignorance" (534) .26 As for the consequences of declining to answer exhaustively, such a refusal in Johnson's tradition is positively virtuous in its recognition of an appropriate respect of the creature for its place in the creation. Accordingly, Johnson witheringly recommends to Jenyns that he spend his time so "that when the imbecility of age shall come upon him," he may remember "hours spent, not in presumptuous decisions, but modest inquiries; not in dogmatical limitations of omnipotence, but in humble acquiescence and fervent adoration" (534). Later in the review, however, Johnson quotes with approbation a long passage fromJenyns because it explains "a criterion of action, an account of virtue and vice, for which I have often contended" (536). The passage is particularly important because it not only contains an explanation of the relation of morality to nature that supplements the periodical essays, but also because it is misunderstood by some modern commentators to be a statement of proto-utilitarianism. In fact, the explanation is clearly an endorsement of rational moral realism, the most adequate label for Johnson's moral position. As quoted by Johnson, Jenyns explains the "nature and essence" of morality: "what it is that constitutes one action evil, and another good" (82). The essence of virtue, and the reason "why God should require us to act in one manner rather than another," is identified as "no other than this, because some actions produce happiness, and others misery ... all moral good and evil are nothing more than the production of the natural" (83). Jenyns makes clear that it is the beneficial consequences of good acts as realized by human beings,

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rather than any abstract, constitutional essence of the acts, that makes them morally good: "This alone it is that makes truth preferable to falsehood, this that determines the fitness of things" (83). To Jenyns's account, Johnson assents heartily: "Si sic omnia dixisset!" ["If only he had said everything so!"] (539). In the context of eighteenth-century moral debates, Jenyns's explanation of the essence of virtue is best interpreted as an affirmation of moral realism. However, his emphasis on the practical results and benefits of virtue and Johnson's approval of his explanation have led to Johnson's classification as a utilitarian. Robert Voitle, for example, on the basis of this and similar passages, calls Johnson's view an example of "altruistic utilitarianism": "altruistic," for reasons obvious throughout Johnson's writings, and utilitarian, "because the effect, the ultimate criterion, is the benefits which result for the members of society." 27 Similarly, Hudson denominates Johnson a "Christian Epicurean" on the grounds that "his major argument was that men were under no obligation to be virtuous unless the happiness promised by virtue outbalanced the temptations to vice. " 28 Both of these characterizations, however, underestimate the scope of the eighteenth-century claims that justified the case for moral realism, and in particular, the expansive definition of "nature" that that case presumed. ThatJenyns and, implicitly,Johnson endorsed rational moral realism can be demonstrated by a comparison ofjenyns's statement with a classic one concerning the essence of moral actions by Ralph Cudworth in A Treatise Concerning Eternal and lmmutabl,e Morality: Since a Thing cannot be made any thing by meer Will without a Being or Nature, every Thing must be necessarily and immutably determined by its own Nature, and the nature of things be that which it is, and nothing else. For though the Will and Power of God have an Absolute, Infinite and Unlimited Command upon the Existences of all Created things to make them to be, or not to be at pleasure; yet when things exist, they are what they are, This or That, Absolutely or Relatively, not by Will or Arbitrary Command, but by the necessity of their own Nature . . . . For the Modes of all Subsistent Beings, and the Relations of things to one another, are immutably and necessarily what they are, and not Arbitrary, being not by Will but by Nature. (16-17; italics added)

Cudworth's explanation provides the essential context for understanding Jenyns's location of the essence of virtue in practical results. For theological realists like Cudworth, nature is comprised of

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irreducible entities whose existence is divinely constituted and whose relations are divinely defined. Strikingly, Cudworth cites o bedience to God as the paradigmatic example that the real and natural relations of things in and of themselves are what define moral principles: If [religious obedience] were not Morally Good and just in its own Nature before any positive Command of God, That God shoula be Obeyed fry his Creatures, the bare Will of God himself could not beget an Obligation upon any to Do what he Willed and Commanded, because the Natures of things do not depend upon Will, being not things that are arbitrarily Made, but things that Are. (20; original italics)

Noting that "things are not arbitrarily made" and that God is benevolent, Cudworth infers that nature exists for a good purpose. His point is that to separate the will of God from his acts as displayed in nature is theologically incoherent and morally dangerous. For Cudworth and the realists, three things are inseparable: God's will that human beings act morally, the principles that define moral action in the context of created nature, and the beneficial results that those actions will have in human society as it is naturally constituted. The tradition of moral realism as explained by Cudworth is central to Jenyns's explanation of virtue. Jenyns intends to explain the "nature," "essence," or "criterion" of virtue; that is, he intends to define its identity, an identity which, as Cudworth shows, is constituted by the real relations that exist in nature. As the context makes clear, Jenyns rejects "conformity to the truth," "the fitness of things," and "the will of God" as criteria of virtue neither because they are not characteristic of virtue nor because they are not consistent with it, but because they don't define it. Moral good and evil are properly defined as actions productive of happiness or misery because, in the context of nature and the benevolent divine arrangement of things that nature implies, virtuous action just is the doing of good, and evil action, harm. The consistency with moral realism of Jenyns's emphasis on the practical usefulness of virtue is manifested by Johnson's approval. Jenyns emphasizes that the criterion of well-doing identifies virtuous action, butJohnson points out, and corrects, an epistemological difficulty: how are limited and imperfect beings to know whether their actions will be beneficial? Johnson says, [Because of human limitations,] it was proper that Revelation should lay down a rule to be followed invariably in opposition to appearances, and

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in every change of circumstances, by which we may be certain to promote the general felicity, and be set free from the dangerous temptation of doing evil that good may come. (539)

Johnson's parenthesis clarifies his understanding ofJenyns's definition of virtue: moral principles inhabit the divine construction of nature, principles whose essence is to define the doing of good and which are understood through the employment of right reason as informed and corrected by the scriptures. Johnson's clarification also separates Jenyns's definition from Epicureanism or utilitarianism, both of which were fundamentally if not militantly naturalistic in origin and tendency. 29 Supplementing Jenyns's explanation with theology, Johnson implicitly melds moral theory, revelation, and metaphysical nature. For him, God wills the ultimate happiness of humanity, and the divine commands, congruent with the human context within nature, are ancillary to the realization of that happiness. Ultimately, Johnson's approval of Jenyns's definition of virtue endorses a goodness whose manifestation is temporal but whose standard is transcendent. Johnson's moral theory, therefore, is less appropriately identified with that of Epicurus or Jeremy Bentham than with the realist tradition of Cudworth, Hooker, and Aquinas.

5

Johnson on the Experimental Philosophy If the foundation in "nature" of eighteenth-century moral theory seems archaic today, the modem impression must be attributed to the mechanization and quantification of "nature" that has been brought about since the seventeenth century by the new science and Newtonian physics. Johnson's cultural commitment to Christian humanism and his intellectual commitment to classical and theological metaphysics lead us to expect that, due to the implicit philosophical materialism of the new science and its distance from humanist cultural concerns,Johnson's works would record an antagonism toward the rising popularity and philosophical impact of the new science. Scholars armed with these expectations who search Johnson's writings for anti-scientific sentiments will not be disappointed: Paul Fussell, for instance, estimates Johnson's overall assessment of the value of scientific knowledge as "low" and cites him as a preeminent exemplar of the humanist "insistence that man is made not for inquiry into 'celestial motions' but for moral decision." 1 In striking contradiction to this view, however, is that of Richard B. Schwartz, who demonstrates not only thatJohnson's "praise of Newton and English science" was "constant," but, furthermore, that he made "a unique, though quiet contribution to the tradition of scientific ideology." 2 To explain the substantial evidence that can be adduced fromJohnson's works to demonstrate both his admiration for the new science and his antagonism to it, that evidence must be interpreted in relation to Johnson's conception of nature and the epistemology that it entails. Endorsing a science that studied "nature" as defined within a metaphysical and theological context, Johnson rejected and ridiculed scientific endeavor that implicitly reduced "nature" to a bare material system. An evaluation of Johnson's views on science appropriately begins from his interpretation of nature as a divine creation, a complex system whose value and purpose are inherent in virtue of its origin and

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design. Statements comparable to those of Aquinas that affirm or imply the teleological importance of nature are not uncommon in Johnson's works, as exemplified in the conclusion of Rambler 184: In this state of universal uncertainty, ... nothing can afford any rational tranquility, but the conviction that_ ... nothing in reality is governed by chance, but that the universe is under the perpetual superintendance of him who created it; that our being is in the hands of omnipotent goodness, by whom what appears casual to us is directed for ends ultimately kind and merciful. (5.205)

Part of the direction and government of nature toward benevolent divine ends consists in the design of nature itself. As Johnson puts it in Idler 43, "Our globe seems particularly fitted for the residence of a being, placed here only for a short time, whose task is to advance himself to a higher and happier state of existence, by unremitted vigilance of caution, and activity of virtue" (2.135). In the Life of Waller he explains that "the beauty and the grandeur of Nature, the flowers of the Spring, and the harvests of Autumn, the vicissitudes of the Tide, and the revolutions of the Sky" constitute such evidence of divine design as to be powerful "motives to piety" (1.291). The purposeful design of living beings is particularly evident in higher orders of creatures: There is nothing more worthy of admiration to a philosophical eye, than the structure of animals, by which they are qualified to support life in the elements or climates to which they are appropriated; and of all natural bodies it must be generally confessed, that they exhibit evidences of infinite wisdom, bear their testimony to the supreme reason, and excite in the mind new raptures of gratitude, and new incentives to piety. (Rambler 83, 4.72-73)

In meditations such as these, the metaphysical significance of nature is no optional lesson that is extrapolated from what is essentially a material system; rather, the divine origin and metaphysical constitution of nature are as essential in Johnson's interpretation ofit as they were in that of Cudworth's and Plato's: the material manifests the invisible. Correlating with Johnson's teleological understanding of nature are many commendations in his works of its manifold usefulness. Throughout these commendations,Johnson emphasizes the importance of both the procedures and discoveries of the new science.

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Emblematic of Johnson 's perspective on nature's essential purpose and usefulness are his epitomization in Idler 88 of the purpose of the Royal Society as the propagation of "useful arts" (2.273) and his concluding emphasis of the genuine utility of science: He that has improved the virtue or advanced the happiness of one fellow-creature, he that has ascertained a single moral proposition, or added one useful experiment to natural knowledge, may be contented with his own performance, and ... may demand ... to be dismissed at his departure with applause. (2.275)

Similarly,Johnson concludes in Rambler 129, There are qualities in the products of nature yet undiscovered, and combinations in the powers of art yet untried. It is the duty of every man to endeavor that something may be added by his industry to the hereditary aggregate of knowledge and happiness. ( 4.325)

Johnson's inclusion of the scientific investigation of nature with examples of what he names as "duties" aligns science with morality and, implicitly, with the purpose of nature and of human existence. Even investigations that appear to be impractical are defended by Johnson on the ground that unfamiliar knowledge, though potentially useful, is often at first misunderstood: despite the fact that the schemes of scientific "projectors" usually go wrong, it is "from such men, and such only," that we may "hope for the cultivation of those parts of nature which lie yet waste, and the invention of those arts which are yet wanting to the felicity of life" (Adventurer 99, 2.434). Whether he commends projectors or natural philosophers, Johnson founds his approval on the actual or potential usefulness of their projects and discoveries to the general community. Johnson commends scientific investigation in terms both general and specific. In contrast to notorious eighteenth-century critics of science such as Berkeley and Swift, Johnson respects the value of mathematics, establishing his point that "there is now a great deal more learning in the world than there was formerly" by citing as his two examples of the diffusion of learning the knowledge of classical languages and the knowledge of mathematics. 3 Physics is approved in the commendation of Boyle's "discovery of the qualities of the air" as constituting the foundation of "much of our [natural] philosophy" ( 4.203). Boyle's "uncommon powers" are commended also for his chemical investigations in which he "exhausted the se-

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crets of vulgar chemistry" (2.433), a commendation that is unsurprising in view of Johnson's own identity as someone whom the "love of chymistry ... never forsook" (Life, 1.140). Johnson's appreciation for the scientific investigation of nature is signified in his obvious admiration of Newton, whose knowledge, attainments, and character are commended in Adventurer 131 to demonstrate his "superiority to the rest of mankind" (2.482). There can be little doubt that Johnson's respect for science is most evident in the Life of Dr. Herman Boerhaave, particularly since the work indicates unmistakable sympathy and even identification of author with subject. 4 The Life of Boerhaave exhibits Johnson's esteem for the industry and piety of the Dutch physician, but it is important in a consideration of Johnson's view of "nature" for its indication of his interpretation of the metaphysical structure of scientific knowledge. Johnson admires "the learned, the judicious, the pious Boerhaave" (Rambl,er 114, 4.242) for his attainments in medicine, chemistry, botany, mathematics, and theology, as well as for his "uncommon" virtue, 5 but it is less the mere quantity or variety of Boerhaave's knowledge that impresses Johnson as it is the integration of it into a coherent and theocentric paradigm of nature. As always, Johnson praises the discoveries and investigations of Boerhaave because of their usefulness, a quality by the emphasis of which Johnson implicitly aligns Boerhaave's investigations with a teleological view of nature. Discussing Boerhaave's decision to pursue medicine as a profession over the ministry,Johnson pronounces that the former may "claim the second place among those [professions] which are of the greatest benefit to mankind," outranked only by theology (60).Johnson's emphasis on utility is emphasized in his description of Boerhaave's variety of professional and personal activities, a variety that blends the contemplative and intellectual with the practical. Although Boerhaave has "no ambition but after knowledge," he does not cloister himself in his laboratory and study; rather, says Johnson, His time was wholly taken up in visiting the sick, studying, making chemical experiments, searching into every part of medicine with the utmost diligence, teaching the mathematics, and reading the Scriptures, and those authors who profess to teach a certain method of loving God. (60)

Johnson's admiration for Boerhaave's combination of the intellectual with the practical has both a moral and an epistemological im-

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plication. With respect to morality, knowledge, like the divine creation that it reflects, has as its ultimate purpose the good of the community, and knowledge that does not benefit is worth little. Boerhaave's lifelong use of his knowledge for the general good is therefore a model of fulfilling the moral obligation that Johnson understands to extend from the acquisition of any real knowledge, an obligation that derives ultimately from the teleological purpose of nature itself. Further, Boerhaave's practical applications also model the best method of learning: because human experience and life are for Johnson ultimately irreducible and prone to be distorted by systematization, then bare propositional knowledge must always be practiced, applied, or related to a living context in order for its dimensions to be fully understood: "Human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth" (Life, 1.454). Boerhaave's combination of study with practice exemplifies at once the right use of knowledge and the most effective method of its acquisition. Johnson's admiration for Boerhaave's knowledge of physical phenomena and the practical skills that such knowledge enabled presupposes his agreement with Boerhaave's foundation of his knowledge in a theocentric paradigm of nature. This foundation is implicit throughout the Life of Boerhaave, notably in Johnson's emphasis on the depth of Boerhaave's theological studies that, like Newton, he undertook concurrently with his scientific endeavors. However,Johnson's appreciation of Boerhaave's philosophy is clearest in the descriptions of the philosophical beliefs and controversies important in Boerhaave's career that are interspersed and discussed throughout the Life. Of particular note is Boerhaave's controversial address delivered "upon the subject of attaining to certainty in natural philoso-phy" at the University of Leyden in 1715. In Johnson's reconstruction of the address, Boerhaave begins with a paradox, asserting that scientific knowledge depends on theological uncertainty. Commending "a true sense of the greatness of the Supreme Being" and, as a corollary, the ultimate "incomprehensibility of his works," Boerhaave criticized rationalistic philosophical systems on the basis that such systems are speculative, unverifiable, and probably wrong: doctrinaire Cartesians and other rationalists, ignoring the fact that human beings as creatures within nature are "entirely ignorant of the principles of things," rush into error because they "rather choose to consult their own imaginations, than inquire into nature." Instead of presumptuously deducing principles from novel

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and uncertain hypotheses, asserts Boerhaave, philosophers must infer them from significant amounts of observable data. On the basis of his relegation of natural causation ultimately to the unobservable realm of theological explanation, Boerhaave is asserted by Johnson to have "not only declared" in the address, "but proved" that "all the knowledge we have is of such qualities alone as are discoverable by experience, or such as may be deduced from them by mathematical demonstration'' (62). Johnson's explanation of Boerhaave's apologetic for empirical science is important because it illustrates the methodological and epistemological commitment of early modern science to a paradigm shaped by a theological interpretation of nature, a commitment that is clearly demonstrated in the similarity of Boerhaave's philosophical statements to those of important contemporaries such as Boyle and Newton. Boyle is particularly concerned to affirm the metaphysical dependence of scientific knowledge on a theological paradigm: The Experimental Philosophy has a great advantage of the Scholastick[, the] ... uninstructive Terms [of which] ... are very insufficient to disclose the exquisite Wisdom, which the Omniscient Maker has express'd in the peculiar Fabricks of Bodies, and the skilfully regulated Motions of them, or of their constituent Parts: From the discernment of which things ... it is, that there is, by way of result, produc' d in the mind of an Intelligent Contemplator, a strong Conviction of the Being of a Divine Opificer. ( Christian Virtuoso, 18)

Such statements advertise Boyle's commitment to a universe whose parts and their relationships guarantee the availability and stability of scientific knowledge in virtue of their intelligent design. For Boyle, as for Boerhaave, inductive investigation is a sort of religious exercise, presuming and honoring an ultimate harmony and coherence of nature that is derived from its construction by a transcendent rational being. In a manner similar to Boyle, Newton concludes the Principia by affirming his dependence on inferences whose validity is guaranteed by the containment of phenomena within a divine matrix: This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all . . . . He endures for ever, and is every where present; and by existing always and every where, he constitutes duration and space. Since every particle of space is always, and every indivisible moment of duration is every where, certainly the Maker and Lord of all things cannot be never and no where. ( 440-41)

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The system of nature , in virtue of its "diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places," testifies to the divine design, the presumption of which validates induction by affirming a natural order and coherence in which effects may be rationally inferred from causes. "Hypotheses," therefore, are useless compared to direct observation: I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phaenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phaenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction. ( 443)

Like Boerhaave, Newton practices a sort of philosophical ignorance: both scientists forego attempting the rationalistic verification of the coherence of nature and the validity of inferential knowledge and adopt instead the presupposition of a theological nature whose stability is ultimately guaranteed by revelation. For this reason, says Newton, "To discourse of [ God] from the appearances of things, does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy" (442). As modern philosophers of science have noted, the epistemological dependence of early modem science on a theological model of nature was no extrinsic, cultural extension of sdentific ideology, but an intrinsic and heuristic component of the early scientific project. The explanation of the importance of metaphysical nature for early science is clarified by framing it within Thomas Kuhn's discussion of the purpose of the scientific paradigm. Kuhn explains, The success of a paradigm ... is at the start largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples. Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise, an actualization achieved by extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm's predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigm itself. 6

Kuhn's reference to the paradigm as a promise illuminates the function of metaphysical "nature" in early modem science: the unity, coherence, rational interpretability, and inherent purpose that theology and philosophy asserted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to be attributable to nature were, as Whitehead noted, in-

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dispensable to the development of the scientific project, constituting the object of the "simple faith" upon which that project was built and promising that the inductive investigation of nature would be meaningful and productive.7 Incidentally confirming Whitehead, Robert Markley has recently examined the early scientific "dependence of experimental knowledge on theological narratives of progress, coherence, and order." In Markley's explanation, Newton, Boyle, and their scientific contemporaries "invoke[d] the metadiscourse of theology to gesture toward a unity that their scientific endeavors [ could] only imperfectly suggest." Markley endorses the metaphysical dependence of the scientists on a paradigm of theologically-interpreted nature to give generality and validity to their inductions from phenomena, a dependence that, as we have seen, was overtly asserted by Boyle, Newton, and Boerhaave. 8 We must draw the unorthodox conclusion that the epistemology of early modern science was traditional in derivation and metaphysical in practice. Johnson's endorsement of the new science as exemplified in the Life of Boerhaave indicates his agreement with the scientists that real knowledge can be inferred and mathematically deduced from observation of phenomena. This endorsement leads us directly to the consideration ofJohnson's empiricism, a topic that has been important in Johnson studies at least since the demonstration by W. K Wimsatt, Jr. of Johnson's choice of the great empiricist Locke as "pre-eminently the philosopher of the Dictionary, one of its most important prose sources." 9 Johnson's high estimation of the epistemological value of experience is particularly important for its apparent contradiction of his reputation for skepticism. What appears contradictory in Johnson's evaluation of the validity of empirical knowledge in fact reveals his understanding of the metaphysical tensions that underlay the empiricists' project and the incipient radical skepticism that those tensions fostered. Johnson's respect for experience is indubitable in view of his emphasis throughout his writings on its benefits. 10 However, his explanations of the epistemological value of experience are more complicated than we might expect. In the first place, by the term "experience" Johnson does not mean a mere uncritical assimilation of sense perceptions, but seems to use the term more in relation to its Latin root, meaning "to test" or "to take to court": "Experience is of more weight than precept" (Rambler 80, 4.60) in the sense that proof outweighs assertion or results confirm the value of a plan.

