Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Thought

Gregory Claeys

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134542604
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Thought provides essential information on, and a critical interpretation of, nineteenth-century thought and nineteenth-century thinkers. The project takes as its temporal boundary the period 1789 to 1914. Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Thought primarily covers social and political thinking, but key entries also survey science, religion, law, art, concepts of modernity, the body and health, and so on, and thereby take into account all of the key developments in the intellectual history of the period. The encyclopedia is alphabetically organized, and consists of: * principal entries, divided into ideas (4000 words) and persons (2500 words)
* subsidiary entries of 1000 words, which are entirely biographical
* informational entries of 500 words, which are also biographical.

A

Acton, John Emerich Dalberg (1834–1902)

John Emerich Edward Dalberg, 1st Baron Acton, eminent British historian, was born on 10 January 1834 at Naples, the son of a Roman Catholic baronet. Educated at Oscott under Dr, later Cardinal, Wiseman, he studied at Edinburgh, then at Munich under Döllinger, who inspired him to become a historian. His great aim was to write a ‘History of Liberty’, but this was never achieved. He spent several years as a Member of Parliament (1859–65), where he adhered to William Gladstone, and developed a reputation as an individualist, free-trading Liberal. Disputing the view that slavery had caused the American Civil War, he supported the Southern states’ right of secession. But his real love was Catholicism: The one supreme object of all of my thoughts is the good of the Church,’ he wrote to his wife. Acton thus exerted much energy as the editor of the Catholic monthly, The Rambler, which merged with the Home and Foreign Review in 1862, though as a liberal Catholic he was isolated even from most British Catholics, and was nearly excommunicated (Döllinger was) because of his opposition to papal infallibility. He helped to found the English Historical Review in 1886, and became Sir John Seeley’s successor as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge in 1895. Following the success of his inaugural lecture, The Study of History’, he gave two courses of lectures, on the French Revolution and on Modern History, and achieved a reputation as a remarkable tutor.

Relatively little of Acton’s historical work was published during his lifetime. The essays on The History of Freedom in Antiquity’ and The History of Freedom in Christianity’ do not develop adequately his Tocquevillian worries about the threat of democracy to modern liberty. His journalism, though deeply partisan (he took issue with ‘the materialist’ Buckle in The Rambler over the role of both free will and Providence in history, for instance, on overtly Catholic grounds), offers as much insight into the key theme of his political philosophy, the interpenetration of religious and political liberty, and the need to secure both by abridging the power of the state. Acton’s account of liberty as ‘the highest political end’ is abstract, Burkian and Whiggish; he defines liberty as ‘the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.’ Acton seemingly ignored the great debates on the reshaping of liberalism towards a ‘New Liberal’, interventionist ideal, during the 1880s and 1890s. Nonetheless he conceded the compatibility of Christianity and socialism, and agreed that the poor should be aided where private enterprise had failed them. Both his liberalism and his Catholic cosmopolitanism also led him to warn of the destructive effects of nationalism, notably in the well-known essay on ‘Nationality’ (1862). Acton died on 19 June 1902.

Further Reading

Acton, John (1906) Lectures on Modern History. London: Macmillan.

Acton, John (1907) The History of Freedom and Other Essays, London: Macmillan.

Acton, John (1907) Historical Essays and Studies, London: Macmillan.

Fasnacht, G.E. (1952) Acton’s Political Philosophy, London: Hollis & Carter.

Hill, Roland (2000) Lord Acton, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Gasquet, Dom (1906) Lord Acton and His Circle, London: George Allen.

See Also: historiography and the idea of progress; liberalism

Gregory Claeys

Aesthetics, Painting and Architecture

The history of aesthetic thought in the nineteenth century has been little investigated by modern scholars, and is still largely unknown territory. In the Anglophone world, at any rate, this is attributable to the long reaction against Victorianism, which dominated the first five or six decades of the twentieth century. From a modernist point of view, the Victorian tendency to moralize made it practically impossible for a serious investigation of the proper objects of aesthetics to take place, a state of affairs of which modernists regarded the supposed corrupt sentimentality of Victorian art as a symptom.

This twentieth-century dismissal of the dominant nineteenth-century tendencies in aesthetics was in large part the culmination of a process that began in the later nineteenth century. The development of a scientific, and eventually laboratory-based, psychology in Britain, Germany and the USA during the last 30 years of the nineteenth century effected a transformation in the discourse of aesthetics, in that it became increasingly difficult to invoke final causes in the discussion of aesthetic questions. This problematization of the theological argument from design, in part a result of the intellectual impact of evolutionary theory, affected thinking about aesthetics particularly profoundly because an appeal to natural beauty had been in many ways the last bastion of religious providentialism.

