| This dissertation offers an aesthetic history of the answers provided by the English Enlightenment to the question, "what constitutes certainty?" The method demonstrated is "aesthetic" in the Enlightenment sense of the term. Proceeding beyond the historical summary of the influence of philosophers on poets or the anecdotal appraisal of poetic beauties, my criticism assimilates the data yielded by these approaches into an intellectually pleasing whole. This task is made manageable in two ways: first, by isolating a systematic style of thinking common to authors between 1660 and 1825, then by examining how this approach to knowledge causes and connects the transformations which define the "Englightenment" as period and process. I divide this intellectual pageant into four scenes--the Restoration, the early eighteenth century, the mid-eighteenth century, and the early Romantic period--each of which denotes one variation on the theme of system and certainty, and each of which records the resonances of this variation in the works of one critic, one writer, and one philosopher.;The third chapter, wound around Pope, Berkeley, and Smith, diagnoses the mania for synthesis which led these writers to retire "reality" before system. Artificial systems overwhelm the world that they explain--including their author! A pathological urge to crush the irregular author beneath his perfect productions erupts. The final chapter turns to Hume, Blake, and Coleridge. These writers not only subordinate magnificent imaginative systems to the author organizing them, but also long for some still higher foundation for that still more elusive system, the author himself. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of author.) UMI.;"The Criteria of Certainty" begins with one generalization: that Renaissance thought tended toward dualism, whether of mind and body or poetry and prose. In the first chapter, Rochester, Halifax, and Dryden pacify the factions of the split universe by introducing a third, "human" world built of hypotheses. The validity of this artificial creation is measured by the degree to which it coordinates the private mind, the public world, and nature. In the second chapter, which features Locke, Shaftesbury, and Swift, the links between mind, body, and artificial world are whittled down to forced analogies. Certainty consists in the coherence of theory with itself. Art competes with "spirit" and "substance" for recognition as the foundry of reality and the fountain of belief. |