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Johnson 's view of experience as a test of knowledge is illustrated in his defense of the Royal Society in the Life of Butler. The philosophers [ of the Society] professed not to advance doctrines but to produce facts; and the most zealous enemy of innovation must admit the gradual progress of experience, however he may oppose hypothetical temerity. (1.208-9)

Equating "the progress of experience" with "facts" and opposing both to presumptuous hypothesizing, Johnson signifies his understanding of "experience" to include the critical verification of beliefs and not the uncritical collection of them, the naivete of which he criticizes in Adventurer 67 when he blames those who "mistake the use of their eyes for effects of their understanding, and confound accidental knowledge with just reasoning" (2.384). If experience for Johnson includes judgment, judgment must include evaluative criteria. Those criteria are for Johnson simply the things that are previously known: "We can form our opinions of that which we know not, only by placing it in comparison with something that we know" (Rambler 79, 4.51). In an intriguing statement from A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, Johnson affirms the derivation of knowledge from empirical nature: It is true that of far the greater part of things, we must content ourselves with such knowledge as description may exhibit, or analogy supply; but it is true likewise, that these ideas are always incomplete, and that at least, till we have compared them with realities, we do not know them to be just. As we see more, we become possessed of more certainties, and consequently gain more principles of reasoning, and found a wider basis of analogy. 11

Johnson's equation of experience with verification is obvious here in his recommendation that ideas be compared with observed realities, but particularly significant is his virtual identification of "reasoning" with "analogy" and his identification of empirical phenomena (observed "certainties") with "principles of reasoning." Johnson implies that the basic structures that constitute and define knowledge are located in observable nature, and, further, that there is continuity between cognitive reason and the entities, structures, and relationships of visible nature that reason engages through experience-in short, Johnson's recommendation of the epistemological value of experience presumes that experience is

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valid because of its context within a nature that embodies order ' structure, and definition. The same philosophical tradition from which Johnson derives the continuity between mind and nature had earlier been the source of Boyle's explanation of the value of analogy. Analogies are valuable, says Boyle, not merely as illustrations, but as conceptual links, because nature itself really contains the relations and reflections that analogies depict: Apposite Comparisons do not only give Light, but Strength, to the Passages they belong to, since they are not always bare Pictures and Resemblances, but a kind of Arguments; being oftentimes . . . Analogous Instances, which do declare the Nature, or Way of Operating, of the Thing they relate to, and by that means do in a sort prove, that, as 'tis possible, so it is not improbable, that the Thing may be such as 'tis represented. ( Christian Virtuoso, A5v-A6r)

Boyle illustrates the meaning ofJohnson's declaration that observation of nature can provide "principles of reasoning": by the observation and rational association of "Analogous Instances" in nature, a "Way of Operating" can be generalized to help explain further observations and to associate them with what is already known. The rationally discernible structure and functioning of nature that warrant the generalization of principles from specific instances underlie Johnson's respect for experience because they are the ground upon which sense perceptions can become knowledge. Paradoxically, however, such regularity and structure can also be a dangerous impediment to knowledge, because the assumption of natural uniformity can falsely assure us that presumptuous generalizations are true.Johnson recognizes the danger of hasty generalization in his famous discussion of the Scottish phenomenon of second sight in the Journey: To the confidence of [skeptical] objections it may be replied, that by presuming to determine what is fit, and what is beneficial, they presuppose more knowledge of the universal system than man has attained; and therefore depend upon principles too complicated and extensive for our comprehension; and that there can be no security in the consequence, when the premises are not understood. ( 109)

Johnson's criticism of systematic generalization insufficiently warranted by "knowledge of the universal system" rephrases Newton's

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and Boerhaave's cautions against "hypotheses." In the new science, as in Johnson's epistemology, words rank well below things, and theories below phenomena: deceptive idealism of any sort is rejected in favor of "real facts, and certain experience" (Rambler 203, 5.291). Ultimately, therefore,Johnson's empiricism presumes that experience depends for its meaning upon a context that is beyond verification, namely, the context defined by metaphysical nature. Johnson's sensitivity to the dependence of interpretation on context is often suggested in his works, as in his cautions against rationalistic systems that foreclose a priori the possible occurrence of an unexplained phenomenon. Similarly, replying to an objection of Hume against miracles, Johnson insists on the inclusion among evaluative criteria of "the doctrines in confirmation of which the miracles were wrought" (Life, 3.188), an insistence that signals his awareness that Hume's objection against the believability of miracles depends for its force on the presumption of the context of materialism, but loses force when evaluated within a presumption of theism: miracles are impossible in an exclusively material universe, but probable or even likely in a theocentric one. Further, Johnson observed in the Life, "The greatest part of our knowledge is implicit faith" (3.299), and, in the Preface to the Dictionary, "Nothing can be proved but by supposing something intuitively known, and evident without proof." 12 The essential relation of intuitions and preconceptions to empirical knowledge that is presumed by Johnson is explained by Kuhn: "No natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism" ( 17). Johnson's presumption of confidence in the order of nature signifies that the environment within which his empiricism must be presumed to function is the same theological and philosophical paradigm of nature that underlay the new science, an endeavor constructed on the presumption that "God has made Nature to operate by certain fixed laws" (Life, 1.445). Johnson's advocacy of the possibility and value of natural knowledge contradicts his reputation for extreme or even pathological incredulity, a quality that in the form of "an instinctive skepticism" has recently been pronounced by some scholars to dominate the tone of the periodical essays 13 and the Lives of the Poets. 14 The assertion ofJohnson's skepticism leads us to consider both its general relation to his confidence in realistic and empirical epistemology and its particular relation to the eighteenth-century trend towards philo-

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sophical skepticism, a trend exemplified by Hume 's resignation in the conclusion of book 1 of the Treatise to the fact that "we have , therefore, no choice left but betwixt a false reason and none at all" (268). IfJohnson's skepticism is examined with reference to his writings, it is obvious that his alleged incredulity has on the philosophical level no common basis with the radical skepticism explicit in Hume and found by many to be implicit in Locke.Johnson's skepticism is more properly described as an intelligent awareness of human cognitive and moral limitations considered within the context of a vast and complex nature, an awareness that is as characteristic of Socrates and the Bible as it is of eighteenth-century philosophers. The assertions by Johnson's friends of his incredulity are qualified by their contexts to indicate that the incredulity indicated is not a philosophical indisposition to believe facts per se, but a hesitancy to trust people. Mrs. Piozzi, for example, equates her charge that "Mr. Johnson's incredulity amounted almost to a disease" with William Hogarth's imputation to him of believing "that all men are liars." 15 Similarly, Boswell supports his generalization that, compared with Johnson, "no man was more incredulous as to particular facts, which were at all extraordinary'' withJohnson's distrust of his claim to have conversed in sign language with "some Esquimaux who were then in London" (Life, 2.247). The philosophical insubstantiality of the charges of incredulity is clarified by Johnson's advice to George Staunton regarding his fact-finding trip to the Americas, to "trust as little as you can to report; examine all you can by your own senses." Johnson adds, "I do not doubt but you will be able to add much to knowledge" (Life, 1.367), confirming that he trusted evidence more than testimony, but not that he doubted the very existence of facts. Johnson's distance from philosophical skepticism is also indicated by his frequent ridicule and condemnation of it. "The bigot of philosophy," for example, is described by the Idler to be "intangled in systems by which truth and falshood are intextricably complicated," and they are common who "deny the most notorious facts" and "contradict the most cogent truths" (#10, 2.33). Similarly, he criticized Joseph Priestley's theological works because "they tended to unsettle every thing, and yet settled nothing" (Life, 2.124). The most notable ofJohnson's criticisms of philosophical skepticism is his satire in Rambler 95, written in the persona of the reformed skeptic Pertinax. As the result of his having studied "those parts of learning which have filled the world with doubt and perplexity," Pertinax

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"accustomed [himself] to enquire not after proofs, but objections" (4.145). He explains, I had perplexed truth with falsehood till my ideas were confused, my judgment embarrassed, and my intellects distorted .... Such is the hazard ofrepressing the first perceptions of truth, of spreading for diversion the snares of sophistry, and engaging reason against its own determinations. ( 4.146-4 7)

Pertinax concludes by giving thanks for his recovery from his "argumental delirium" that was filled with "the confusion and tumult of a feverish dream" ( 4.148), a conclusion by which Johnson powerfully condemns skepticism by rhetorically equating it with physical illness. The skepticism attributed to Johnson by modern scholars can be accounted an exaggerated interpretation of the epistemological caution that is detectable throughout his works and that derives from Johnson's view of the insecurity of the human condition in its relation to nature. Not only is there a perpetual danger of trusting as veridical the mere "superficies of life" (Rambler 196, 5.259), but even what is seen truly is seen partially. In Adventurer 107, Johnson analogically explains the source of epistemological uncertainty: At our first sally into the intellectual world, we all march together along one strait and open road; but as we proceed further, and wider prospects open to our view, every eye fixes upon a different scene; we divide into various paths, and, as we move forward, are still at a greater distance from each other.

Johnson here illustrates the inevitable focus of perspective that accompanies intellectual maturation, a process in which different combinations of beliefs and experiences produce in each individual a unique basis for judgment. He continues on to detail the implications: As a question becomes more complicated and involved, and extends to a greater number of relations, disagreement of opinion will always be multiplied, not because we are irrational, but because we are finite beings, furnished with different kinds of knowledge, exerting different degrees of attention, one discovering consequences which escape another, none taking in the whole concatenation of causes and effects, and most comprehending but a very small part. (2.441)

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Thus considered, human experience must promote the uncertainty of knowledge. To callJohnson's view "skepticism," though, is to misunderstand the emphasis revealed in his concluding comment: "Where, then, is the wonder, that they, who see only a small part, should judge erroneously of the whole?" (2.441) Johnson's point stands revealed: human knowledge is limited relative to the vast totality of possible knowledge; the "small part" of the whole that each person understands, however, is both true and valuable, despite its limitation. Johnson's insistence on intellectual humility is no skepticism, but at once an affirmation that knowledge is possible and a realistic assessment of the difficulty of acquiring it. The contrast between Johnson's intellectual caution and radical eighteenth-century skepticism is obvious when his epistemological position is compared with that of Hume in the Treatise: When we trace up the human understanding to its first principles, we find it to lead us into such sentiments, as seem to turn into ridicule all our past pains and industry, and to discourage us from future enquiries . .. How must we be disappointed, when we learn, that this connexion, tie, or energy [ uniting causes and effects] lies merely in ourselves, and is nothing but that determination of the mind, which is acquir' d by custom, and causes us to make a transition from an object to its usual attendant, and from the impression of one to the lively idea of the other.

(266)

Having undermined the credibility of causation by associating it with tradition rather than reality, Hume explodes the possibility of attaining real knowledge of nature: a verbal representation or natural explanation that is a mere custom has no necessary relation to what it is traditionally regarded to represent. 16 Assuming a context of metaphysical nature, in contrast, Johnson endorses cause and effect and the potentiality of real representation of nature and implies what he elsewhere declares, that a "custom" can be true: When an opinion to which there is no temptation of interest spreads wide and continues long, it may be reasonably presumed to have been infused by nature or dictated by reason .... nothing keeps its ground but truth, which gains every day new influence by new confirmation. (Idler 52, 2.162)

For Johnson, epistemological difficulties result not from the theoretical impossibility of knowledge, but from its potential abundance and the complexity of its objects.

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In their greater context in Johnson's works, therefore, appearances of skepticism are most appropriately considered to manifest his passion for truth and accuracy rather than epistemological pessimism. The "scrupulous dialectical reversal" in the Lives, for example, "in which assertion is followed by doubt and counterassertion,"17 is best interpreted as the strenuous effort to account for all appearances of a subject without too nice a regard for consistency, with the presumption that appearances will finally be accounted for in the ultimate coherence of things. Similarly, the Ramblers appear to be "dynamic enterprises in which real doubts and uncertainties are constantly at war with the mere appearances of order and faith" 18 not because Johnson doubts that order exists and that faith has an object, but because the Rambler's observations are faithful to the way reality appears: the ultimate coherence of nature in its present state is not visible from the human perspective, a fact affirmed by Johnson along with, in their ways, such anti-skeptics as Plato and the Apostle Paul. Although Johnson can not accurately be accused of philosophical skepticism, there is no denying that he not infrequently recorded an apparent antagonism towards science, an antagonism that is puzzling because it seems to contradictJohnson's respect for natural knowledge. Whether or not the ridiculous inventor and the mad astronomer in Rasselas are meant to imply criticism of science or merely of human frailty is ultimately unimportant, because Johnson's numerous depictions of virtuosos in the periodical essays are invariably satirical, and his criticisms commonly seem aimed at their absorption with some aspect of material nature. 19 Among these satirical portraits is that ofHypertatus in Rambler 117, according to whose theories of "barometrical pneumatology" happiness is increased by living in a garret rather than on lower floors because there is less atmospheric pressure there to affect the mind ( 4.263); a collector of fossils appears in Adventurer 128 among those whose "lives are passed in trifles, in occupations by which the busy -neither benefit themselves nor others, and by which no man could be long engaged, who seriously considered what he was doing" (2.477); Quisquilius in Rambler 82 indulges his "taste for solid knowledge" by collecting "stones, mosses, and shells" along with antiques such as "a lock of Cromwell's hair in a box" ( 4.66-67); Gelasimus in Rambler 179 makes himself a social misfit by his devotion to mathematics. Although there is some truth in the explanation that Johnson's criticisms of virtuosos have more to do with psychology than science, 20

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the observation does not explain away either the frequency with which Johnson resorts to virtuosos as butts of satire or his assertion that their foolishness consists in their devotion to knowledge of trivialities: "Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which he cannot apply will make no man wise" (Idler 84, 2.262). The source ofJohnson's criticism of virtuosos is the tradition that interprets nature to be essentially formal and teleological, represented by Aquinas in his assertion that "the natural agent acts by the form which makes it what it is," a form through which the universe "participates the divine goodness" 21 teleologically by communicating and representing it within the existence and process of nature; therefore, "the distinction and multitude of things come from the intention of the first Agent, who is God" (1.47.1.resp., ad 3). Like Aquinas,Johnson represents the knowledge of nature to be valuable and accurate insofar as it represents purpose and metaphysical form along with the appearance and function of things: among natural facts, what is useful for human well-being has more value than what is useless, and what explains more, like Newtonian physics, is more valuable than what explains less.Johnson illustrates this hierarchy of knowledge in Rambler 83: The virtuoso [is] ... culpable for confining himself to business below his genius, and losing in petty speculations, those hours by which if he had spent them in nobler studies, he might have given new light to the intellectual world. It is never without grief, that I find a man capable of ratiocination or invention enlisting himself in this secondary class of learning ... [and refusing to] leave his toys and trinkets for arguments and principles, arguments which require circumspection and vigilance, and principles which cannot be obtained but by the drudgery of meditation. (4.75)

Johnson's distinction between "secondary" learning and "nobler studies" focuses his ridicule of the virtuosos: their "petty speculations" and preoccupations with insignificant curiosities of nature are a self-indulgence undertaken at the expense of potential "useful knowledge" ( 4. 71) conducive to the common good, that is, knowledge aligned with the purpose of nature: "Every terrestrial advantage is chiefly valuable, as it furnishes abilities for the exercise of virtue" (Rambler 48, 3.258). Johnson criticizes virtuosos because he does not consider their preoccupations to be proportionate to or

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representative of the real value, purpose, and form that the realm of nature includes. Johnson's view of the hierarchical structure of knowledge and the range of values that it contains is illustrated in his comments regarding it in the Life of Milton, in which he subordinates "the knowledge of external nature, and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes" to "intercourse with intellectual nature" because "speculations upon matter" and "physiological learning" have less to do with the essence of reality than does the "religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong" (1.99-100). This subordination explains Johnson's comment on Paradise Lost that approves of "Raphael's reproof of Adam's curiosity after the planetary motions" and Adam's response as comprising a valid "rule of life" (1.177). The essential reproof and response are as follows: Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid, Heav'n is for thee too high To know what passes there; be lowly wise. Not to know at large of things remote From use, obscure and subtle, but to know That which before us lies in daily life, Is the prime Wisdom. 22

The relation of Johnson's approval of Raphael's commendation of astronomical ignorance to the assertion of, for example, "Newton's superiority to the rest of mankind" (Adventurer 131, 2.482) is a dark relationship indeed, unless that approval is considered to signify not a proscription of scientific knowledge, but an affirmation of its value relative to those sorts of knowledge that delineate nature's metaphysical constitution. 23 Accordingly, as Johnson himself explains elsewhere, the real meaning of the "angelick counsel" is this: He that devotes himself to retired study, naturally sinks from omission to forgetfulness of social duties; he must be therefore sometimes awakened, and recalled to the general condition of mankind. (Rambl,e,- 180, 5.183)

Johnson reveals here that he understands Raphael's warning not to be a simple criticism of scientific study but rather a corrective reminder that natural knowledge is dangerously incomplete when ab-

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stracted from its relation to the "condition of mankind" within general nature. Johnson's relation of knowledge of physical nature to an essential moral and spiritual basis contrasts strikingly with the prominence of natural philosophy in the English intellectual culture of the eighteenth century. The tension between the scientific worldview that endorsed a nature comprising an automatic mechanism and the humanistic view that emphasized the reality of a metaphysical nature whose basic structure was signified in the teachings of morality and religion has been traced by Dijksterhuis to the spectacular success of Newton: The more completely [Newton] succeeds in explaining natural phenomena from the operation of natural forces obeying fixed and immutable laws, the more difficult it becomes for him to find for the Creator of the world a function also as Preserver of the material universe .... The mechanization of the world picture led with irresistible consistency to the conception of God as a retired engineer, and from this to His complete elimination was only a step. 24

Whether or not eighteenth-century humanists blamed Newton for the increasing cultural dominance of philosophical materialism, they were alarmed by the trend, as Pope indicates when he concludes the Dunciad, having the sons of Dulness declare: We nobly take the high Priori Road, And reason downward, till we doubt of God: Make Nature still incroach upon his plan; And shove him off as far as e'er we can: Thrust some Mechanic Cause into his place; Or bind in Matter, or diffuse in Space.