The late nineteenth-century call for a scientific aesthetics was accompanied by a change in the definition of aesthetics itself, a change that had profound consequences for the way in which the history of nineteenth-century aesthetics was written (or, more frequently, left unwritten), JOHN RUSKIN, early on in the second book of Modern Painters, objected to the very term ‘aesthetics’ itself, as a description of the philosophical study of beauty, because it focused attention on the role played by the senses in appreciation of the beautiful, rather than on what the mind perceived by means of the senses. The later nineteenth-century psychologization of aesthetics, coupled with Whistler’s impressionist-influenced proclamation that the only criterion by which a painting could legitimately be judged was its sensuous immediacy, fulfilled Ruskin’s fears that use of the term ‘aesthetics’ heralded a behaviouristic redefinition of beauty purely in terms of sensory inputs.

Consequently, in order to understand the development of nineteenth-century aesthetics we must expand our category of ‘the aesthetic’ beyond what most twentieth-century commentators have understood by the term. This means that we must abandon the assumption that the appeal to an extra-artistic reality, characteristic, for example, of Victorian narrative painting, is necessarily aesthetically incoherent, or merely ‘sentimental’. The characteristic twentieth-century attitude that pronounces reference outside the artwork itself aesthetically illegitimate is a reflection of a relativistic philosophy for which reality, outside the structuring systems of human aesthetics and culture, is essentially chaotic; reference to such a reality by a work of art must in this view be either an exercise in falsification, or in contravention to the work’s own principles of aesthetic order. For the majority of nineteenth-century thinkers, however, there is no such conflict between intrinsic aesthetic qualities and external reference, so that aesthetic order can be understood as corresponding to an order that really exists outside the work of art, and which can be referred to by the artist in its support.

The philosophical perspective that justified this predominant nineteenth-century view of art, as indicative of a reality which transcended it, may be identified with that of the so-called Common Sense school of philosophy founded in the eighteenth century by Thomas Reid. Common Sense philosophy was a protean intellectual tradition that continued to be an important influence in all major European countries, and also in North America, until the 1870s. It thus constituted the philosophical frame within which arguably the majority of nineteenth-century aesthetic thought took place, and whose rejection lay behind the scientific psychology of such figures as Alexander Bain and James Sully, and the Decadent aesthetics of Pater.

The Common Sense tradition has been little studied by twentieth-century scholars, who have generally found its insistence on philosophical realism unappealingly dogmatic (although a revival of interest in the realist position among philosophers during the 1990s has led to a corresponding upturn in the academic fortunes of Thomas Reid). The widespread nature of the influence of Common Sense philosophy has therefore attracted little recognition even in studies of the nineteenth-century British intellectual tradition. It has however been shown that in Germany Scottish Common Sense philosophy formed the matrix from which the philosophy of Kant and the German Idealists emerged, and that in France its influence was perpetuated by the philosophical eclecticism of Cousin and his pupil Jouffroy. In both Britain and France Common Sense philosophy was heavily implicated in the development of nineteenth-century faculty psychology and studies of the physiology of the brain, as well as in popular movements such as phrenology and mesmerism. The Scottish Enlightenment inheritance of educational systems in North America has been well known for some time, and Common Sense philosophy represented an important part of that inheritance, influencing EMERSON and the trans-cendentalists. Because of the overlap between Common Sense philosophy and German Idealism, many nineteenth-century ideas of great importance for aesthetic theory (such as that of the essential activity of the mind in the process of perception), which have usually been attributed to the influence of German Idealism in twentieth-century scholarship, are more correctly viewed as belonging to the Common Sense tradition’s intellectual heritage; this has been shown to be the case, for example, for THOMAS CARLYLE, often regarded even in his own day as an essentially ‘German’ thinker, but whose actual acquaintance with German Idealist philosophy appears to have been scanty at best.

Common Sense philosophy’s importance for nineteenth-century thinking about aesthetics lies in its development of Berkeley’s account of perception. Thomas Reid, in his 1764 Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, analysed each of the senses in turn in order to show that human perception was essentially dependent on the interpretation of divinely ordained sensory signs, as Berkeley had claimed. Reid argued, in an anticipation of Kant, that Hume’s demonstration of the insufficiency of reasoning based on the data available to the senses to justify common human beliefs, such as that in a world external to the mind, made it necessary to suppose that these beliefs represented fundamental intuitions that were inherent in the mind’s capacity to apprehend the world. Such intuitions (collectively entitled ‘common sense’ by Reid) were the enabling conditions that allowed the mind to form a coherent interpretation of the perceptual cues, or signs, presented by the world, and were comparable to the basic assumptions about the structure of experience that for Reid were embodied in the grammar of every language.