(11. 471-76)

For someone like Johnson, for whom "piety ... was ever his primary object" (Life, 1.238), the empirical erosion of the philosophical immaterialism that comprised the essence of the humanists' perspective was a matter of the gravest concern. 25 His reaction to the increasing intellectual importance of materialism was not the instinctive rejection and attack of some humanists, however, but a considered and deliberate response. Unlike philosophers such as Plato, Cudworth, and Berkeley who found the very idea of materiality philosophically threatening, 26 Johnson endorsed the knowledge of material nature, rightly used and understood. In Rambl,er 5 he says,

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There is no doubt but many vegetables and animals have qualities that might be of great use, to the knowledge of which there is not required much force of penetration, or fatigue of study, but only frequent experiments, and close attention. What is said by the chymists of their darling mercury is, perhaps, true of every body through the whole creation, that, if a thousand lives should be spent upon it, all its properties would not be found out. (3.29)

Johnson validated scientific knowledge by distinguishing empirical knowledge per se from the presumption of philosophical naturalism and materialism within which it was often contextualized, a distinction that he maintained through a Socratic subordination of physical knowledge to metaphysical.Johnson cites his precedent: The great praise of Socrates is, that he drew the wits of Greece ... from the vain persuit of natural philosophy to moral inquiries, and turned their thoughts from stars and tides, and matter and motion, upon the various modes of virtue, and relations oflife. (Rambler 24, 3.131-32)

Johnson's purpose here is, of course, to discourage "vain" enquiries, not to discourage productive ones. With Newton, Boyle, and Boerhaave,Johnson found the right understanding of nature not only to be productive for society but to constitute "reasons for adoring the sovereign author of the universe" (Rambler 5, 3.29). The purpose of Johnson's apparent disparagement of science is to contextualize the pursuit of natural knowledge within the framework of classical and Biblical virtues that was inherent in Johnson's "nature." Distinguishing natural knowledge from philosophical materialism,Johnson avoids the humanistic contempt for science notoriously exemplified in Gulliver's Travels, Part 3. 27 If Johnson avoided the rejection of science to which Swift succumbed, however, he also criticized the philosophical materialism against which Pope complained.Johnson's most important criticism of materialism is less lyrical than Pope's, but more thorough. In Rasselas, chapter 48, Johnson presents what Robert DeMaria calls an "anti-materialist tract" 28 that argues the immaterialist position with regard to the controversy over the nature of mind and consciousness, a controversy that, as John W. Yolton has shown, epitomized the progress of materialism in eighteenth-century intellectual culture.29 Although Johnson has Imlac mention the theological argument that an immaterial mind accords with the doctrine of the eternal duration of the soul, his central argument for the immateriality of mind is eminently scientific: an immaterial explanation of mind best

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accounts for the phenomenon of consciousness.30 Imlac, the voice of reason, as often, prefaces the discussion by announcing what must certainly be Johnson's view: "All the conclusions of reason enforce the immateriality of mind, and all the notices of sense and investigations of science concur to prove the unconsciousness of matter." 31 Much of the argument is taken up with a dispute over the nature of matter: to the objection of Rasselas, who anticipates Joseph Priestley in asserting that matter may support consciousness, 32 lmlac replies, in effect, "That's more than we know": Matter can differ from matter only in form, density, bulk, motion, and direction of motion .... All that we know of matter is that matter is inert, senseless and lifeless; and if this conviction cannot be opposed but by referring us to something that we know not, we have all the evidence that human intellect can admit. (170-71)

Like Newton in framing no hypotheses, Imlac insists that consciousness be accounted for without the invention of a possibility that cannot be verified, the idea that matter can think. This denial leads to the most interesting part of the debate, Imlac's affirmation of the reality of intellectual structures. The question arises: if the unverifiability of the consciousness of matter implies its nonexistence, then does not the same argument imply the nonexistence of immaterial structures? Imlac responds with a full endorsement of the objective reality of Johnson's "intellectual nature." To the objection of Rasselas, he replies: Consider your own conceptions .... You will find substance without extension. An ideal form is no /,ess real than material bu,l,k. ... It is no less certain, when you think on a pyramid, that your mind possesses the idea of a pyramid, than that the pyramid itself is standing. ( 173; my italics)

Immaterial substance is self-evident, says Imlac, because consciousness and ideas are by definition immaterial. 33 If Johnson does not quite follow Plato here in subordinating matter to ideas, he clearly endorses and equates the reality of both. Materialism is obviously wrong, therefore, on empirical grounds, because it does not account for the immaterial conceptions that are the irreducible contents of consciousness. For Johnson, as for Aquinas, the intellectual and material structures of nature were conceptually distinguishable but ontologically inseparable.

6

Representation, Imagination, and Nature in Johnson's Literary Criticism Throughout the body of Johnson's criticism, the themes of the following quotations are both emphasized: Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature. (Preface to Shakespeare, 61) Was there ever yet any thing written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim's Progress? (Johnson, quoted by Mrs. Piozzi, 180)

Not surprisingly, the necessary conformity of literature and truth that Johnson commends in the former quotation is often understood to contradict the literary importance of the imagination that is implied in the latter. Murray Krieger, for instance, indicts the Preface for containing "three Johnsons," one "realistic and particularizing," one "moralistic and universalizing," and one "who celebrates our consciousness of the artifice of art as fiction." 1 Missing from interpretations such as Krieger's that imply the contradictory tendencies of truth and imagination in Johnson's criticism is the unifying factor of Johnson's concept of nature. If Johnson's "nature" includes the metaphysical dimensions of ethics, value, and teleology, then their representation and evocation require the sort of invention that transcends mundane description. For Johnson, therefore, characters like Bunyan's Christian, Defoe's Crusoe, and Cervantes's Quixote that come alive in their invented worlds through their creators' ingenious employment of the literary imagination can represent more about reality than could any literary work of mere pedestrian realism. 2 Just as Johnson's concept of nature reveals the coherence of his statements on science and epistemology, so also it harmonizes his critical emphasis on the just representation of reality with his assertion of the importance of imaginative literary fictions.

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Any examination ofJohnson's criticism must reckon with its foundation in his commendation of truth in literature, a commendation both repeated and emphatic. Supporting the greatness of Shakespeare, for example, Johnson cites the "adherence to general nature" characteristic of his plays, in which "his drama is the mirrour oflife" such that "human sentiments" are portrayed "in human language," and "from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions" (65). This faithfulness to nature accounts for the perennial appeal of Shakespeare's dramas; on the other hand, "the mind revolts from evident falsehood, and fiction loses its force when it departs from the resemblance of reality" (76). Johnson's emphasis in the Preface is confirmed by Boswell, who illustrates his general observation of Johnson's "love of truth" with particular instances of the manifestation of that sentiment in his critical judgments, such as his approval of the critic Bouhors's demonstration of "all beauty to depend on truth" (Life, 1.231, 2.90). Johnson also commends literary faithfulness to nature throughout the periodical essays. Besides the famous Rambler 4, with its theme that "it is justly considered as the greatest excellency of art, to imitate nature" (3.22), statements arc not uncommon such as that in Rambler 152 that "nothing but conformity to nature can make any composition beautiful or just" (5.46). More profound is the conclusion of Rambler 156: It ought to be the first endeavor of a writer to distinguish nature from custom, or that which is established because it is right, from that which is right only because it is established; that he may neither violate essential principles by a desire of novelty, nor debar himself from the attainment of beauties within his view by a needless fear of breaking rules which no literary dictator had authority to enact. (5. 70)

Identifying "nature" as the source of "essential principles" that signify what is artistically "right," Johnson powerfully commends the "attainment of beauties" by careful artistic discernment and attention to nature and by the avoidance of artificiality and conventionality. The same emphasis is present throughout the Lives of the Poets, as exemplified in the Life of West. The noblest beauties of art are those of which the effect is co-extended with rational nature, or at least with the whole circle of polished life;

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what is less than this can be only pretty, the plaything of fashion and the amusement of a day. (3.333)

Johnson leaves us in no doubt of his foundation: "Poets, indeed, profess fiction, but the legitimate end of fiction is the conveyance of truth" (Life oJWaUer, 1.271). Johnson's insistence on veracity in literary art is so emphatic that it can be easy for a reader·to overlook what appears to be a serious qualification,Johnson's assertion that a mere copy of obvious reality is not necessarily a work of art. The most notorious instance of this assertion, the accusation in the Preface that Shakespeare's chief fault is too close and unselective a portrayal of reality in its moral dimension, demands its own discussion, to follow, but Rambler4 contains a similar sentiment: It is necessary to distinguish those parts of nature, which are most proper for imitation .... If the world be promiscuously described, I cannot see of what use it can be to read the account; or why it may not be as safe to tum the eye immediately upon mankind, as upon a mirror which shows all that presents itself without discrimination. (3.22)

Johnson's objection here to "promiscuous" description of the world is primarily moral, but similar objections to indiscriminate representation emphasize the aesthetic. In the Life of Waller, for instance, he says: Poetry pleases by exhibiting an idea more grateful to the mind than things themselves afford. This effect proceeds from the display of those parts of nature which attract, and the concealment of those which repel, the imagination. (1.292)

Accordingly, "mere obvious nature may be exhibited with very little power of mind" (Life, 2.91). We may extrapolate from Johnson's criticisms of indiscriminate representation of nature that he supports the attack by Joshua Reynolds in Idler 79 on the idea that "objects are represented naturally when they have such relief that they seem real": on the contrary, says Reynolds, "In painting, as in poetry, the highest style has the least of common nature" (2.248). The simultaneous commendation and disapproval of the artistic imitation of nature makes little sense unless it is understood within the context of the classical aesthetic tradition inherited by the eighteenth-century humanists, a tradition in which the concept of "na-

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ture" is both stressed and complicated. Aristotle defines art by its relation to nature: "As a general proposition, the arts either, on the basis of Nature, carry things further than Nature can, or they imitate Nature." However, in the same context, he defines "nature" not in terms of appearance but of metaphysical purpose: There is purpose, then, in what is, and in what happens in Nature .... When a thing is produced by Nature, the earlier states in every case lead up to the final development. ... We may, therefore, infer that the natural process was guided by a purpose to the end that is realized.

Art, Aristotle concludes, follows nature in its tendency toward the realization of purpose: "If, then, artificial processes are purposeful, so are natural processes too; for the relation of antecedent to consequent is identical in art and in Nature" (Physics 199a). The points to note in relation to eighteenth-century aesthetics are Aristotle's virtual qualification of art as a species of nature and his relation of art and nature on metaphysical rather than material grounds. Comparable with Aristotle in his relation of art to nature, Plato characteristically distinguishes an "art" by its engagement with essential realities over superficial appearances. In his famous distinction between an art and a "knack" in Gorgi,as, Socrates disparages "the flattery of make-up" in relation to gymnastics, for example, because the former deceives "by means of forms and colors, polish and fine garments, assuming a borrowed beauty to the neglect of natural loveliness which comes only through gymnastics" (465). Similarly, "cookery" is disparaged in relation to medicine: The medical art has made an inquiry into the nature of what it treats and the reasons for the treatment and can give an account of each of them. The other, however, directs absolutely all of its unprofessional efforts toward producing the pleasure which is its only end and aim; yet it has not studied the nature of pleasure or its causes. (501)

For Plato, as for Aristotle, any artistry must proceed from a deep and subtle understanding of nature, transcending the obvious in engaging the essential. Exemplifying the powerful influence over humanist aesthetics of the literary ideals of Aristotle and Plato is the union of them presented by Philip Sidney. Sidney founds his Defence of Poetry on the presumption of a complex, inherently teleological nature, a conception that derives from Aristotle as modified by Christian interpret-

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ers. In the foundation of Sidney's literary aesthetic on metaphysical nature, his debt to Aristotle is obvious: There is no art delivered to mankind that hath not the works of nature for his principal object, without which they could not consist, and on which they so depend, as they become actors and players, as it were, of what nature will have set forth. (Defence, 23)

Sidney permeates his formulation with Aristotelian teleology: the arts are "actors and players" which function as a "second nature" (24) to fulfill nature's purposes. Further, Sidney endorses the Platonic concept that an art must transcend the apparent to contact the real. Poets in particular establish this contact through a combination of perceptiveness and imaginative invention; they "range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be" (26), not in order to obscure nature, but to reveal it: [Poets] indeed do merely make to imitate, and imitate both to delight and teach; and delight, to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger; and teach, to make them know that goodness whcrcunto they arc moved. (27)

So effective and powerful are poetic images to reveal the knowledge of "goodness," defined as action that conforms with real value, that it may be said of a poet that "with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth surpassing [nature's] doings" (24-25); that is, the poet reveals the potential, the valuable, the moral, and the ideal that are metaphysically and potentially present in nature. Sidney's argument converts a contradiction into ajustification: in the hands of a genuine poet, imaginative literary invention, far from contradicting truths about nature, is the indispensable means of their declaration; thus, "that imitation whereof poetry is, hath the most conveniency to nature of all others" (40) . The complexity and subtlety of Aristotelian nature, the Platonic insistence that genuine art must engage the essential over the transient, and the combination of these lines of argument in Sidney's defense of imaginative literature in its capacity to represent the defining metaphysical contours of reality all together explain the neoclassical and Johnsonian insistence on both faithfulness to nature and the necessity of artistic license in its representation. Since reality consists of more than meets the eye, representation of its essence

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must be more than reproduction of appearances. Sidney himself makes this argument, echoing Horace 3 and anticipating Reynolds in his analogy of painting with poetry: Betwixt [right poets] and [philosophical writers] is such a kind of difference as betwixt the meaner sort of painters, who counterfeit only such faces as are set before them, and the more excellent, who having no law but wit, bestow that in colours upon you which is fittest for the eye to see: as the constant though lamenting look of Lucretia, when she punished in herself another's fault, wherein he painteth not Lucretia whom he never saw, but painteth the outward beauty of such a virtue. (26)

In this arresting statement, Sidney distinguishes inartistic copies of the obvious from truly artistic representations that evoke an impression of the "virtue" existing beyond its visible manifestation. Explaining this metaphysical capability of art, Sidney, following Plato, places the purely ideal within the realm of the artistic, locating "the skill of each [poetic] artificer" in "that idea or fore-conceit of the work" which exists beyond any verifiable manifestation in "the work itself" (24). Sidney's attribution to the literary imagination of the capacity to suggest the invisible depths of reality is central to Johnson's concept of "just representations of general nature." The meaning of Johnson's phrase is elucidated by both its origin and its context in the Preface. The phrase "general nature" appears to originate in Boyle's Enquiry, 4 where it is used to distinguish the aggregate of forms, laws, and relationships in the "the great system of the Universe" from "particular Nature" or "the Nature of this or that particular body" (72): in short, to distinguish complex relation and function from simple constitution. We may infer that Johnson, reflecting Boyle's usage, intends the phrase to refer to the relationships of nature's constituent parts and the patterns that they exemplify more than to the appearances of the constituents themselves. Expressions parallel to "just representations of general nature" in the Preface confirm Johnson's meaning. As the "poet of nature," Shakespeare "holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life," allowing them to "repose on the stability of truth" (62); he "excells in accommodating his sentiments to real life" (63). In these and numerous other expressions, Johnson commends the relation of Shakespeare's art to the dynamic over the static. "Life," "manners," and "truth," like "nature," are great abstractions that reach beyond

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the appearance of reality to comprehend the energy of its process and the complexity of its relationships. ''Just representations of general nature," then, are based not so much in the material contents of nature as on the patterns, processes, and relationships that are its essence. 5 To illustrate his commendation of representing the dynamic in nature,Johnson cites and discusses instances of Shakespeare's "just representations of general nature" throughout the Preface. The most famous and also most illuminating of these discussions is no doubt the paragraph in which Johnson vindicates Shakespeare's eccentric characterizations against the criticisms of Dennis, Rymer, and Voltaire. The critics, he says, complain that Claudius in Hamlet is "not completely royal" and that Menenius in Coriolanus is "not sufficiently Roman";Johnson answers: Shakespeare always makes nature predominate over accident; and if he preserves the essential character, is not very careful of distinctions superinduced and adventitious. His story requires Romans or kings, but he thinks only on men. (65)

Johnson's usage here of the Scholastic categories of essence and accident and his identification of "nature" with the "essential" emphasize his commendation of Shakespeare's ability to represent the permanent and definitive in reality. Claudius the usurper and Menenius the buffoon exemplify qualities of morality and character whose perennial recognizability transcends their manifestation in characters defined by a particular cultural or national stereotype like "king" or "Roman." Further, Shakespeare so involves his characters in actions and relationships that exemplify and parallel the courses of real life that even his fantasies are believable: Even where the agency is supernatural the dialogue is level with life .... Shakespeare approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderfut the event which he represents will not happen, but if it were possible, its effects would probably be such as he has assigned; and it may be said, that he has not only shewn human nature as it acts in real exigencies, but as it would be found in trials, to which it cannot be exposed. (64-65)

The dramatic approximation and familiarization commended here are interpreted by Johnson to have a strongly philosophical character: Shakespeare, Johnson implies, identifies the general character of reality so perceptively that he is able to translate it into vivid and

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recognizable representations contained within fantastic and unbelievable contexts. 6 Johnson presents his commendation of the adherence of drama to general nature not as a mere theoretical doctrine but as a principle of obvious practical value: drama that represents general nature, he affirms, is more interesting and more helpful than drama that does not. Most obvious ofJohnson's rationales for the dramatic representation of nature is his relation of nature to variety. Since "all pleasure consists in variety" (67), and since nature is the ultimate source of variety, then writers in ignoring nature deprive themselves of the great source of literary interest. He explains, "Art and nature have stores inexhaustible by human intellects; and every moment produces something new to him, who has quickened his faculties by diligent observation"; therefore, it is indispensable for writers to acquire along with knowledge of literature "that experience which can never be attained by solitary diligence, but must arise from general converse, and accurate observation of the living world" (Ramblers 124, 4; 4.299, 3.20). The quality of Shakespeare's dramas is directly (but not solely) attributed by Johnson to the playwright's observation of nature and life: There is a vigilance of observation and accuracy of distinction which books and precepts cannot confer; from this almost all original and native excellence proceeds. Shakespeare must have looked upon mankind with perspicacity, in the highest degree curious and attentive. (88)

Variety derived from nature is valuable for Johnson beyond the interest that it contributes, however, because he endorses the classical precept that "the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing" (67) .7 Like Sidney,Johnson values fiction for its unique capability to signify the truth about reality in a way that makes it useful for readers. Johnson's view of the signification of reality by fiction is most powerfully stated (and exemplified) in Ramb/,er 96, an allegorical depiction of the contest of truth with falsehood for the allegience of humanity. Because of the "present corruptions of humanity," says Johnson, "many incitements to forsake truth" exist, not least of which is the attractiveness of falsehood to the "appetites and passions" (4.148, 150). Johnson explains the relation of truth and fiction in the context of Jupiter's remedy to the problem of the human attraction to unreality: The Muses wove in the loom of Pallas, a loose and changeable robe, like that in which Falsehood captivated her admirers; with this they invested

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Truth, and named her Fiction. She now went out again to conquer with more success; for when she demanded entrance of the Passions, they often mistook her for Falsehood, and delivered up their charge; but when she had once taken possession, she was soon disrobed by Reason, and shone out, in her original form, with native effulgence and resistless dignity. ( 4.152)

Most significant in this statement is Johnson's alignment of fiction and (implicitly) imagination with truth and reason, all in opposition to falsehood. Johnson therefore affirms to belong to imaginative literature the capability to meet the deep human need for reassurance and instruction about the ultimately mysterious environment that contains and sustains life, an environment that he characteristically represents as baffling and unpredictable. Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate? ( Vanity, 11. 346-4 7)

In Shakespeare's case, the justness of his representations of nature allows a reader to "repose on the stability of truth" by means of Shakespeare's representation of the complex "appearance of life," "shewing how great machinations and slender designs may promote or obviate one another, and the high and the low co-operate in the general system by unavoidable concatenation" (62, 67). Considering Johnson's emphasis on the importance of truth in fiction, we may find it incongruous that he appears to criticize and even reject detailed accuracy of literary representation and to commend generic over specific images. The reason for Johnson's assertion of his notorious doctrine of generality is immediately aesthetic but ultimately philosophical, a manifestation of his belief in an immutable basis in natural reality. 8 The commendation of generality is common throughout the Pref ace. "[Shakespeare's] persons act and speak by the- influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system oflife is continued in motion"; a Shakespearean character is less commonly an individual than a "species" (62); "Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion" (64); his dramas present "the uniform simplicity of primitive qualities" (70). On the basis of this faithfulness of Shakespeare to representative generality,John-

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son accounts for his perennial appeal: "The stream of time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabricks of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare" (70); that is, the playwright's dramas maintain the ability to "please many, and please long" because different audiences discern and recognize among their images and actions those truths which obtain as well in their real world as in Shakespeare 's fictional ones. 9 Johnson most fully explains and illustrates the necessity of general representation in Rasselas chapter 10 and in the Life of Cow/,ey, emphasizing that poets must abjure detailed description in order to capture in images the real qualities that lie within appearances. First, with respect to aesthetic appeal, Johnson commends "the grandeur of generality" in opposition to "scrupulous enumeration": [The metaphysical poets] broke every image into fragments, and could no more represent by their slender conceits and laboured particularities the prospects of nature or the scenes of life, than he who dissects a sunbeam with a prism can exhibit the wide effulgence of a summer noon. (Life of Cowky, 1.45, 1.21)

Because "great thoughts are always general" (1.14), 10 says Johnson, imaginative appeal is dissipated by analysis but compounded by synthesis. In the person of Imlac, 11 Johnson extends the ramifications of his commendation of generality: [The poet] is to exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features, as recal the original to every mind; and must neglect the minuter discriminations, which one may have remarked, and another have neglected, for those characteristicks which are alike obvious to vigilance and carelesness. ( 43-44)

The distinction of "striking features" from "minuter discriminations" implies the necessity of selective representation: because the poet must choose to represent some aspects of reality and to ignore others, he is an "interpreter of nature" (45) in virtue of the shaping of the poetic rendition of reality that the selection of images involves. Implicit in Johnson's approval of "just representations of general nature," therefore, is a commendation of the just interpretation of general nature. 12 Johnson's doctrine of poetic generality is understood more fully when considered in relation to his larger conception of knowledge. His advocacy of general over particular representation correlates

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with his suspicion of abstract systems separated from their context in nature, of virtuosos' limited focus on particular data to the exclusion of their context, and of theory apart from experience, all suspicions that derive ultimately from Johnson's perception of the inherent meaning and purpose of nature. For Johnson, nature is assembled for determinate moral and spiritual ends apart from which the natural system or its parts cannot be adequately understood. Within the system are "immutable" forms, tendencies, and principles such as "right and wrong" whose proximity to nature's essential purpose renders them more significant than the more remote and accidental of nature's constituents (Adventurer 95, 2.425, 427): such qualities are what Johnson means by the "settled and unalterable nature of things" (Rambler 140, 4.377), the state of which it should be the artist's purpose to represent. The representation of human characters is particularly important in virtue of the central teleological position of human beings in nature: just as we must judge persons by "learn [ing] how to separate the real character from extraneous adhesions and casual circumstances" (Rambler 166, 5.120), so artists must learn convincingly to portray such "real character" in their dramas. It is the genius of Shakespeare in creating such portrayals that Johnson commends when he notes that his characters transcend stereotypes in their relation to real humanity: they are human beings, not heroes (64). Johnson's equation of literary representation with interpretation combines with his teleological view of nature to explain the central critical problem of the Preface, the apparently anomalous criticism of Shakespeare's conformity of his dramas to life that is the very basis of Johnson's commendation throughout the first half of the Preface. Soon after commending Shakespeare's mixed dramas for exhibiting the "real state of sublunary nature" in which "the course of the world" is characterized by the random distribution of good and evil (66), Johnson turns to what he perceives to be Shakespeare's defects, the "first" of which is this: '

He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and ... seems to write without any moral purpose .... He makes no just distribution of good and evil, nor is always careful to shew in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked. (71)

The argument is amplified in Rambler 4: It is necessary [for the artist] to distinguish those parts of nature, which are most proper for imitation: greater care is still required in represent-

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ing life, which is so often discoloured by passion, or deformed by wickedness. (3.22)

Further complicating the meaning ofJohnson's contradiction of his approval of Shakespeare's verisimilitude is this admission from the Life of Addison: Since wickedness often prospers in real life, the poet is certainly at liberty to give it prosperity on the stage. For if poetry has an imitation of reality, how are its laws broken by exhibiting the world in its true form? The stage may sometimes gratify our wishes; but, if it be truly the mirror of life, it ought to shew us sometimes what we are to expect. (2.135)

This comment shows that Johnson's criticism of Shakespeare's verisimilitude may not be interpreted to be a simple advocacy of a dramatic moral idealism that we are somehow to juxtapose incongruously with Johnson's respect for the portrayal of real nature. The comments on verisimilitude in total must be considered to imply his determination that the artist must somehow blend in a single work both a convincingly recognizable portrayal of sublunary nature and a suggestion of Sidney's "what may be and should be" (26) _13 In order to reconcile the texts in which Johnson specifies that drama ought to mirror "life" with those in which he states or implies that "it is always a writer's duty to make the world better" (Pref ace, 71), we must bring to those textsJohnson's recognition that the mimetic artist must write as "the interpreter of nature" and also that, in the tradition in which Johnson participates, "nature" transcends immediate experience of the obvious to include metaphysical purpose, an inclusion which contains the implication that visible nature is in its present condition unnatural. When Johnson observes in Rambler 4, for example, that life is "discoloured" and "deformed" by passion and wickedness (3.22), he implies a discontinuity to exist between these qualities and what is normal; similarly, in Rambler 160, Johnson contrasts "the natural state of the universe" to its present state, in which it is "deformed by interest and passion" (5.85).Johnson reflects in passages like these the powerful dichotomy inherent in the Christian understanding of nature that underlay eighteenthcentury thought, a dichotomy represented in the conflict between the view of nature as a benevolent creation and nature as damaged goods, marred by the fall of Adam. On the one hand, nature was

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understood to reflect its Creator's benevolence, a view powerfully explained by Augustine, Aquinas, and Richard Hooker, among others. Hooker, for instance, queries: This world's first creation, and the preservation since of things created, what is it but only so far forth a manifestation by execution, what the eternal law of God is concerning things natural? (Laws, 1.156)

Beyond its visible constituents, Hooker implies, nature manifests a definitive metaphysical character deriving from its creation by divine decree. Contrasting with the conditions implied by its origin, however, nature was also considered to be deeply flawed, a view promoted energetically and controversially by Burnet in The Sacred Theory of the Earth. The uneasy combination within Johnson's inherited philosophical tradition of the divine origin of nature with its present deformity requires him to expect that combination to be apparent within "just representations of general nature." 14 When Johnson concludes his first criticism of Shakespeare, therefore, by pronouncing that, because ''justice is a virtue independent on time or place," then "it is always a writer's duty to make the world better" (71), he affirms the artist's duty to render images that both represent and transcend sublunary appearances in order to characterize the real metaphysical contours and implications that inhabit nature. It is in relation to Johnson's requirement that artists render interpretations of reality in which sublunary nature is at once convincingly represented and profoundly transcended that his view of the artistic imagination must be understood: for Johnson, imagination is the artistic connection that unites the depiction of mundane with that of metaphysical nature. Johnson's conception of the power of the poetic imagination to contextualize visible nature within its metaphysical definition is illustrated in his comm en ts on the imagination in the Life of Milton. "Poetry" he there defines as "the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination- to the help of reason." To the study of nature, life, and morality,Johnson explains, the poet must bring "an imagination capable of painting nature and realizing fiction" in order "to put these materials to poetical use" (1.170), producing the "pleasure and terrour" which are "the genuine sources of poetry" ( 1.182); in other words, the poetic imagination is the faculty of creating and combining interpretive images that evoke responses appropriate to reality as it exists beyond mere custom or appearance. The poetic imagination, therefore, allows

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the poet to reveal the resu~ts of a "deep search into nature," those "accurate discriminations of kindred qualities, or nice display[s] of passion in its progress" that distinguish extraordinary fiction from superficial (Life of Rowe, 2. 76). Johnson's understanding_ of the artistic imagination as an interpretive faculty is illustrated in his comments on the use of the imagination by Milton and Pope. Milton's works are evidence of "the united force of study and genius": his "great accumulation of materials" was "fermented by study and exalted by imagination" (Life of Milton, 1.183) to allow him in his greatest work to portray "worlds where only imagination can travel" (1.178) and to realize a narrative in which "the probable ... is marvellous, and the marvellous is probable," yet whose "substance ... is truth" (1.174). Appropriately for a narrative including depictions of "Creation and Redemption" and displays of "the power and the mercy of the Supreme Being," the "characteristick quality of [Paradise Lost] is sublimity" and "gigantick loftiness" (1.174, 177). Johnson's commendation of the work is appropriately summarized as approval of the poet's creation and combination of images which, beyond embellishing the Biblical narrative upon which they are based, confirm subjectively the reality of those truths which the narrative contains by evoking responses appropriate to them. In short, Milton provides the "enlargement of ... comprehension and elevation of ... fancy" that a "reader justly expects" from "good poetry" (Life of Waller, 1.292), enlargement and elevation that transcend their enablement by fictional images to engage a reader contemplatively with real metaphysical qualities and transcendent even ts. Less exalted than Johnson's commendation of Milton's poetic imagination as demonstrated in Paradise Lost, but no less subtle, is his commendation of the poetic invention of Pope, notably exemplified in his appreciation of the "Alps" simile in the Essay on Criticism. Johnson notes, "A simile, to be perfect, must both illustrate and ennoble the subject; must shew it to the understanding in a clearer view, and display it to the fancy with greater dignity." By these criteria, Johnson decides, Pope's simile comparing a student's advancement in knowledge with a traveller's ascent into the Alps is "perhaps the best that English poetry can shew" (Life of Pope, 3.229). The simile tells a story of overconfidence leading in to danger. Illustrating how "In fearless Youth we tempt the Heights of Arts, / While from the bounded Level of our Mind,/ Short Views we take," Pope adopts an

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alpine context to explain the dangerous inaccuracy of such intellectual presumption: Th' Eternal Snows appear already past, And the first Cluuds and Mountains seem the last: But those attain 'd, we tremble to smvey The growing Labours of the lengthen'd Way, Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandring Eyes, Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise! (11. 221-23, 227-32)

Pope' s simile evokes the amazement of the student who arduously masters the standard Latin authors only to confront beyond them the immensity of Greek. Johnson comments, "The simile of the Alps ... affords a striking picture by itself: it makes the foregoing position better understood, and enables it to take faster hold on the attention; it assists the apprehension, and elevates the fancy" (3.230). Johnson commends Pope's fictional relation of study with Alpine travel because it is founded in natural and human reality: just as both the body of classical literature and the Alps are manifestly great, so study and mountaineering are both (in their own ways) dangerous occupations deserving of caution and respect. Pope's invention is commended by Johnson for revealing the merit and potential costs of real human endeavors. A powerful confirmation that Johnson understands the poetic imagination to be substantially an interpretive capability is his repudiation of imagination when it is divorced from that capability, 15 a repudiation notoriously exemplified in the Life of Cowley and Life of Butler.Johnson's criticism of metaphysical poets like Cowley is wholly founded on the representational vacuity of their images. Johnson's sentence is unequivocal: If the father of criticism has rightly denominated poetry techne mimetike, an imitative art, these writers will without great wrong 'lose their right to the name of poets, for they cannot be said to have imitated any thing: they neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of matter nor represented the operations of intellect. ( 1.19)

Johnson commends the metaphysicals' wit, "a discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike," only to use it against them. In contrast to Pope, whose similes reveal the hidden nature of things, metaphysical poetry contains "the most heterogeneous ideas

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... yoked by violence together" ( 1.20); that is, the meta physicals ignored nature: "As they sought only for novelty they did not much enquire whether their allusions were to things high or low, elegant or gross; whether they compared the little to the great, or the great to the little" (1.29) . Nearly as illegitimate as Cowley's disregard of nature is Butler's distortion of it: Burlesque consists in a disproportion between the style and the sentiments, or between the adventitious sentiments and the fundamental sul:r ject. It therefore, like all bodies compounded of heterogeneous parts, contains in it a principle of corruption. All disproportion is unnatural; and from what is unnatural we can derive only the pleasure which novelty produces.

Concluding, Johnson witheringly compares the burlesque technique of Hudibras to "tricks, of which the only use is to shew that they can be played" (1.218). The point is obvious: literary images that do not function to represent and refer are ultimately worthless. This observation leads us back to the Preface, the argument of which sustains the praise of Shakespeare's images of nature: "The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while ... , but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth," stability created through images founded recognizably in nature (61-62). IfJohnson's criticism of Shakespeare emphasizes the insistence that ''just representations of general nature" must be characterized by accurate portrayals not only of the sensible and experiential but also the metaphysical, then his famous defense of Shakespeare's violation of the neoclassical unities reveals his presumption that nature is, as a recent critic put it, "a medium in which we all move but of which few of us are ordinarily much aware." 16 Within Johnson's explanation of the subtlety required to represent and evoke the depths of nature is revealed his most fully developed concept of artistic represen tation and the genius required to accomplish it. Johnson's criticism of certain critics' stringent enforcement of the Aristotelian unities implies a demarcation between his understanding of the purpose of artistic representation and theirs. 17 Johnson's position is founded on the proposition that "imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind" (78). The critics' position, on the other hand, was based on evident absurdities thatJohnson, by their

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mere unambiguous statement, refutes: "It is false, that any representation is mistaken for reality; that any dramatick fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single moment, was ever credited" (76). Johnson foregrounds the question of what makes drama engage the intellectual sympathy of audiences and convinces them that the world portrayed on stage is theirs. The unities were meant to promote such credibility by enforcing literal and detailed resemblance of a dramatic symbol to a real entity or event, stipulating for example that dramatic actions in a play must be represented to occur all within a day. Johnson notes that such insistence ignores the nature of drama as imaginary. Since "spectators are always in their senses" (77), they do not believe that a stage is really Alexandria or Rome, a fact that, of all people, Shakespeare himself was most aware: Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? 18

Beyond exposing the absurdity of the critics' premise that artistic representation is accomplished by presenting a detailed correspondence between artistic symbols and visible realities, Johnson's criticism of the unities illustrates his concept that fiction must transcend visible nature in order to suggest and evoke its real constitution. Significantly, when Johnson attempts to locate the "real power" of Shakespeare's dramas, he can only indicate the "progress of his fable, and the tenour of his dialogue" (62), perhaps the most vague phrases in the Preface. Johnson's uncharacteristic ambiguity in this instance and the conceptual strain of which it gives evidence is explained in his discussions in the Rambl,er of the purpose and effect (or hindrance) of artistic and literary rules. Rules may provide a starting point, says the Idler, but no more: they "may obviate faults, but can never confer beauties" (Idl,er 57, 2.178). The ultimate reason for the artistic inutility of rules and principles is that, however they might help to represent gross nature, rules have nothing to do with the interpretive discriminations and constructive associations of imagery that the representation of in obvious nature demands. Johnson's criticism of literary rules appears within the context of his general philosophy as a manifestation of the limited capability of humanity to understand exhaustively the vast realm of nature. In Rambler 125, for example, he includes "the performances of art" within a general explanation of the inadequacy of verbal definition:

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Definition is, indeed, not the province of man; every thing is set above or below our faculties. The works and operations of nature are too great in their extent, or too much diffused in their relations, and the performances of art too inconstant and uncertain, to be reduced to any determinate idea. It is impossible to impress upon our minds an adequate and just representation of an object so great that we can never take it into our view, or so mutable that it is always changing under our eye, and has already lost its form while we are labouring to conceive it. ( 4.300)

The critical word in this paragraph is "reduced": natural reality, Johnson presumes, exists in such greatness, richness, and complexity as to render any attempt to contain it within a literal and comprehensive "determinate idea" an inevitable reduction of real nature. The most arresting aspect of this criticism of definition, however, is found in the paragraph that follows, in which nature is equated with the products of the literary imagination. Definitions, begins Johnson, "have been no less difficult or uncertain in criticism than in law." Imagination ... has always endeavored to baffle the logician, to perplex the confines of distinction, and burst the inclosures of regularity. There is therefore scarcely any species of writing, of which we can tell what is its essence, and what are its constituents; every new genius produces some innovation, which, when invented and approved, subverts the rules which the practice of foregoing authors had established. ( 4.300)

The application of Johnson's assertion of the inadequacy of definition to the appropriateness of the unities is obvious. Johnson's explanation is more interesting in its implicit relation of nature, imagination, and genius: just as nature defies definition, he implies, so does literary art, the achievements of which are accomplished through the faculty of imagination functioning in the province of "genius" where rules cannot govern. Johnson's commendation of imagination over literal definition in Rambler 125 supports the argument of the Preface in its assertion of Shakespeare's genius, an assertion that is the ultimate warrant for his contravention of the unities. In its combination ofJohnson's two essential critical concepts, imagination and the representation of nature, "genius" in his usage is, beyond a superlative commendation, a technical term that includes within its meaning the conditions and capabilities that enable the production of extraordinary literary art. The importance of the term is illustrated in Johnson's famous com-

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parison of Dryden with Pope, in which he summarizes the concept as "that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgement is cold and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates" (Life of PofJe, 3.222). In the dynamism represented in this summary-its inclusion of "energy" which "animates," for example, and its opposition to the "cold" and "inert"-:Johnson equates genius with life. This imaginative life that Johnson asserts to distinguish the product of literary genius is everywhere in the Preface imputed to Shakespeare, notably in Johnson's remarkable metaphor by which he distinguishes him from conventional dramatists: The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers; the composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless diversity. (84)

Johnson's analogy contrasts a scene characterized by artificiality and ornamentation with one filled with the unrestrainable vitality that distinguishes the productions of genius. Indeed, says Johnson, as "the world is not amazed with prodigies of excellence, but when wit tramples upon rules, and magnanimity breaks the chains of prudence," so "violations of rules merely positive, become the comprehensive genius of Shakespeare" (Idler 57, 2.179; Preface, 79) .19 The deep significance ofJohnson's imputation to Shakespeare of literary genius is revealed when the concept is defined within its traditional relation to transcendence. According to Plato, for instance, poetic genius is "a kind of possession or madness" that "comes from the Muses." In Plato's contrast of inspired poets with those merely talented, the resemblance to Johnson's commendation of Shakespeare over conventional dramatists is forecasted:He who without the Muses' madness in his soul comes knocking at the door of poetry, thinking that art alone will make him fit to be called a poet, will find that he is found wanting and that the verse he writes in his sober senses is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen. (Phaedrus 245a)

Similarly, Sidney illustrates his concept of the "right poet" with a discussion of the Roman vates, not merely a poet but a "diviner, fore-

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seer, or prophet," whose "exquisite observing of number and measure in the words, and that high flying liberty of conceit ... did seem to have some divine force in it" (21-22). Milton speaks from within the same tradition: So much the rather thou Celestial Light Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight. 20

The classical notion of poetic genius as exemplified and recounted by Plato, Sidney, and Milton is a union of extraordinary capability of invention with extraordinarily perceptive or exalted vision. Poets not only invent ingenious and arresting images, but they represent in those images what is hidden within and beyond visible nature. Johnson's conception of literary genius accords with the ancient concept in its relation of acute perception and understanding to imaginative representation. In Milton's case, for example, the "genius ... that Nature had bestowed upon him more bountifully than upon others" consisted in his "power of displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid, enforcing the awful, darkening the gloomy, and aggravating the dreadful" (1.177).Johnson's point in this commendation of Milton's genius is to demonstrate that Milton used his imaginative capabilities not to evoke psychological states alone, but to do so for the purpose of representing what he understood by means of revelation concerning supernatural worlds, beings, and actions: he "chose a subject" for his epic "on which too much could not be said," creating images that bring to life a narration "the substance of [which] is truth" (1.177, 1.174). Just as Johnson credits the genius of Milton to the combination of imagination and perceptive understanding, so also he imputes to that combination the genius of Shakespeare, an imputation epitomized in Johnson's judgment that Othello is "a vigorous and vivacious offspring of observation impregnated by genius" (Preface, 84). Particularly revealing is Johnson's accounting for Shakespeare's unique talent. Johnson affirms that "the greater part of his excellence was the product of his own genius" on the basis that he possessed an extraordinary "vigilance of observation and accuracy of distinction" of life and nature (87, 88). Johnson explains, Shakespeare, however favoured by nature, could impart only what he had learned; and as he must increase his ideas, like other mortals, by

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gradual acquisition, he , like them, grew wiser as he grew older, could display life better, as he knew it more, and instruct with more efficacy, as he was himself more amply instructed. (87-88)

Crediting Shakespeare's powers of perception with being the source of his images, Johnson implies that Shakespeare represented nature so vividly not merely because he noticed its complicated appearance, but because he understood its inner subtleties. Examples of Johnson's commendations of Shakespeare's images from his edition of the plays illustrate his understanding of Shakespeare's genius in creating representative images. Justifying an emendation in 1 Henry N, IV.i.97-99, for example, All furnish' d, all in arms, All plum'd like estridges that wing the wind Baited like eagles 21

Johnson encloses an appreciation of Shakespeare's representative and evocative power within the discussion of the vividness of this "strong image": They were not only plum'd like estridges, but their plumes fluttered like those of an estridge on the wing mounting against the wind. A more lively representation of young men ardent for enterprize perhaps no writer has ever given. ( 482)

More complicated, but also more important, is the well-known encomium for Falstaff. Despite the unconvincing attempt to draw a cautionary moral from Shakespeare's character that follows Johnson's explanation of Falstaff's dramatic effectiveness, we are compelled to feel that the dominant tone of his evaluation is one of high praise. The "compound of sense and vice" that the character exhibits makes him both abhorrent and attractive; we are left in no doubt which quality, in Johnson's view, dominates: But Falstaff unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I describe thee? ... The man thus corrupt, thus despicable, makes himself necessary to the prince that despises him, by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety, by an unfailing power of exciting laughter. (523)

We recognize in this description the admiration for the portrayal of exuberant energy and life that is the touchstone ofJohnson's under-

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standing of dramatic genius. Falstaff, it is implied, does more than copy life; he embodies and magnifies it. Erich Auerbach's comment is pertinent: Shakespeare includes earthly reality, and even its most trivial forms, in a thousand refractions and mixtures, but ... his purpose goes far beyond the representation of reality in its merely earthly coherence; he embraces reality but he transcends it. 22

When, following the ancients,Johnson commends Shakespeare's genius for its capabilities of both perception and imagination, he confirms the paean of Pope: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchang'd, and Universal Light, Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart, At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art. (Essay on Criticism, 11. 70-73)

Throughout its course, Johnson's argument in the Preface assumes and illustrates the artistic implications of Pope's brilliant and dynamic "nature." As Milton displayed the sublimity and magnificence of reality, so Shakespeare evoked its energy and complication: for Johnson, the ultimate justification of each author's claim togenius was his ability to convince us that the distinctive "nature" that his works represented was there to be found.