The Common Sense philosophy of Reid insisted on the irreducibility of the mind’s perceptions of the world to mere sense-data, an argument that was intended to refute the materialist associationism of Hume. Later developments in the Common Sense tradition, however, tended to combine this account of foundational transcendent intuitions with associationist arguments. An early example is Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, first published in 1790, but influentially popularized by FRANCIS JEFFREY in the Edinburgh Review in 1811, which went on to be a standard nineteenth-century text on aesthetics and was later read by Marcel Proust. Alison’s work is normally described as an example of associationism, but as is made clear by the conclusion to its second volume, where Alison cites Reid’s Common Sense philosophy, Alison’s associationist analyses take as their basis the kind of foundational intuitions described by Reid (who returned the compliment, writing a commendatory letter to Alison). This tendency to combine Reidian Common Sense philosophy with associationism was taken to an extreme by the later Common Sense philosopher Thomas Brown who controversially argued in the 1810s that there was no inherent conflict between the philosophy of Reid and that of Hume, and proceeded to elaborate an essentially Humean analysis of the methodological problems of the physical sciences. Brown’s combination of Reidian intuitionism with Humean associationism is reflected in his notion of unconscious ‘suggestion’, which proved to be influential on much subsequent nineteenth-century aesthetic discussion.

The Common Sense tradition’s potential for combining Berkeley an immaterialism with the materialist implications of Humean psychology meant that its intellectual legacy to nineteenth-century aesthetic thought was fundamentally ambiguous. On the one hand, Reid’s claim for the semiotic basis of perception pointed the way towards various varieties of symbolist doctrine, a trend that extended from the symbolist poetics of writers such as Carlyle, Emerson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning right up to the French Symbolistes at the end of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Reid’s insistence on the fundamentally immaterial nature of perception, as an interpretative act of the mind, prompted scientific inquiry into the physiological basis of perception, a tendency foreshadowed by Reid’s own investigations into the nature of sensation and that ultimately led to the physiological aesthetics of 1870s writers such as Grant Allen.

It would be a mistake to regard this physiologically orientated research, particularly in the early part of the nineteenth century, as necessarily motivated by a materialist agenda; the study of involuntary physiological processes, it was thought, could help to demonstrate the essentially immaterial nature of mind and its independence from the body. Charles Bell’s Essays on the Anatomy of Expression, first published in 1806 and, in its many revised editions, a major influence on the pre-Raphaelite painters, is an example of this kind of immaterialist-orientated physiological investigation. The ultimate effect of such research, however, was to emphasize the physiological workings of the brain to such an extent as to suggest that the individual characteristics of works of art could be traced back to peculiarities in the dietary habits and physical organization of the artist. The early reception of Edgar Allan Poe’s writings in France affords an example of this physiological reading of aesthetics, with critics explaining Poe’s artistic idiosyncrasies as the inevitable result of his alcoholic temperament.

One of the major facets of Common Sense philosophy’s influence over aesthetic thought in early nineteenth-century Britain was its encouragement of a typological approach to art. The extent to which Victorian art was typological in orientation, in the sense that it included apparently realistic detail that was intended to be interpreted allegorically as significant of a spiritual world transcending what could be represented, has been commented on by many critics. A well-known example is Holman Hunt’s painting The Awakening Conscience, where the minutely rendered bourgeois parlour contains many indicators both of the young woman’s status as a kept mistress, and of her newly aroused moral capacity to redeem herself through repentance. The critic F.G. Stephens, in his anonymously issued 1860 memoir of Hunt, furnished a lengthy interpretation of the painting The Light of the World in these terms, objects such as the unusual seven-sided lantern that Christ carries being assigned quite specific theological significance.

That the architecture of the Gothic Revival was also understood by the Victorians as possessing typological significance is suggested by the writings of its first great exponent, Augustus Welby Pugin, who argued that the Gothic style was the only appropriate one for a church, because its use of height was, by a natural typology, indicative of the Resurrection. A similar kind of typological reading of church architecture, though applied to a very different theological purpose, is to be found in the eccentric late Victorian occultist Hargrave Jennings. Chris Brooks, in his 1984 study Signs for the Times: Symbolic Realism in the Mid-Victorian World, has advanced typological interpretations of a number of specific Victorian churches.

Although the prominence of typological interpretation in early Victorian aesthetics has often been attributed by late twentieth-century commentators to the influence of evangelicalism, the recourse to a typological aesthetics is found in nineteenth-century writers belonging to a number of theological persuasions. John Keble, the prominent Tractarian, advanced as early as 1814 his view that the effect of poetry could be understood as deriving from its use of natural ‘types’ of the divine that had been authorized for the Christian by their appearance in the Bible, a view that he expounded at length in Tract 89 (On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church’) and in his Oxford Lectures on Poetry. The striking proliferation of arguments from natural typology in early nineteenth-century Britain is probably to be attributed to the use made of Common Sense philosophy by orthodox defenders of Trinitarian theology, such as Bishop Magee, in their controversies with the Unitarians during the 1790s.

Common Sense philosophy encouraged an aesthetics based on a natural typology in which hidden correspondences were identified between the realm of Nature and that of spirit (rather than just between separate passages of the Bible) because in its view perception itself was based on just such unexplainable correspondences. For the Common Sense school, the sensory cue of the perceptual sign was recognized, through the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of editors
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Entries A-Z
• Index