7

Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Reductionism By modern standards, the complicated metaphysics and transcendental implications of Johnson's "nature" make it look truly ancient, but compared to eighteenth-century standards of philosophical evaluation it fares better. Judged in particular by the criterion that the adequacy of an account of reality consists in its capacity to represent and explain the entirety of the data presented to human experience,Johnson's concept of nature compares favorably with those against which it competed. The most important contextual indication of the eighteenthcentury significance ofJohnson's "nature" is the tone of intellectual insecurity within which the concept was asserted. The predominance of that insecurity is indicated both by the many serious philosophical conflicts that characterized the period and also by direct accounts, such as Hume's: Nor is there requir'd such profound knowledge to discover the present imperfect condition of the sciences, but even the rabble without doors may judge from the noise and clamour, which they hear, that all goes not well within. There is nothing which is not the subject of debate, and in which men of learning are not of contrary opinions .... Disputes are multiplied, as if every thing was uncertain; and these disputes are managed with the greatest warmth, as if every thing was certain. (xiv)

Hume's description of eighteenth-century intellectual debate as pandemonium is ironic in view of the reputation that he earned for himself as its most disruptive participant. Lord Karnes, for instance, accuses Hume of compounding the prevailing philosophical confusion by endorsing Berkeley's critique of material substance while also refuting Berkeley's immaterialism, "leaving nothing in nature but images or ideas floating in vacuo, without affording them a sin-

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gle mind for shelter or support," and concludes pointedly that "it might have been expected, that no man who is not crazy would have ventured to erect such a superstructure till he should first be certain, beyond all doubt of a solid foundation" ( 450 n.) Karnes implies what many of his contemporaries believed, that the philosophers' attempts to establish a basis for knowledge had actually unsettled it, reducing "knowledge" to mere ideas, sense perceptions, or social conventions. Nor was the unfavorable evaluation of the empiricists' project merely an eighteenth-century phenomenon, as W. V. 0. Quine illustrates when he categorizes the epistemologies of both Locke and Hume under the heading of "radical reductionism." 1 If the philosophical reductionism that Lord Karnes noticed is compared with eighteenth-century cultural and intellectual trends, it is difficult to avoid concluding that reductive developments parallel to those in philosophy were occurring in virtually every other intellectual discipline. Indeed, chapter 3 of this study substantially consists of a catalogue of these reductions. Most obviously, deism, by its disregard of revelation, reduced orthodox Christianity to a vaguely religious philosophical naturalism. Similarly, moral conventionalists reduced the moral principles that realists located in immutable reality to mere social and cultural fabrications. A truly ironic reduction occurred in the gradual inclination of natural philosophy towards naturalistic materialism and away from its original presumption of a theocentric universe. Finally, there was the reductive sterilization of art by neoclassical critics who insisted on conformity to what they had determined to be essential rules and principles. Pope strikingly and summarily characterizes these trends in book 4 of the Dunciad: Then rose the Seed of Chaos, and of Night, To blot out Order, and extinguish Light, Of dull and venal a new World to mold, And bring Saturnian days of Lead and Gold.

(12-15)

Pope's ridicule in the Dunciad of what he perceives to be radical cultural degeneration represents the substantial eighteenth-century resistance to the sort of reductionism implicit in, for example, deism, radical empiricism, and Humean moral conventionalism. It is in philosophy, however, that the roots of the reductionistic tendency are most clearly evident. Berkeley lays them bare:

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If we have any knowledge at all of external things, it must be by Reason inferring their existence from what is immediately perceived by sense. But what reason can induce us to believe the existence of bodies without the mind, from what we perceive, since the very patrons of Matter themselves [i.e., Lockeans] do not pretend there is any necessary connexion betwixt them and our ideas? (73)

Complementing Berkeley are the objections of Thomas Reid: Since sensation is an operation of the mind, as well as all the other things of which we form our notions by reflection, when it is asserted, that all our notions are either ideas of sensation, or ideas of reflection, the plain English of this is, That mankind neither do, nor can think of any thing but of the operations of their own minds. Nothing can be more contrary to truth, or more contrary to the experience of mankind. (Inquiry, 266-67)

With the objections to philosophical reductionism of Berkeley and Reid should be grouped the objections of Cudworth and Boyle to philosophical and scientific materialism and of Butler to deism. The preeminent case against eighteenth-century reductionism, however, is to be found in the writings of Samuel Johnson. Before turning to a reconsideration of Johnson's arguments with regard to their antireductionist tendency, we must first distinguish the negative sort of reductionism that he opposes from the constructive, which he commends. As A. D. Nuttall has helpfully explained, there is a legitimate reductionism, exemplified in Newton's Principia, which is the accurate and complete explanation of a variety of phenomena in terms of fewer and simpler conceptions. Illegitimate reductionism, in contrast, ignores or misrepresents in its explanations some part of the data to be explained, thereby implying a distortion of or subtraction from the content of reality. 2 Johnson's endorsement of "nature" as represented in his literary use of the concept is a defense against the illegitimate reduction of its content that pervaded eighteenth-century discourse. Johnson, in the periodical essays, opposes against reductionism his recommendation of the pursuit of genuine value on the presumption that nature contains such value in virtue of its divine creation. In chapter 4, we have considered how Johnson avoids by means of this presumption both the incipient secular utilitarianism of the eighteenth century and also what he sees as the general human tendency to equate reality with its superficial appearances.

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Criticizing any "dangerous and empirical morality" (Rambler 183, 5.200) that determines moral principles by their expediency, Johnson insists on the existence of objective "laws of right" (Rambler 114, 4.241); on this basis, he opposes a simplistic abandonment to fashion or convention and advocates a perspicacious attention to reality combined with a spiritual reliance on providential guidance. Johnson considers reason to be not only the analyzation and combination of facts but also the apprehension of the value that nature really contains; similarly, he founds the adequacy oflanguage to symbolize and communicate true propositions in a stable and determinate nature that ultimately exists beyond both linguistic convention and human perception. Johnson's opposition to moral reductionism is appropriately symbolized in his denial of the adequacy of theoretical systems to represent reality with sufficient accuracy to account for the varieties and textures that experience indicates nature to contain. As shown in chapter 5, Johnson protested against reductionistic materialism by advocating the scientific investigation of nature within the context of its metaphysical implications. Just as, through lmlac in Rasselas, he opposes the reduction of mind and consciousness from the metaphysical to the physical, so, less obviously but more significantly, he opposes the investigation of nature apart from the consideration of its teleological dimension as the field for human development.Johnson's theoretical commitment to the concept of metaphysical nature prompted him to recognize the difficulty of obtaining real knowledge in virtue of nature's complexity and the limitations of the human perspective. However, that commitment also affirmed the possible existence of real knowledge by endorsing both the existence of a real natural system and also the enclosure of the human subject within an objective universe whose contents all shared the affinity and interdependence deriving from their mutual creation by the divine being. Not only was Johnson's endorsement of the concept of nature instrumental in his avoidance of and arguments against philosophical materialism, but that endorsement also founded his criticism of eighteenth-century skepticism, a way of thinking whose condensation of all possible knowledge into the single, inflexible dogma that nothing can be known makes it the most extreme and dramatic example of eighteenth-century reductionism. Johnson's most important statement against reductionism, discussed in chapter 6, is contained in his works of literary criticism,

134

SAMUEL JOHNSON 'S " GENERAL NATURE"

preeminently the Preface to Shakespeare. His commendation of "just representations of general nature" contains and illustrates his endorsements of both the moral content and the teleological implications of nature and applies them to the support of his explanation of the concept of mimesis. More profoundly than in his expositions of either nature's ethical or teleological content, however,Johnson's commendation of Shakespeare implies an expansive view of what reality finally is and how human beings may most fully know it. Fictional images, says Johnson, convey to our apprehension the dimensions of reality that are not directly available: through the creations of literary geniuses there is revealed a nature both strange and familiar, one to which we feel that we naturally belong but which is finally beyond our reach. Johnson's refusal to evaluate Shakespeare's dramas in terms of the neoclassical unities emphasizes that the ''just representation" of nature is ultimately the province of genius, the products of which are characterized by a disregard for principles in view of their larger purpose to represent genuine nature with its unpredictability, energy, and vitality. Beyond their literary and aesthetic explanations, Johnson's arguments in support of mimesis are philosophically important in implying the boundless immensity and ultimate mystery of nature as expressed in the requirements of extraordinary perception and imagination that are necessary to portray it. The polemic~l and philosophical import ofJohnson's conception of nature within his discussions of morality, science, and aesthetics invites us to question the adequacy of "nature" to found those positions: what claim to philosophical validity did Johnson's "nature" deserve, particularly as it is evaluated in regard to the radical critiques that the concept sustained at the hands of philosophers of the caliber of Hume? We must begin such an evaluation of Johnson's "nature" by taking into account the architectonic nature of the term and its consequential immunity to simple verification. Johnson's "nature" is no static philosophical foundatiq_n whose quality can be determined by the disassembly and inspection of its parts, but is rather a metaphysical shape whose adoption is epistemologically prior to the understanding of whatever is contextualized within it. To evaluate the validity of Johnson's nature, therefore, it is most appropriate to begin with the use that Johnson himself made of it, which was to account for and interpret the totality of data encountered within human experience. Tested by its performance in use as a context for interpreting the range of human experience, both

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individual and social,Johnson's "nature" demonstrates its philosophical adequacy and vindicates itself over the objections of the reductionists. The strongest corroboration of the adequacy of Johnson's "nature" is its endorsement of the conceptual order of things that must be in place a priori in order for the data of experience to "mean" anything in virtue of their description, relation, and interpretation. As Wimsatt noticed, the multiple dimensions contained within neoclassical "nature" comprised "a set of complementary and analogical senses intrinsic to the subject-object relation of human knowledge and to the process of abstracting principles from concreteness" ( Criticism, 317); in other words, "nature" constitutes a theoretical recognition of the conditions that must obtain in order for there to be knowledge. Cartesianism and radical empiricism, in their attempts to define knowledge purely in terms of what is contained in the mind, contradicted the nature of human perception, which presents itself as an awareness of the external. In contrast, the presumption of "nature" affirms at the outset the existence of the human subject within an environment that can be known. 3 The reductive misinterpretation of human experience implicit in the empiricists' theoretical equation of knowledge solely with mental contents occasioned spirited reaction, notably from Thomas Reid, who objected that "every operation of the senses ... implies judgment or belief, as well as simple apprehension," judgment that pain in a toe, for example, carries both a real sensation and a belief that we have it, or that the sight of a tree implies its presence (Inquiry, 268). Johnson's writing gives evidence everywhere of his endorsement of the reliability of physical perception, of the possibility of genuine knowledge of the world, and of his rejection of theoretical schemes that imply the contrary; that is, he accepts as self-evident the material and perceptual framework that reality itself seems to present to human experience. Johnson's conception of nature, in its assertion of an external world that is coherent and available to perception, presumes therefore the conditions that must be in place in order for anything at all to be coherently predicated. 4 Besides establishing the conditions within which "meaning" can exist, Johnson's "nature" complements and validates the intuition that human experience is significant and purposeful. We must here remember Johnson's qualification that "experience" consists not in mere sense perceptions or in suffering and acting in the midst of things, but in ordering and evaluating the events and impressions of

136

SAMUEL JOHNSON'S " GENERAL NATURE"

life with reason and judgment. "Nature" provided, therefore, the context of order and value by which such evaluation could proceed: in short, Johnson's "nature" not only contains but actually constitutes experience by allowing the association of actions and perceptions with the varieties of real metaphysical value that "nature" was presumed to contain. Consideration of the obvious skeptical objection, that "nature" evidentally represents a sort of wishful thinking by which purpose and value are projected from the collective human imagination into an indifferent universe, will help to orientJohnson's "nature" in its proper perspective. Johnson's own answer to the skeptic would no doubt be both religious and sharp, but its philosophical substance would most likely be an insistence on the adequacy of his concept of nature superior to the skeptic's material universe to account for and accommodate the totality of the data that human life and societies offer for consideration. Collective experience counts for Johnson as data which no adequate account of reality can ignore: "Opinion," as he says, which "spreads wide and continues long ... may be reasonably presumed to have been infused by nature or dictated by reason" (Id/,er 52, 2.162), and what is "built upon the discoveries of a great many minds, is always of more strength, than what is produced by the mere workings of any one mind" (Life, 1.454). It is not surprising, therefore, thatJohnson, given the traditional affirmation of the significance and purposefulness of human life and action, an affirmation that, as may be observed, is actually or implicitly endorsed (if only in practice) by skeptics no less than by traditionalists, would choose and defend a context of "nature" that would support the value and purposefulness of life and oppose the philosophical materialism that would undercut it. Johnson's conception of nature occupies so influential a position in his thinking that it may be compared to and connected with his theology, an unsurprising fact in view of the substantially theological origins of the concept. In relation to the role ofJohnson's "nature" in his accounts of knowledge and value, what Chester F. Chapin says of the influence on Johnson of his religion applies to the influence of his conception of nature as well: What Johnson is saying is that the more we learn of human nature, the more carefully we consider man in all his aspects, the more evident it becomes that the religious view of life is the only rational view, the only view that does not jar with the facts of experience, and the only view, indeed, that really takes these facts into account. 5

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Johnson's conception of nature would in the eighteenth century have been called "philosophical" rather than religious; however, Johnson's "nature" worked consistently with his theological commitments to define an intellectual perspective from within which he was able to account for the variety, structure, meaning, and ultimate unfathomability of reality that were so dominant among his concerns. Because Johnson's "nature" occupies so fundamental a position in his philosophical perspective as to qualify and contextualize any and all ideas that were built upon it, we must conclude, contrary to some important scholars to which this study is very much indebted, 6 that Johnson can not accurately be called an empiricist. This is not to deny Johnson's high regard for experience, but to notice that experience is created for Johnson only by its interpretation within the context of metaphysical nature as defined by the complex framework of philosophy and tradition that it has been the business of this study to set forth. Not only does the classification of Johnson as an empiricist misleadingly associate him with a reductionism and skepticism which the intellectual tendency of his works consistently and powerfully opposes, but such a classification also obscures the fact of Johnson's evident and profound awareness that there is no such thing as "experience" without interpretation, an awareness that from the perspective of the date of this writing can arguably be considered to be Johnson's most "modern" attribute. Johnson's distance from the "empiricist" category reminds us of further incongruities: that he was, for instance, a realist who loved fiction, or a traditionalist of vast irreverence, or an amateur scientist who found amateur scientists ridiculous. Indeed, in Johnson's oftennoted incompatibility with neat characterization he is similar to the "nature" that he so respected. In the absence of a category large and complex enough for Johnson, therefore, the concept of "nature," by virtue of its inclusive variety, range, and depth, suggests its final use in this study as a fitting analogue of the character of its defender.

Notes PREFACE

1. Preface to Shakespeare, in Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, The Yale Editon of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 7 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 61. All further citations of this work will refer to this edition and will be supplied parenthetically by page number in the text. 2. A Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed., s.v. "nature." All quotations from entries in the Dictionary will be from the CD-ROM version, 1st and 4th eds., ed. Anne McDermott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 3. Cf. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2d ed., ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 474;Joseph Butler, Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1880), 105. All further citations of these works will refer to these editions and will be supplied parenthetically by page numbers in the text. 4. Tuesday, 16 July, 1754, in The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 81. 5. This generalization can be interestingly supported by contrasting the metaphysical "nature" described in the "General Scholium" of Newton's Principia Mathematica with the exclusively material "nature" that is emphasized in Steven Weinberg's Dreams of a Final Theory (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992). 6. These works are all listed in the catalogue prepared by the auctioneer Christie for the sale ofJohnson's books after his death; see Donald Greene, Samuel Johnson's Li&rary: An Annotated Guide (Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, University ofVictoria, 1975). 7. The term "eighteenth-century" is here and afterwards used loosely to designate the era from Descartes through Edmund Burke, a usage meant to recognize the powerful influence that philosophers like Descartes, Locke, and Newton exerted over the eighteenth century.

CHAPTER

1

1. Donald Greene's well-known criticism of the appropriateness of this term for characterizing the eighteenth century does not deny the significant classical influence over eighteenth-century literature and culture, but, rather, that such influence was unique to the eighteenth century compared with other periods. See The Age of Exuberance: Backgrounds to Eighteenth-Century English Literature (New York: McGrawHill, Inc., 1970), 91.

NOTES

139

2. A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Receiv'd Notion of Nature; Made in an Essay Address 'd to a Friend (London: H. Clark, for John Taylor, 1685-86), 44, 100; cf. section IV ( 56-121). In all further references, this work will be called the Enquiry. All further citations of this work will refer to this edition and will be supplied parenthetically by page or signature numbers in the text. 3. See The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678; reprint, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1964), chapter 1, 1-55 passim. All further citations of this work will refer to this edition and will be supplied parenthetically by page or signature numbers in the text. 4. Looking ahead to the discussion of the eighteenth-century andJohnsonian awareness and adaptation of the classical philosophers' discussions of nature, we note that virtually all of the classical sources represented in this chapter were both popular and readily available in the eighteenth century in editions of the works of Aristotle and Plato, in Cicero's philosophical works, and in Diogenes Laertius's Lives. Johnson owned all of these works, and those by Cudworth and Boyle, as well; cf. Greene, Johnson's Library. 5. English "nature" derives, via Old French, from Latin natura, from natus, perfect participle of "nascor," "to be born." Natura is always used in Classical Latin to translate the Greek phusis, from phuo, "to beget or bring forth," ultimately from Indo-European bhu, "to become, grow." Phusis basically means "what something becomes," thus "form, nature." By extension, this came to mean "whatever was given or permanent." From this meaning, the distinction seems to have developed between the "appearance" of a thing according to naive inspection and its "nature" or essence. The concept of general or universal nature developed, apparently, from the concept of nature as particular real essence. For further discussion of etymologies, see OED, s.v. "nature," the Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. natura, and the Greek-English Lexicon, ed. Liddel and Scott, s.v. phusis. See also Gerhard Friedrich, ed., and Geoffrey W. Bromiley, ed. and trans., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), s.v. phusis, phusikos, phusikos, by Helmut Koster. 6. C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 35-37. 7. The consensus of modern scholars seems to be that it is doubtful that these titles are original, but that there is not enough evidence to support a definitive judgment. That "the phrase was later used indiscriminately as a title for Presocratic works" supports the view that, if not original, the title Peri phuseos represents later philosophers' approximation of the goal of the pre-Socratics to explain universal "nature"; see A.H. Coxon, The Fragments ofParmenides (Assen/Maasticht, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1986), 156. For a discussion of the title's source and appropriateness, see M. R. Wright, Empedocles: the Extant Fragments (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 85-86; see also William Arthur Heidel," Peri Phuseos. A Study of the Conception of Nature Among the Pre-Socratics," Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 15 (1909-1910): 79-133. 8. Arthur 0. Lovejoy, "The Meaning of Phusis in the Greek Physiologers," The Philosophical Review 18.4 (1909): 376. 9. Diogenes Laertius Lives ofEminent Philosophers I.27. In further references, this work will be referred to as DL. Further citations of this work will be supplied parenthetically in the text by book and section numbers. Translations are from the Loeb edition.

140

NOTES

10. Wright, 86. 11. English quotations from this work are from the Loeb edition . All citations are supplied parenthetically in the text, using the numerical system that is standard for this work. Greek words are transliterated here and throughout. 12. Coxon, 60-61. 13. Wright, 96-97; cf. 166-67. 14. True Intellectual System, 18-20. Cudworth notes that Plato and Aristotle were not the inventors of metaphysical "nature," but he emphasizes their use and development of the concept. 15. Friedrich, 257. 16. All English quotations from this work are from The Laws of Plato, trans. and notes by Thomas Pangle (New York: Basic Books, 1980). All citations to this work are supplied parenthetically in the text, using the standard numerical system for this work. Gregory Vlastos identifies Plato's target specifically as the Ionian school; see his Plato's Universe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), 23. 17. "Moral realism" and "moral conventionalism" are indispensable terms for discussing the moral implications of nature, and, because they will appear often throughout this study, it will be convenient to define them here. "Moral realism" is the view that moral values and principles exist in reality independently of human judgment and thus are discovered rather than manufactured, and that moral propositions can be true or false. "Moral conventionalism," in contrast, is the position that, although societies formulate and adopt moral principles for a variety of reasons, those principles have social decision and custom as their ultimate sanction, not a real existence in nature. See The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), s.v. "moral realism," "conventionalism." 18. English quotations from this work are from the Loeb translation. All citations are supplied parenthetically in the text, using the numerical system that is standard for this work. 19. Cf. The Laws of Plato, ed. and notes by E. B. England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1921 ), 462, c2 n.: "[The Athenian) is here concerned to prove that psuche is more phusei ["natural") than any kind of bodily substance." 20. England, 481, 899b5, n. 21. All English quotations from this work are from the translation by W. C. Hembold (New York: Macmillan Co., 1952). All citations are supplied parenthetically in the text, using the numerical system that is standard for this work. 22. Corgi.as, ed. and commentary by E. R. Dodds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 339, 508a6 n. 23. Cf. Dodds, 338, 508a3 n. 24. All English quotations from this work are from the Loeb translation. All citations are supplied parenthetically in the text, using the numerical system that is standard for this work. 25. The translator of the Loeb Physics comments, "English cannot reproduce the ambiguity of he phusis, which ... may mean 'the nature' (of any natural thing) or 'Nature' collectively" (192b, n.) 26. In Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, intro. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1969), l. 72. All further quotations will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by line numbers.

NOTES

141

27. Cicero De natura dearum 2.24-25. Furthe r citations will refer to this work as ND. All English quotations from this work are from the Loeb edition; further citations will be supplied parenthetically in the text by book and line numbers. Cicero is considered an authoritative source on Stoic doctrine; reliance on secondary sources in the study of early Stoicism is necessary because the works of the early Stoics have not survived. See A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (New York: Charles Scibner's Sons, 1974), 115, 185. 28. Gisela Striker, "Anti pater, or the art of living," in The Norms of Nature: Studies in Hellenistic Ethics, ed. Malcolm Schofield and Striker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 185; cf. Long's list of the five meanings of logos in Stoic writings, Philosophy, 148. 29. Friedrich, 264. 30. A. A. Long, "The Logical Basis of Stoic Ethics," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 71 n.s. (1970-1971): 98-99. 31. Cicero De legi,bus 1.33-35; translation from the Loeb edition. 32. Cicero De finibus bonarum et malarum 3.28, 36, 53; translation from the Loeb edition. 33. For the ultimate eighteenth-century criticism of the Stoics, seejohnson's Rambler 32. Perhaps the most famous illustration of the moral regard with which "nature" was held in eighteenth-century thought is Thomasjefferson'sjustification of the colonies' rebellion in the Declaration of Independence on the basis of the "laws of nature and of nature's god." 34. DL 10.39-40. Epicurus's large work on nature, Peri phuseos, does not survive, but Diogenes Laertius preserves the philosopher's "Letter to Herodotus" in which his physics are summarized. The letter, with supplementation from De rerum natura by the Epicurean Lucretius, is the basis for this explanation of Epicurus's physics. 35. Lucretius De rerum natura 5.148. 36. Lucretius queries: if atoms do not swerve and vary their courses, "whence comes this power of free will for living creatures throughout the earth?" (2.25257). This translation is from On Nature, trans. Russel M. Geer (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1965), 2.219-20. For a discussion of the "swerve" and its implications, see R. D. Hicks, Stoic and Epicurean (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 258-62. 37. Cf. Boyle, Enquiry, 48-52. 38. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, 1951 ed., s.v. eretz. 39. Cf. The Whole Duty of Man, Part I, which opposes to the Puritan assertion of total human depravity the following: "Of these things [that God now requires of us] there are some which God hath so stamp' d upon our souls, that we Naturally knew them; that is, we should have known them to be our Duty, though we had never been told so by the Scripture" (London: for T. Garthwait, at St. Paul's, 1659), 2. That the author has in mind the Pauline citation of natura in Romans 2:14 is indicated by the citation of the next verse in the text that immediately follows. 40. Similarly, in 1 Cor. 11:14, the readers are said to be taught by "nature [phusis] itself." Again, the usage of phusis may only indicate the author's employment for apologetic purposes of ideas current in contemporary Hellenistic:Jewish dialogue. Cf. Friedrich, 274, n.229. All Biblical quotations are from the Authorized Version.

NOTES

142 CHAPTER

2

1. C. S. Lewis, Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century, Oxford History of English Literature, vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 21. 2. For a description of the classical works and emphases that were most influential for Renaissance humanists, see Paul Oscar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and its Sources, ed. Michael Mooney ·(New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 32-81. 3. Science and the Modem World (New York: Macmillan Co., 1925; New American Library, 1948), 14; cf. 1-20: "The faith in the possibility of science [i.e., the presumption of the rational coherence of nature], generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology." The fundamental connection of traditional "nature" with the development of seventeenth-century science suggested in this quotation will be treated in depth in chapter 5. 4. The sophisticated interpretive relation of "nature" to the more basic "creation" is illustrated in their separation by Francis of Assisi, who, though now regarded as a "nature mystic," left no evidence that he had ever used in his writings the word natura; we may infer that he ought more properly to be called a "creation mystic"; cf. Roger D. Sorrell, St. Francis of Assisi and Nature: Tradition and Innovation in Western Christian Attitudes toward the Environment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 7, 69-97. 5. It is central to the understanding of Cudworth's "nature" to note that, in contrast to the modem use of "intellectual" to mean "mental," Cudworth uses it in the old sense of spiritual or non-material, in accordance with his Platonism. Cf. OED, s.v. "intellectual," lb. 6. The second page, cited as "6," is misnumbered in the facsimile text. 7. Enneads 3.8.4; translation from the Loeb edition. 8. Confessions 7.26; all translations from this work are from The Confessions of Saint Augustine, trans. Edward Pusey (New York: Collier Books, 1961). Further citations will be supplied parenthetically in the text by book and line numbers. 9. Meyrick H. Carre, Realists and Nominalists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946),28 10. St. Augustine The Literal Meaning of Genesis 12.16.33. All quotations from this work are from the translation by John Hammond Taylor, S. J. (New York: Newman Press, 1982). Further citations will be supplied parenthetically in the text by book and section numbers. 11. Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middl,e Ages (New York: Random House, 1955), 73. 12. The Trinity 4.1.3; all translations from this work are from the version by Stephen McKenna, S. SS. R., The Fathers of the Church, vol. 45 (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1963). Further citations will be supplied parenthetically in the text by book and section numbers. 13. Significantly, Boyle's opposition to Aristotelian "nature" in the Enquiry substantially takes the form of his characterization of it as a rival to a Christian understanding of nature in virtue of what he takes to be its similarity to that understanding; Cf. Enquiry, 6: "It seems to detract from the Honour of the great Author and Governor of the World; that Men should ascribe most of the admirable

NOTES

143

things that are to be met with in it, not to him , but to a certain Nature, which themselves do not know what to make of." Boyle's "nature" is in fact virtually identical to the Aristotelian and Thomist notion in its emphasis on the dynamic interdependence that characterizes nature. 14. By "plastick," Cudworth means "causing the growth or production of natural forms, especially ofliving organisms ... formative, procreative, creative"; OED, s.v. "plastic," 1.2. 15. Cf. Newton, The Princi,pia1 trans. Andrew Motte (1848; rprL, Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1995), 443, 440-41: "The impenetrability, the mobility, and the impulsive force of bodies, and the laws of motion and of gravitation" may be "inferred from phenomena," but these laws and principles that are evident in natural processes are overseen and ultimately governed by the "Universal Ruler": "In him are all things contained and moved; yet neither affects the other." 16. Summa theologica l.ll5, art. 2, resp. All quotations from Aquinas will be from this work; all English quotations are from the translation by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, Inc., 1947). Further citations will be supplied parenthetically in the text with reference to the divisions and subdivisions that are standard for this work. 17. Carre, 71. 18. This translation preserves the original Latin sense of partidpare as a transitive verb, designating the formation of a partnership. Writing totum universum partici,pat divinam bonitatem, Aquinas states that the "whole universe" is a partner with its Creator in realizing the divine goodness. The merging of entity and activity is characteristically Thomist. 19. Carre, 98-100. 20. Gilson, 498-499; Carre, 123. 21. Elucidations of the Search After Truth, trans. Thomas M. Lennon (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 668. 22. Introduction, Ockham: Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Philotheus Boehner, O.F.M. (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1957), xlvi. 23. Q}todlibeta, III, Q.iii, in Boehner, 129. 24. Summa totius logicae, I, c. xvi, in Boehner, 40. 25. Ibid., c. xiv, in Boehner, 34. Cf. the double reference of "truth" for Aquinas to mental contents and to objective referents: Aquinas did not deny the subjective component of truth, but neither did he limit truth to intentio animae, as did Ockham. 26. Gilson, 487. 27. Summa totius logicae, I, c. xiv, in Boehner, 34. 28. Prologus in Expositionem super viii libros Physicorum, in Boehner, 11. 29. Gilson, 489. 30. Dictionary, 4th ed., s.v., "nature." 31. Chaucer, The Parliament ofFowls, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987), 390. 32. See chapter 3 below, pages 58-59. 33. George D. Economou, The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 53. Although she is prefigured by late-classical authors, notably Statius, Claudian, and Boethius, Natura was developed as a major literary and philosophical conception in the twelfth century. C. S. Lewis calls Na-

144

NOTES

tura the " youngest of deities " ; The Discarded Image: an Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 37. In view of the status of Natura as the creative intermediary between God and the earth parallel to that of the "World-Soul" in Plato's Timeaus, and because the authors who developed and incorporated the character most richly are known to have been heavily influenced by the Platonism of the twelfth-century renaissance and the School of Chartres, the philosophical impetus for the character is almost unanimously located by commentators in Plato; Cf. Timaeus 30b-c; Economou, 11-14, 58. 34. The Cosmographia of Bernardus Silvestris, trans. Winthrop Wetherbee (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 96, 111. All quotations are from this translation; further quotations will be cited parenthetically in the text by page number. 35. Alan of Lille, The Plaint of Nature, trans. James J. Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 146, 120, 124. All further quotations are from this translation and will be cited parenthetically in the text by page numbers. The expanded role for Natura makes the De planctu "the single most significant contribution to the history of the goddess Natura in medieval literature"; Econer mou, 72. 36. Economou, 94. 37. Wetherbee, intro., Cosmographia 10. 38. William A. Wallace, O.P., "The Philosophical Setting of Medieval Science," in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 95-96; cf. A. C. Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 11-21. 39. Cf. E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture, trans. C. Dikshoom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 135-41. 40. Wallace, 112-14. 41. Cf. the representative comment of Francis Bacon: certain ones who are " commonly taken for the most sublime and divine philosophers" cause those whom they influence to" [withdraw] themselves too much from the contemplation of nature and the observation of experience," and to "[tumble] up and down in their own reason and conceits" and "disdain to spell and so by degrees to read in the volume of God's works"; Of the Advancement of Leaming, in The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, ed. John M. Robertson (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 59. 42. Roger French and Andrew Cunningham, Before Science: The Invention of the Friars' Natural Philosophy (Han ts, England: Scolar Press, 1996), 4. 43. Cf. Wallace, 102-3; Crombie, 103-19. For a detailed discussion of the contributions of Aristotle's concepts and terminology to the development of science such as his invention of the concept of energy, see Charles Coulton Gillespie, ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970-1980), s.v. "Aristotle," by Lorenzo Minio-Paluello. 44. Language, Thought, and Logic (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 64. 45. Notable evidence of these conflicts that correlates with this discussion is, for example, the frequent citation of Plato and Augustine by Aquinas in the Summa theologica as foils for the Aristotelian corrections of their views that he presents, and the condemnation of some of Aquinas's propositions by the Bishop of Paris in 1277.

145

NOTES

46. See e .g., Ephesians 1:10, Revelation 19:11-21:8. 47. Job 38: 4-5. 48. Genesis 1:31.

CHAPTER

3

1. Notable observations of the powerful Christian and classical influence on eighteenth-century intellectual culture are the following: Donald Greene, The Age ofExuberance, 92, cf. 93-100; Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philowphers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), 28-31, cf. 33-34; Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 302, cf. 20-22. Greene characterizes the eighteenth-century influence of orthodox Christian theology as "extremely obvious," while Fussell calls Cicero the "founder" of eighteenth-century humanism. Becker's classic essay provocatively showed that even the most overtly antitheological eighteenth-century thinkers presumed an intellectual paradigm consistent with medieval Christianity, emphasizing, for example, a Thomist view of nature exhibiting rational design and teleological purpose. Becker's popular work was criticized by, for example, Peter Gay ("Carl Becker's Heavenly City," in Carl Becker's Heavenly City Revisited, ed. Raymond 0. Rockwood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), 27-51), but, at least in regard to the history and philosophy of science, his thesis is paralleled and confirmed in recent studies, as will be shown in chapter 5. 2. "The word Nature is every where to be met with in the Writings of Physiologers. But, though they frequently employ the Word, they seem not to have much consider'd, what Notion ought to be fram'd of the Thing, which they suppose and admire, and upon Occasion celebrate, but do not call in Question or discuss"; Enquiry, A3'. Boyle also notes that "among Latin Writers I found the acceptions of the word Nature to be so many, that I remember, one author reckons up no less than fourteen or fifteen" (30). 3. Treatise, 474. 4. Fourth ed., s.v. "nature"; cf. Enquiry, 26-30. 5. The Christian Virtuoso: Shewing That lfJ being addicted to Experimental Philosophy, a Man is rather Assisted, than Indisposed, to be a Good Christian (London: Edw. Jones, for John Taylor, 1690), 30. All further citations of this work will refer to this edition and will be given parenthetically by page and signature numbers in the text. For a fuller discussion of Boyle's "nature," see J.E. McGuire, "Boyle's Conception of Nature," journal of the History of Ideas 33.4 ( 1972): 523-42. 6. For Boyle's criticism of this notion, see Enquiry, section 8. Cudworth's most important explanation of plastic nature and its implications is found in his True Intellectual System, 146-74. 7. For an explanation of the debt of Berkeley and Hume to Malebranche, see Charles]. McCracken, Malebranche and British Philowphy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 205-90. 8. The Principles of Human Knowledge, with Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philo-nous, intro. G. J. Warnock (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1963), 141 (cf Malebranche, Elucidations, 668). All further citations of this work will refer to this edition and will be supplied parenthetically in the text by page number.

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9. " [It is] the pretending to explain things by corporeal causes [ that] seems to have too much estranged the minds of men from that Active Principle, that supreme and wise Spirit 'in whom we live, move, and have our being' " (98). For a thorough and interesting discussion of the misunderstood purpose of Berkeley's writings as a defense of theism and epistemological realism, see Richard H. Popkin, "The New Realism of Bishop Berkeley," in The High Road to Pyrrhonism, ed. Richard A. Watson andjames E. Force (San Diego: Austin Hill Press, 1980), 319-38. 10. OJ the Laws ofEcclesiastical Polity, ed. Christopher Morris, vol. 1 (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), 177. All further citations of this work will refer to this edition and will be supplied parenthetically in the text by page number. 11. For a discussion of the development of deism in the con text of seven teen thcentury rationalism, see Nicholas Hudson, Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-century Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 7-58; Barbara]. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships Between Natural Science, Religi,on, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 74-101. 12. Christianity as Old as the Creation, ed. Gunter Gawlick (1730; rprt., StuttgartBad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1967), 368-69. All further quotations will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by page number. 13. For an overview of eighteenth-century English moral debates, see Robert E. Norton, The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 9-54. 14. See Laws ofEcclesiastical Polity, bk. 1. 15. 1724; reprinted with John Clarke, An Examination of the Notion of Moral Good and Evil (1725), et al. (New York: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1974), 26. 16. An Inquiry into the Origi,nal of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1726; rprt., New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1971), 125. All further quotations will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by page number. 17. See, for example, Leviathan, 1.14-15, 11.17. 18. A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731; rprt., New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1976), 298. 19. For Hume's remarkable explanation of the nature of moral obligation, see the Treatise, 470-84. See also V. M. Hope, Virtue by Consensus: the Moral Philosophy of Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 50-82. 20. "An Essay of Dramatic Poesy," in Essays ofJohn Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker, vol. 1 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), 36. 21. Galileo Galilei, The Assayer, in Discoveries and opinions of Galileo, trans. Stillman Drake (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 237-38. 22. See especially Dijksterhuis, 480-91; see also Whitehead, 1-20. 23. Meditations on the First Philosophy in Which the Existence of God and the Distinction Between Mind and Body are Demonstrated, in Descartes, A Discourse on Method and Other Works, ed. Joseph Epstein, trans. E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (New York: Washington Square Press, 1965), 15. All further quotations will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by page number. 24. See part IV, which reviews Descartes's metaphysics so that "one may judge whether the foundations [of scientific methodology] which I have laid are sufficiently secure"; Discourse on Method, in Epstein, ed., 97.

NOTES

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25. Reflections Upon Ancient and Modem Leaming (1694; rprt; Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1968), 156. 26. For an explanation of the dualistic implications of Cartesian epistemology, see E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modem Physical Science (London: Routledge, 1932),96-11~ 27. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 525. For a discussion of the contemporary judgment that Locke's Essay promoted skepticism, see John W. Yolton, john Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), ix, 1-25. 28. For the theological motivations of Newton and Locke, see, for example, Dijksterhuis, 486-88; Norton, 18-20. Whitehead commits himself to the view that Hume's philosophy, as represented, presumably, in the Treatise, constitutes a "refutation" of science (Modem World, 17). 29. In Williams, ed., II. 643-50. All further quotations will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by line numbers. 30. Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 99-100. All further quotations will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. 31. For an indication of the powerful intellectual and cultural influence of the new science on the eighteenth century, see, for example, BettyJo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob, Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995), 61-124. 32. Dramatic Poesy, 43-44. 33. An Essay on Criticism, in Williams, intro., II. 68-69. 34. Preface to Shakespeare, 61. 35. A.D. Nuttall, A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality (London: Methuen, 1983), 61. 36. In Eighteenth-Century English Literature, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson, el al. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Javonavich, 1969), 318. 37. Henry Home, Lord Karnes, Elements of Criticism (New York: Collins & Hannay, 1829), 444. 38. In The Oxford Authors: Samuel Johnson, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 310. Greene notes, "Samuel Madden's Boulter's Monument (which Johnson revised) has (line 377) 'Words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things'" (810, n. 310). All further citations of works from Greene's anthology will be from this edition. 39. A Defence of Poetry, ed. Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 23-24. All further citations of this work will refer to this edition and will be supplied parenthetically by page number in the text. 40. Maynard Mack explains Pope's "nature" in the poem as "a peculiarly honorific term and concept"; ambiguous, but "always tending to imply the creative operations of a quasi-divine agency that made for order, universality, and permanence, alike in man, in art, and in the cosmos"; Alexander Pope: a Life (New York: Norton & Co., 1985), 173. 41. John R. Searle's observation is pertinent to the semantic function of eighteenth-century "nature": "It is a condition of the adequacy of a precise theory of an indeterminate phenomenon that it should precisely characterize that phenomenon as indeterminate." "The Word Turned Upside Down," review of OnDeconstruc-

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tion: Theory and Criticism after Strncturalism, by Jonathan Culler, in New York Review of Books 30.16 (1983): 76. 42. Ellis, 60.

CHAPTER

4

I. The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, The Yale Edition of the Works ofSamuelJohnson, vols. 3-5 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969); The Idler and The Adventurer, ed. W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell, The Yale Johnson, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). Unless otherwise noted, quotations in this chapter are from these volumes and will be cited parenthetically in the text by volume number of the Yale edition followed by page number. 2. In contrast, Robert DeMaria,Jr, in The Life of Samuel Johnson: a Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), identifies the idea explored by Johnson in the essays as "the vanity of human wishes" (145), but I propose instead "the value inherent in universal nature," a topic that accounts for the more positive tone of the essays in comparison with the poem, their variety of content, and their philosophical seriousness. 3. The Vanity of Human Wishes, in The Poems of Samuel Johnson, 2d ed., ed. David Nichol Smith and Edward L. McAdam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 1. 6. All further quotations will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by line numbers. 4. Life of Milton, 1.99-100. 5. Cf. Paul Kent Alkon, Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline (nc: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 4: "It is impossible to overlookJohnson's explicit assumption that all systems of 'wisdom and piety' must ground their utility upon a bedrock of immutable truth ." 6. Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1971), 148-49. 7. Cf. Sir Robert Chambers's A Course of Lectures on the English Law, a work on whichJohnson collaborated: "Natural law, or as some writers call it, the law of reason ... may be considered as the will of the Creator, manifested by its conformity to reason, and by its utility to his creatures"; ed. Thomas M. Curley, vol. I (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 85. Whether or not Johnson wrote this, it illustrates perfectly his view of the relation of reason to a divinely established natural order, a view virtually identical to that of Aquinas (cf. p. 55). 8. History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, pref. Crane Brinton, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962), 318-19. 9. Phaedrns 247. 10. Ephesians I :9-10. 11. Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, intro. Baruch Brody (1815; rprt., Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1969), 47. 12. Cf. Life of Cowley: "Words being arbitrary must owe their power to association, and have the influence, and that only, which custom has given them" (1.58). 13. For a thorough explanation and discussion of Johnson's conception of the " anatomy of the mind" that emphasizes what he considered to be its objective structure, see Alkon, 3-84.

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14. As a representative example of this tradition, see the ethical debate in Cicero De finilnts 3.10-76, 4.14-62, which includes an interminable attempt by the Stoic participant to locate moral value in nature. 15. In passing.Johnson's marvelous jab at the Stoics' boasted capability to determine what is "according to nature" must be noted: "Inconsistencies [as exemplified by the Stoics] are to be expected from the greatest understandings, when they endeavour to grow eminent by singularity, and employ their strength in establishing opinions opposite to nature" (3.175; italics added). 16. The Sacred Theory of the Earth, intro. Basil Willey (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 399. All further quotations will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by page number. 17. For a review of the Burnet controversy with emphasis on its implications for moral philosophy, see Macklem, The Anatomy of the World: Relations Between Natural and Moral Law from Donne to Pope (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), 3-56. 18. Macklem, 37. 19. Johnson's view that the creation is both dangerously imperfect and also benevolent reflects the ambivalence toward creation traditionally present in JudeoChristian thought, an ambivalence discussed in detail in chapter 6. 20. For a history of the "scale of being" beginning with its classical antecedents, see Arthur 0. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936; Harper Torchbooks, 1960), chapters 2-5. Against Lovejoy's contention of the general acceptance of the scale of being in the eighteenth century (183 ff.), see Hudson's demonstration that "Johnson's satire of this doctrine was as typical of eighteenth-century thought as the optimism of Leibniz, Pope, Bolingbroke, and Soame Jenyns," 112; see 112-23. Johnson himself implied the relative novelty of the "scale of being" idea in the "Review of A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin ofEvil," where he says that it was ''adopted by Pope" from "Arabian metaphysicians" (Greene, ed., 523-24); see also the Life of Pope, 3.163, where he implies that Pope borrowed it from Bolingbroke. All further citations of Johnson's "Review" will be cited parenthetically in the text by page number according to Greene's anthology. 21. In Works, intro. Charles Nalson Cole, vol. 3 ( 1790; rprt. Westrnead, Farnborough, Hants., England: Gregg International, 1969), 57-58. All further quotations will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by page number. 22. An Essay on Man, in Williams, intro., 129-30 (ll.267-68, 289-94). All further quotations will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by line numbers. Johnson asserts in the "Review" thatJenyns's nature is copied from Pope's Essay (Greene, ed., 522-23). On the relation ofJenyn's Inquiry to Pope, see A. D. Nuttall, Pope's 'Essay on Man' (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), 208-9. 23. For an exposition of Johnson's "Review" that emphasizes its tone of moral indignation as deriving from the implicit immorality ofJenyns's explanation of nature, see Richard B. Schwartz, Samuel Johnson and the Problem of Evil (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 22-37. 24. Hudson, 100-23. 25. Johnson stops short even of the traditional alternative orthodox explanations of evil, that it is permitted by God as necessary to human freedom (cf. Milton, On

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Christian Doctrine, 1.3 and Paradise Lost, 3.80-143) or that it was decreed by God as part of his providential design ( cf. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.18).Johnson's silence about these explanations signifies his recognition that evil, whether decreed or allowed, is a mysterious anomaly within the creation of the beneficent and divine being-a recognition that will be considered either wise or evasive, depending on the perspective of the reader. 26. Cf., for example, the divine admonition delivered by Isaiah: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord" (55:8). 27. Robert Voitle, Samuel Johnson the Moralist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 60; see also Nuttall (Pope's 'Essay on Man, '212), who callsJenyns's definition of the essence of virtue (strangely attributed by Nuttall to Johnson himself) a "utilitarian definition" ofvirtue. 28. Hudson, 84-85. 29. As the founders of both Epicureanism and utilitarianism demonstrated, the reduction of the context of moral definition from a theistic and metaphysical nature to a social consensus was a presumption of both systems; on Epicurus, see Diogenes Laertius 10.78, 143; on utilitarianism, see Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, chapter 2, especially section 14.

CHAPTER

5

1. Fussell, Humanism, 17, 19. 2. Samuel Johnson and the New Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 29. 3. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 4.217. All further citations will refer to this work as the Life, they will refer to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. 4. On the Life of Boerhaave as autobiography, see, for example, Fussell, Johnson, 101-108; DeMaria, 76-78. 5. The Life ofDr. Herman Boerhaave, in Greene, ed., 69. All further quotations will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by page number. 6. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 23-24. 7. 53; cf. 39, 13. 8. Fallen Languages: Crises ofRepresentation in Newtonian England, 1660-1740 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 98. 9. Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the Rambler and Dictionary of SamuelJohnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 96. 10. On Johnson's appreciation of experience, particularly in its relation to the new science, see, for example, Schwartz, Science, 62-93. 11. Ed. Mary Lascelles, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 9 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 40. All further quotations will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by page number. 12. Preface to the Dictionary, in Greene, ed., 315. 13. Fussell, Johnson, 171; cf. 143-80.

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14. Martin Maner, The Philosophical Biographer: Doubt and Dialectic in Johnson s Lives of the Poets (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 18-31. 15. Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, I.L.D., during the last twenty years of his Life, ed. S. C. Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 90. 16. This interpretation of Hume as arch-skeptic follows the eighteenth-century interpretation of the Treatise exemplified in the introduction to Thomas Reid's An Inquiry into the Human Mind, where "the author of the Treatise of Human Nature" is heavily implicated in helping produce "a system of skepticism, that seems to triumph over all science, and even over the dictates of common sense"; ed. Timothy Duggan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 5, 14; cf. 1-20. Recent studies are divided over the degree of Hume's skepticism and its purpose in his philosophical method. For an interpretation emphasizing Hume's epistemological skepticism, see David Fate Norton, David Hume: Common-Sense Maralist, Sceptical Metaphysician (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 192-38. For a vindication of Hume's philosophy in regard to its positive epistemological implications, see Don Garrett, Cognition and Commitment in Humes Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 205-41. As for Johnson himself, although he severely opposes Hume's antireligious works (see, for instance, Boswell, Tour to the Hebrides, in Life, 5.29-30, 272), he criticizes his philosophy proper only indirectly (as through the Pertinax character). All further references to Reid's Inquiry will refer to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text by page number. 17. Maner, 27. 18. Fussell,johnson, 160-61. 19. For examples of Johnson's ridicule of virtuosos besides those mentioned in the text, see Rambler24, 157,179,199, Idler 17. 20. See, for example, Schwartz, Science, 108-11. 21. On the unusual grammar of this literal translation, see chapter 2, note 18. 22. Paradise Lost, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan Co., 1957), book 8, 11. 167, 172-73, 191-94. 23. For a demonstration thatJohnson's commendation is less a denunciation of science than an appreciation of Raphael's implicit endorsement of a humanistic hierarchy of values, see John Hardy, 'Johnson and Raphael's Counsel to Adam," in Johnson, Boswell and their Circle: Essays Presented to Lawrence Fitzroy Powell in Honour of his Eighty-fourth Birthday ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 122-36. 24. Dijksterhuis, 491. 25. Leo Damrosch notices the link between empiricism and hostility to immaterialism: "Empiricism, even when it claimed to confirm the religious basis of existence, was systematically demolishing the vertical dimension [i.e., the interpretive reference to metaphysical nature] that had connected the world of phenomena with a metaphysical structure of meaning through which they might be organized and understood." Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 141. 26. Representative of the tradition that materiality per se is dangerous is the contention of the Athenian in Plato's Laws that the idea that "fire, water, earth, and air are the first of all things" implies that material nature precedes spirit and undermines belief in the gods and in the spiritual essence and origination of reality (10.89lc-893a). Similarly, Cudworth's True Intellectual System has as its central pur-

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pose to refute philosophical materialism, blamed by Cudworth as the root of atheism and spiritual and moral corruption (A5'-A7v; cf. chapters 1 through 3, passim). Berkeley, of course, found the idea of material substance so threatening as to reject it altogether; see the Prindples of Human Knowledge, 16-21; see also Berkeley's satire of a materialist philosopher in Alciphron; or, The Minute Philosopher, a satire that anticipates Johnson's treatment of virtuosos. 27. For an interesting explanation of why humanist culture was from tile start "indifferent, if not hostile, to science" (2), see Lewis, Poetry and Prose, 1-32. 28. DeMaria, 78. 29. Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 3-13. 30. Although Johnson affirms the orthodox view of the divine inspiration and authority of the Bible, endorsing, for example, the Mosaic account of creation ( cf. e.g., Life, 1.336, 2.467-468), he virtually always relies on rational and empirical explanations of natural phenomena rather than resorting to Biblical explanations, and in Rambler 31 he criticizes the accusers of Galileo who refused to consider the evidence presented to support the heliocentric theory because they thought that theory contradicted revelation. The respect for both revelation and reason endorsed by Johnson throughout his writings leads us to consider that he may well have held the view of their relation that was held by Burnet: " 'Tis a dangerous thing to ingage the authority of Scripture in disputes about the Natural World, in opposition to Reason; lest Time, which brings all things to light, should discover that to be evidently false which we had made Scripture to assert" (Sacred Theory, 16). 31. The History of Rasselas, Prince of A!,yssinia, in Rasselas and Other Tal,es, ed. Gwin J. Kolb, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 16 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 170. All further quotations will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by page number. 32. For an explanation of the materialist theories of Priestley, the foremost eighteenth-century exponent of "thinking matter," see Yolton, Materialism, 107-26. 33. Imlac's immaterialism, without the theological commitment, is prominent in recent work on the philosophy of mind. For two different modern versions, see John R. Searle, review of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, by David Chalmers, in New York Review of Books 44.4 ( 1997): 43-50.

CHAPTER

6

1. Ekphrasis: the Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 58 n. 20. See also Krieger, "Fiction, Nature, and Literary Kinds in Johnson's Criticism of Shakespeare," in Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 55-69. Similarly, R. D. Stock finds in Johnson's defense of the verisimilitude of tragicomedy an abandonment of the "notions of general or ideal nature" that he earlier had advocated; see Samuel Johnson and Neoclassical Dramatic Theory. the Intellectual Context of the Preface to Shakespeare (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), 69; cf. 2871. See also Leopold Damrosch,Jr., who in The Uses ofJohnson's Criticism (Charlottes-

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ville: University Press of Virginia, 1976) , finds underlying the Preface a " deep suspicion of the relation between art and imagination" (107). 2. On the idea that "seldom, indeed, has a subject suggested the problematic study of contemporary reality as insistently as does Don Quixote," see Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 333-58. 3. Cf. Ars poetica 361 ff. 4. The phrase "general nature" is not common in eighteenth-century discourse and has been found by the writer only in Johnson's Preface and Boyle's Enquiry, a work, it will be recalled, that is quoted at length by Johnson in the Dictionary ( 4th ed., s.v. "nature"). 5. Cf. Aristotle's commendation of general representation in the Poetics, a passage whose influence on Johnson's conception is suggested by its similarity of emphasis: "Poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts .... [A poet] is a poet in virtue of his 'representation,' and what he represents is action" (9.3, 9). Quotations from this work are from the Loeb translation (with "Longinus," On the Sublime, and Demetrius, On Style). Further quotations will be cited parenthetically in the text by standard book and section number. 6. For a discussion of the "internal probability" of Shakespeare's supernatural characters based on their context in an implicit "intellectual nature,'' see Stock, 199-203. 7. The classical paradigm is stated by Horace Ars poetica 343-44. 8. See the explanation of Nuttall for Johnson's position that he finds the general more authoritative than the specific because "there is more of reality" in it (Mimesis, 67-68); see also William Edinger, Johnson and Detailed Representation: The Significance of the Classical Sources (Victoria, B.C: English Literary Studies, University ofVictoria, 1997), 73-92. 9. Cf. Aristotle's explanation in the Poetics: poets write about "general truths" that may be considered to be such in virtue of their "being the sort of thing that would probably or inevitably happen" (9.3, 10). 10. The powerful resonance that this statement must have had with eighteenthcentury audiences in virtue of their respect for that greatest of all collections of generalities, Newton's Principia, should be noted. 11. For a different view ofJohnson's relation to Imlac, see Howard D. Weinbrot, "The Reader, the General, and the Particular: Johnson and Imlac in Chapter Ten of Rasselas," Eighteenth-Century Studies 5.1 (Fall 1971): 80-96. Although Weinbrot argues that the perspectives of Imlac and Johnson on poetry differ significantly, he implicitly confirms Johnson's respect for the interpretive capacity of the poet by emphasizing the poetic importance of the selection and presentation of particular details. 12. Cf. Stock's explanation of the selective and interpretive relation of poetry to nature and the derivation of this interpretive view of poetry from Aristotle (30). 13. Cf. the thesis of Jean Hagstrum's chapter on "nature" in Samueljohnson's Literary Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952) that, with regard to literal as contrasted with selective and generalized literary representation,Johnson "may in certain contexts stress one rather than the other, but it will not be found that he is fully satisfied as a critic unless the author has somehow managed to accommodate both" (57).

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14. See chapter 4, pp. 79-81 for an explanation ofJohnson's view. 15. Hagstrom notes, "Uohnson] believed that excellence of any kind arose only when a single faculty was subordinate to the whole mind and only when the whole mind was itself subordinate to antecedent experience and investigation of external reality" (89; see his entire discussion of imagination, 89-96).Johnson's most vivid representation of the danger of unrestrained imagination is, of course, the portrayal of the mad astronomer in Rasselas, chapters 40-44, a portrayal only partially comic. 16. G. F. Parker, Johnson's Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 28. On the complexity and metaphysical basis of the "nature" of neoclassical criticism and the criticism ofJohnson, see also Arthur 0. Lovejoy, " 'Nature' as Aesthetic Norm," Modem Language Notes 42. 7 (November, 1927): 444-50; Hagstrom, 56-75; Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: a Short History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1957), 315-20. All further citations will refer to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the text by page number. 17. For an overview of the progress of the controversy over the unities through the eighteenth century, see Stock, 72-103. 18. Henry V, in The Riverside Shakespeare I. pro.11-14. 19. Cf. the complementary statement of Reynolds: although "works of genius ... have their rules," yet "the rules by which men of extraordinary parts, and such as are called men of genius work, are either such as they discover by their own peculiar observations, or of such a nice texture as not easily to admit being expressed in words"; Discourses on Art, ed. Stephen 0. Mitchell (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 76. 20. Paradise Lost, in Hughes, ed., book 3, lines 51-55. 21. Notes on Shakespeare's Plays, in Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Sherbo, 482. All further quotations will be from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by page number. 22. Auerbach, 327. For an explanation of the complex mimetic implications of the character Falstaff, see Nuttall, Mimesis, 143-61.

CHAPTER

7

1. Willard Van Orman Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From a Logical Point ofView, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 38. 2. "Is There a Legitimate Reductionism?" in The Stoic in Love: Selected Essays on Literature and Ideas (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 179-80. 3. This seems to be the point at which Hume finally arrives in the Treatise, book I. As he says in concluding the summary of that book in the Abstract, "We assent to our faculties, and employ our reason only because we cannot help it. Philosophy wou'd render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it" (Treatise, 657): where Johnson endorses "nature" as an indispensable presumption to validate experience, Hume reluctantly concedes it as an unavoidable corollary of experience. For a modern use of the same argument to support philosophical realism, see John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1992), 185. 4. To the evidence presented in support of Johnson's realist epistemology in chapter 5 should be added, at least, his theatrical response to Berkeleyan immateri-

NOTES

155

alism ("I refute it thus"; Life, 1.471) . On the view thatJohnson here implies a sophisticated philosophical critique, see H. F. Hallett, "Dr. Johnson's Refutation of Bishop Berkeley," Mind56 (April 1947): 132-147. However we interpretJohnson's gesture, we may not infer that he thought Berkeleyan immaterialism merely silly. Idler l O describes it as containing "fallacies not easily detected," whose victims "may plead that they did not forsake truth, but for appearances which they were not able to distinguish from it" (33). Further confirmation ofJohnson's agreement with the philosophy of Reid can be soundly inferred from his appreciation for James Beattie's Essay on Truth, which followed the views of Reid (cf. Monday, 31 August, 1772, in Redford, ed., 1.393-394). Finally, for a detailed comparison of the Common Sense philosophers and Johnson that supports their substantial agreement, see Chester Chapin, "Samuel Johnson and the Scottish Common Sense School," The Eighteenth Century 20.1 (1979): 50-64. 5. Chester F. Chapin, The Religi,ous Thought of Samuel Johnson (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1968), 155-56. 6. See, for example, Voitle, 12; Hagstrum, 4. The general argument thatJohnson's respect for experience makes him an empiricist is radically challenged by the counterargument that "the grand paradox of English empiricism lies in its hostility to experience"; see A. D. Nuttall, A Common Sky: Philosophy and the Literary Imagi,nation (London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1974), 23; cf. 13-29. See also Chapin's argument that "eighteenth-century empiricism, after Locke, takes two sharply divergent paths," with Berkeley and Hume leading the way on one and Reid and Johnson diverging onto another ("Johnson and Common Sense," 64).

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Index Addison,Joseph, 65 Aenei.d, The, 67 Alan of Lille, 44, 45-46, 53, 71, 144n. Alkon, Paul Kent, 148n. Analogy of Religi,on, 52, 53, 138n. Anaxagoras, 22, 24 Anaximander, 22, 23, 24 Anaximenes, 24 Anglicanism, 56 Aristotle, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 23, 48, 59, 71, 139n., 140n., 144n.; develops Platonic phusis, 28-29; influence of, in eighteenth century, 25, 29, 48, 52, 142-43n.; influence of, on Scholastics, 28, 29, 41; and literary theory, 111-12, 122-23, 153n.; and the Physics, concept of phusis in, 28-31 Ars poetica, 153n. atoms, 24-25, 33, 141 n. Auerbach, Erich, 129, 153n., 154n. Augustine, St., 12, 14, 41, 42, 43, 51, 120, 144 n.; epistemology of, 38-39; influence of, 36, 37, 44; ontology of, 37-38; Platonic influence on, 29 Bacon, Francis, 59, 61, 144 n. Bacon, Roger, 46 Battle of the Books, 63 Beattie,James, 155 Becker, Carl L., 145 n. Bentham,Jeremy, 87, 150n. Berkeley, George, Bishop, 15, 16, 34, 39, 44, 51, 52, 62, 90, 105, 130, 131-32, 145n., 146n., 152n., 154-55n. Bernardus Silvestris, 44-45, 144n. Boerhaave, Herman, 91-95, 98, 106 Boethius, 42 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Lord, 149n.

Boswell,James, 99, 109, 150n. Boyle, Robert, 21-22, 34, 39, 43, 49-51, 52, 60, 90, 93, 95, 106, 113, 132, 139n., 141 n., 142n., 143n., 145n., 153n. Bradwardine, Thomas, 46 Bunyan,John, 108 Buridan, Jean, 46 Burke, Edmund, 138n. Burley, Walter, 46 Burnet, Thomas, 12, 79-80, 81, 120, 149n., 152n. Butler, Joseph, Bishop, 11, 52, 53-54, 70, 80, 132, 138n. Butler, Samuel, 123 Callicles, 27-28, 67-68 Calvin,John, 150 Cervantes, Miguel de, 108 Chambers, Robert, Sir, 148n. Chapin, Chester F., 136, 155n. Chaucer, Geoffrey, 44, 143 n. Chevy Chase, 65 Christianity as old as the Creation, 54, 146n. Christian Virluoso, The, 93, 98, 145 n. Cicero, 12, 139n., 14ln., 145n., 149n. Clarke, Samuel, 54 Common Sense philosophy, 17, 132, 135, 155n. Confessions (Augustine), 37, 142n. convention, 25, 32. See also nomos conventionalism, moral, 26-28, 56, 63, 131, 140n. Copernicus, 59 Cosmographia, 44, 144n. Course of Lectures on the English Law, A, 148n. Cowley, Abraham, 122-23

INDEX

164 cnt1c1sm, literary, 14 , 16, 29, 64-65 , 133-34. See also Shakespeare, William, Johnson's criticism of Cudworth, Ralph, 12, 21-22, 25, 37, 39, 43, 45, 50-51, 52, 58, 85-86, 87, 89, 105, 132, 139n., 140n., 142n., 143n., 145n., 151 n., 152n. Damrosch, Leo, 151 n., 152n.

Defence of Poetry, A (Sidney), 66, 69, 111-

12, 147n.

De finibus bonorum et malorum, 141 n.,

149n. Defoe, Daniel, 108 deism, 11, 14, 33, 54, 63, 131, 132 De l£gibus (Cicero), 141 n. DeMaria, Robert, 106, 148n., 152n. Democritus, 14, 23, 24-25, 33, 34 De natura deorum, 32-33, 141 n. Dennis, John, 114 De planctu naturae, 45-46, 67, 144n. De rerum natura, 141 n. Descartes, Rene, 16, 39, 59, 60-61, 62; influence of, 92, 135, 138n., 146n., 147n. determinism, 26, 34, 50 Dijksterhuis, E. J., 105, 144n., 146n., 147n., 151 n. Diogenes Laertius, 22, 24, 25, 32-34, 139n., 150n. Discourse on Method, A, 60, 146 n. Dodds, E. R., 140n. Don Quixote, 108, 153n. Dryden,John, 59, 65, 126 dualism, 62 Dunciad, The, 63, 105, 131 Economou, George D., 143n., 144n. El£ments of Criticism, 65, 130-31, 147n. Ellis,John M., 47, 70, 148n. Empedocles, 22, 23, 24 empiricism, 17, 42, 54, 63, 135, 151 n., 155n. See also Johnson, Samuel, and empiricism Epicurus, 22, 141 n., 150n.; concept of nature of, 33-35; influence of, 85, 87 epistemology, 16-17, 36, 61-63, 88, 9295, 130-31

Essay Con cerning Human Understanding, An, 64, 147 Essay ofDramatic Poesy, An, 59, 65, 146n.,

147n.

Essay on Criticism, An, 31, 65, 66-69,

121-22, 129, 147n. Essay on Man, An, 82, 149n. experience. See empiricism; Johnson, Samuel, and empiricism; Johnson, Samuel, experience, respect for

Falstaff, 128-29, 154n. fate, 41-42 Francis of Assisi, St., 142n. Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly R.eceiv 'd Ntion of Nature, A, 21, 39, 49-50, 52, 113, 139n., 14ln., 142n., 145n., 153n. Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, A, 81-82, 84-87, 149n. Fussell, Paul, 73, 88, 145n., 150n., 151 n. Galen, 22 Galileo Galilei, 47, 59, 146n., 152n. Gilson, Etienne, 142n., 143n. Gorgias, 27-28, 67-68, 111, 140n. "great chain of being," 15, 81-83, 149n. Greene, Donald, 138n., 139n., 145n., 147n., 149n., 150n. Grosseteste, Robert, 46 Gulliver's Travels, l 06 Guthrie, William, 65 Hagstrum,Jean, 153n., 154n., 155n. Heraclitus, 22, 24 Hippocrates, 22 Hobbes, Thomas, 37; 56, 57 Hogarth, William, 99 Homer, 67 Hooker,Richard,44,52-53,56,87, 120 Horace, 113, 153n. Hudibras, 123 Hudson, Nicholas, 83-84, 85, 146n., 149n., 150n. humanism, eighteenth-century, 14, 34, 64, 71, 105, 145n.; prejudice of,

165

INDEX

against natural philosophy, 16, 63, 88, 106 humanism, Renaissance, 36, 142n. Hume, David, 11, 15, 16, 44, 49, 51, 52, 56, 98, 99, 130-31, 134, 138n., 145n., 147n., 151 n., 154n., 155n.; on causation, 62-63, 101; moral conventionalism of, 57-59, 146n. Hutcheson, Francis, 56-57, 79 idealism: Berkeleyan, 51; Augustinian, 44 imagination, 16, 44, 47, 54, 92, 154n. See also Johnson, Samuel, and the literary imagination lmlac, 106-7, 117, 152n., 153n. immaterialism, 22, 37, 130n., 152n., 154-55n. Inquiry into the Human Mind, An, 132, 135, 151 n. Ionians, 23-24, 26, 140 n. Jefferson, Thomas, 141 n. Jenyns, Soame, 81-87, 149n., 150n. Johnson, Samuel, 11, 12, 13, 15-17, 49, 70 ; and Aristotelian unities, criticism of, 123-24, 134; and empiricism, 17, 95-99, 106, 136-37, 155n.; and evil, 80-84, 119-20, 149-50n.; and experience, respect for, 16-17, 75-77, 79, 83,92,95-98, 101-02, 118,130, 13437, 154n., 155n.; and generality, doctrine of, in literature, 116-18, 153n.; and "great chain of being," 81-84; and immaterialism, 106-7; "intellectual nature," 63-64, 72-73, 106-7; and language, 77-78, 133, 148n.; and literary genius, 16, 118, 125-29, 134, 154n.; and the literary imagination, 108, ll0, 113, ll5-16, ll 7, 120-23, 125-29, 134, 153n.; and literature, faithfulness of, to nature, 108, 10910, ll2, 113-29, 133-34, 154n. (see also Shakespeare, William, Johnson's criticism of); and morality, relation of, to nature, 72-73, 78-81, 84-87, 92, 132-34, 148n.; and the moral sense, 75; and natural philosophy, 88-93, 95-98, 102-6, 133; and na-

ture, beneficence of, 80-81, 89, 11920, 149n.; and nature, physical, 72, 105-6; and nature, unpredictability of, 74, 116, 134; and nature, variety in, 73-74, 101, 115; and reason, 7475, 135-36; and skepticism, 95, 98102; and speculation, opposition to, 75, 76, 79, 104, 135; and theories, skepticism about, 75-77, 80-84, 118, 133,135 -Works: The Adventurer, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78, 90, 91, 96, 101-2, 104, ll8, 148n.; Dictionary, 44, 49, 138n., 153n.; The Idler, 73, 78, 80, 83, 89, 90, 99, 101-3, 110, 124, 126, 136, 148n., 151 n., 155 n.; A journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 96-97, 150 n.; "Life of Boerhaave," 91-93, 95, 150n.; Lives of the English Poets, 63-64, 71, 72, 89, 96, 98, 102, 104, 109, 110, ll7, 119-27, 129, 147n., 148n.; Preface to Shakespeare, 65, 108-10, 113-16, ll 7, 118-20, 12627, 134, 138n., 147n., 153n.; Preface to the Dictionary, 66, 98, 150n.; The Rambler, 32, 71-81,89-91,95,96,98,99100,102-6,109, 110,115-16,118-19, 124-25, 133, 148n., 151 n., 152n.; Rasselas, 102, 106, 107, 117, 133, 152n., 154n.; "Review of A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin ofEvil," 81-87, 149n.; The Vanity of Human Wishes-, 72, 7 4 justice,27,28,32,58-59,64, 72,73,120 Karnes, Lord, 65, 130-31, 147n. Kepler,Johannes, 59 kinesis. See nature, development in Krieger, Murray, 108, 152n. Kristeller, Paul Oscar, 142n. Kuhn, Thomas, 94, 98 Lanctantius, 22 law, 34, 51, 55-56, 125. See also natural law Laws ofEcclesiastical Polity, Of the, 52, 120, 146n. Laws (Plato), 25-27, 58, 140n., 151 n. Leviathan, 57, 146n.

166 Lewis, C. S., 139n ., 142n ., 143-44n., 152n. Life ofJohnson, The, 91, 92, 98-100, 105, 109, 110, 136, 150n., 151 n., 152n., 154-55n. Literal Meaning of Genesis, The, 38, 39, 142n. Locke, John, 16, 33, 42, 62, 64, 9?, 99, 131, 138n., 147n., 155n.; response of Berkeley to, 132 logos (Stoic). See nature, relation of reason to Long, A. A., 141 n. Lovejoy, Arthur 0., 139n., 149n., 154n. Lucretius, 14, 141 n. Mack, Maynard, 147n. Macklem, Michael, 79, 149 Madden, Samuel, 66, 147n. Malebranche, Nicolas, 42-43, 62; influence of, 51, 145 Maner, Martin, 151 n. Manicheans, 37 Markley, Robert, 95 materialism, 15, 16, 22, 33-34, 37, 52, 98, 105, 107, 133, 151 n.; and the new science, 61, 63, 88, 131, 132; Plato's case against, 25-28 mathematics, 46-47, 59-60, 63, 64, 70, 90,91,93,95 metaphysical poets, 117, 122-23 Metaphysics, The, 29 Milton, John, 16, 52, 64, 121, 127, 129, 149n. monism, 24. See also Parmenides moral sense, 56-57 Moses, 48, 152n. Natura (goddess), 44-46, 66, 143-44n. natural law, 55-56, 58, 148 n . See also nature, law of natural philosophy, 15-16, 29, 33-4, 64, 147n.; dependence of, on theological paradigm, 92-95; effect of religion on, 47; implications of method of, 59-63, 88; medieval, 44, 46-47, 48. See also Johnson, Samuel, and natural philosophy

INDEX

naturalism , philosophical, 11 , 58-59, 131 nature: and analogy, 33, 96-97; authority of, 11, 15, 36, 71; and being, 37-38; benevolence of, 40, 54, 57, 79, 103, 143n.; causation in, 29, 31, 4142, 43, 44, 51, 62-63, 100-102, 105, 146; and chance, 26, 82, 89; as composite (of matter and form), 41-42; contingency of, 43, 51; as "craftsman," 32; development in, 29-31, 38-39, 40-42, 50-51; diversity of, 40, 45; as divine creation, 26, 38, 52, 8586, 88-89, 133; and divine providence, 32, 53, 55-56, 79; and energy, 26, 31-32, 113-14, 129, 134; form in, 27, 30-31, 38-39, 40-42, 43; "general n.," 13, 16, 34, 65, 108, 109, 113-14, 117, 120, 123, 134, 153n.; human n., 13, 59, 78, 114; imperfection of, 28, 79-84, 119-20; as interpretive context, 11, 13, 17, 41, 43, 50, 52, 55-56, 64, 70, 75, 77-78, 85-87, 98-101, 104-6, 130-37, 150n.; irreducibility of, 75-77; knowledge of, 29, 33-34, 43, 60, 63-64, 92-98, 101, 103-5, 129-30 (see also epistemology; natural philosophy); laws ofn., 39, 50, 51, 59; material substance and, 29-30; as mechanism, 33-34, 46, 50, 88, 105; and moral principles, 25-28, 31-33, 48, 53, 54-59, 149 n. (see also Johnson, Samuel, and moral principles, relation of, to nature); mystery of, 75-77, 116, 134; and Nous, 24, 44; order in, 26-28, 31, 44-46, 50, 51, 79, 94, 98, 102, 135; "plastick n.," 37, 38, 39, 45, 50-51, 143n., 145n.; primary elements of, 23-26, 31-32 (see also atoms); and psuche, 26-27; purpose in, 26, 29-31, 39, 86, 89-90, 92, 103-5, 118-19, 133-34 (see also teleology); relation of reason to, 31-33, 55-56, 96-98; relation of, to divinity, 50, 51 , 67, 143n.; representation of, 65-66, 77-78, 110-12 (see also Pope, Alexander, on aesthetic implications of n .; Johnson, Samuel, and litera-

167

INDEX

ture, faithfulness of, to n .) ; and the senses, 33-34, 42 , 43; supernatural context of, 53-54; theological implications of, 52-54; universal n., 23, 29-30, 34 (see also nature, general); value in, 15,32-33,63-64, 71,81-84, 108, 132-33, 136, 148n. See also phusis " nature" (the term): ambiguity of, 11, 13, 21, 37, 45-46, 49, 69-70, 145n.; Biblical usage of, 34-35; classical origins of, 12, 13-14, 21-35, 36, 49, 138n.; criticism of, 11, 43, 142-43n., 145n.; definition of, 12, 15, 16, 21-23, 49-50, 53,63-64, 70, 125;etymology of, 139n.; medieval interpretation of natura, 14, 36-48, 142 n.; semantic complexity of, 13, 21, 35, 37, 48, 49, 50, 64, 65; ubiquity of, in eighteenthcentury literature, 11, 21, 49, 69-70 " neoclassical," 21, 68, 69, 123, 131, 135, 138n., 154n. Neoplatonism, 14, 37 new science. See natural philosophy Newton, Isaac, Sir, 12, 13, 39, 46, 60, 64, 79, 88, 91, 93-94, 95, 97, 104, 106, 107, 132, 138n., 143n., 147n., 153n.; influence of, 103, 105 nominalism, 36, 42-44 nomos, 27 Nuttall, A. D., 132, 147n., 149n., 150n., 153n., 154n., 155n. Oresme, Nicole, 46 Paradise Lost, 52, 121, 127, 150n., 151 n ., 154n.; science in, 104-5 Parliament of Fowls, The, 44 Parmenides, 23 Paul,St,34-35,76, 102, 141n. Pertinax, 77,99-100, 151n. Phaedrus, 126, 148n. phusikoi, 23-25 phusis, 12, 14, 22-35, 37, 45, 140n., 141 n.; concept of, in the Bible, 3435. See also Aristotle; Epicurus; Plato; pre-Socratics; Stoics Physics, The, 23, 24,111, 140n. Pilgrim's Progress, The, 108

Piozzi, Hester Lynch, 99, 108, 151 n . Plato, 12, 14, 16, 22, 23, 41, 48, 64, 67, 71, 76, 89, 102, 105, 107, 139n., 140n., 144n., 151 n.; and aesthetics, 111-12, 113, 126-27; influence of, 25, 27, 28-29, 38, 42, 44, 45, 46, 142n.; and moral realism, 26-28; phusis in cosmology of, 25-27; use of phusis in allegory of the cave, 28 Plotinus, 37 Poetics, 153n. Pope, Alexander, 11, 31, 63, 64, 65, 71, 82, 105, 106, 121-22, 126, 131, 140n., 149 n.; on aesthetic implications of nature, 66-69, 126, 147n. Popkin, Richard H., 146n. pre-Socratics, 13, 22-25, 139n. See also names of individual philosophers Priestley,Joseph, 99, 107, 152n. prime mover, 31, 40, 41 Principia Mathematica, 12, 59, 93-94, 132, 138n., 143n., 153n. Principles of Human Knowledge, The, 51, 145n., 151 n. Puritans, 52, 141 n. Pyrrhonism, 17, 154n. Pythagoras, 22, 24 Quine, W. V. 0., 131, 154n. rationes seminales, 38, 40 realism: in literature, 32; moral, 15, 2628, 54-56, 57, 58, 61, 64, 84-87, 140n.; philosophical, 36, 44, 146n., 154n. reason, 32, 61, 99, 100, 101, 116, 132, 152 n.; and analogy, 96-97. See also nature, relation of reason to reductionism, 11, 16, 17, 63, 77, 125, 130-37 Reid, Thomas, 11 , 17, 77, 132, 135, 151n. Religion of Nature Delineated, The, 56 Republic, The, 26-28 revelation, divine, 15, 53, 54, 55, 87, 94, 131, 152n. Reynolds, Joshua, Sir, 110, 113, 154n. Romance of the Rose, The, 44

168 Royal Society, 90, 96 Rymer, Thomas, 114 Sacred Theory of the Earth, The, 12, 79-80,

120, 149, 152n. Sallust, 71-72 Scholastics, 14, 35, 44, 48, 61, 114. See also names of individual philosophers Schwartz, Richard B., 88, 149n., 150n., 151 n. science. See natural philosophy Searle,John R., 147-48n., 152n., 154n. "second sight," 97 Seneca,22,31 sentimentalism, moral, 56-57. See also moral sense Sextus Empiricus, 22 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 56 Shakespeare, William, 11, 16, 64, 65; Johnson's criticism of, 109-10, 11319, 123-29, 153n. Shakespeare, William, plays of: Coriolanus, 114; I Henry .Iv, 127; Hamlet, 114; Henry V, 154n.; Othello, 127 Sidney, Philip, Sir, 16, 65-66, 67, 68-69, 111-13, 115,119, 126-27 skepticism, 52, 77, 95, 97, 133, 136, 147n., 151 n. See also Pyrrhonism Smith, Adam, 56 Socrates, 27-28, 67, 99, 106, 111 soul. See nature, and psuche Spectator, The, 65 Staunton, George, 99 Stephen, Leslie, Sir, 76, 83-84 Stoics, 14, 34, 48, 55, 66, 71, 79, 141 n., 149n.; concept of nature of, 31-33; influence of, 31, 33 Stock, R. D., 152n., 153n., 154n. Summa theolog;ica, 40-42, 55, 58, 143n., 144n. Swift,Jonathan, 63, 90, 106 taste, 65 teleology, 26-27, 40-41, 47, 57, 70, 89, 91, 103, 108, 111-12, 145n. See also nature, purpose in telos, 14, 16, 29, 31-32, 48, 77 theodicies, 15, 82

INDEX

Thales, 12, 23 "thinking matter, " 106-7 Thomas Aquinas, St., 12, 13, 14, 15, 51, 64, 71, 87, 89, 103, 107, 120, 143n., 144n., 148n.; Aristotelian influence on, 29; epistemology of, 42, 43; influence of, 36, 39, 43, 44, 46-47, 53, 56, 57, 72, 143n.; moral realism of, 55-56; on to logy of, 40-42 Tindal, Matthew, 54 Tour to the Hebrides (Boswell), 151 n. Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, A, 58, 85-86, 146n. Treatise of Human Nature, A, 49, 58-59, 62, 101, 138n., 145n., 146n., 147n., 151 n., 154n. Trinity, The, 142n. True Intellectual System of the Universe, The, 12, 21, 37, 50-51, 52, 139n., 140n., 145n., 151 n. universals (Scholastic), 42, 43-44 utilitarianism, 85, 87, 150 n. value. See nature, value in vales, 69, 126-27 Virgil, 67, 68 virtuosos, 15, 102-4, 118 Voitle, Robert, 85, 150n., 155n. Voltaire, 114 Wallace, William A., 46-47, 144n. Weinberg, Steven, 138n. Weinbrot, Howard D., 153n. Whitehead, Alfred North, 36, 94, 95, 142n., 146n., 147n. Whole Duty of Man, The, 141 n. William of Ockham, 62, 143 n.; epistemology of, 43-44; influence of, 4243, 51-52; ontology of, 42-43 Williams, Aubrey, 140n., 147n., 149n. Wimsatt, W. K,Jr., 95, 135, 154n. Wotton, William, 60-61 Wollaston, William, 56 Yolton,John W., 106, 147n., 152n. Zeno,22,31,32