CARLYLE AND SCOTTISH THOUGHT This page intentionally left blank Carlyle and Scottish Thought
Ralph Jessop Lecturer in Philosophy and English Literature University of Glasgow First published in Great Britain 1997 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-39453-1 ISBN 978-0-230-37147-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230371477
First published in the United States of America 1997 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-17287-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jessop, Ralph, 1957- Carlyle and Scottish thought I Ralph Jessop. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-17287-9 (cloth) I. Carlyle, Thomas, 1795-1881-Philosophy. 2. Scotland• -Intellectual life-19th century. 3. Philosophy, Scottish-19th century. I. Title. PR4437 .P5J47 1997 824'.8-dc2l 96--44508 CIP
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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 For Sharon This page intentionally left blank Contents
Preface X
List of Abbreviations xviii
1 Introduction 1
2 Categorizing Carlyle - Literature or Philosophy? 15
3 A Common Fund of Philosophic Prose 27
4 The Theory of Ideas: Hume - Reid - Hamilton 55
5 Common Sense: Principles- Perception- Nescience 75
6 Carlyle's 'Wotton Reinfred' 110
7 Scotch Philosophy in Carlyle's Essays 123
8 'Signs of the Times' 142
9 Sartor Resartus 155
10 Conclusion 196
Notes 206
Works Cited 246
Index 259
vii This page intentionally left blank Thought, in such a country [as Scotland], may change its form, but cannot go out .... It may take many forms: the form of hard-fisted money-getting industry, as in the vulgar Scotchman, in the vulgar New Englander; but as compact developed force and alertness of faculty, it is still there; it may utter itself one day as the colossal Scepticism of a Hume (beneficient this too though painful, wrestling Titan-like through doubt and inquiry towards new belief); and again, some better day, it may utter itself as the inspired Melody of a Bums: in a word, it is there, and continues to manifest itself, in the Voice and the Work of a Nation of hardy endeavouring considering men, with whatever that may bear in it, or unfold from it. (Carlyle, 'Sir Walter Scott', CME, 4: 43)
ix Preface
This book attempts to mark the beginning of a long overdue reas• sessment of Carlyle's works within a Scottish intellectual context. The title should immediately suggest to Carlyle scholars that I am aiming to respond to Charles Frederick Harrold's seminal study, Carlyle and German Thought. However, I am more concerned with providing a complement to his work than a critique and replace• ment of it. In addition to providing a study of Carlyle, I shall also examine some crucial features of Scottish thought as articulated both by David Hume and by the Scottish response to Hume's sceptical metaphysics, Thomas Reid's philosophy of Common Sense. The first major limitation that I have placed on the area of study is to confine scrutiny of Carlyle's texts mainly to those written up to 1834. I do not want to imply that the Scottish philosophical dimension of his works abruptly ended in that year or that his works after that time took a wholly different course. Certainly his attention did turn more surely towards historiography, biography and social criticism. But as the fictive or imaginary reworking of fact, present in his work before Sartor Resartus, remained in his later works such as The French Revolution and Past and Present, his inter• est in history was evident in his earliest writings for Brewster's Encyclopcrdia. Carlyle's move to London in 1834 heralded the emer• gence of his literary fame and influence as he first began to make his mark on the dawning Victorian age with the publication of The French Revolution in 1837. Although there are undoubtedly conti• nuities and developments in his writing after 1834, the student of Carlyle's works seems to embark on a different study after this time which involves greater attention to the social, political and historical conditions of the age. But such excuses and justifications aside, the date of 1834 is ultimately fairly arbitrary though it fol• lows at least one of several good precedents for this demarcation in the work of Harrold. Chris Vanden Bossche is correct when he argues that studies of Carlyle should now attempt to encompass all of his career and not simply end with or focus almost entirely on Sartor Resartus. Had this book been solely devoted to Carlyle I would have followed his example.1 In the hope that what I have
X Preface xi discarded or ignored may prompt later research I have tried to keep other conscious limitations similarly obvious. Tracing influences is and ought always to be a difficult task which goes beyond any mere textual comparison and cataloguing of verbal and other similarities. Some of the complicating features in attempting to trace the Scottish philosophical influences on Carlyle need to be mentioned at the outset. Given his undoubted and extensive interest in German writers, the question of the extent to which they were themselves influenced by Scottish philosophers including Hume and Reid complicates any attempt to read Carly• le's works as influenced by a Scottish philosophical tradition. Immanuel Kant's debts to Scottish Common-Sense philosophy, along with those of several other German philosophers, have recently been studied by Manfred Kuehn.2 However, even in the early decades of the nineteenth century in Scotland there seems to have been an awareness that Kant, who famously declared that Hume had first awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers, owed much to another philosophical tradition and another response to Hume made by the Scottish school of Common Sense as instituted by Hume's first major critic, Thomas Reid.3 Dugald Stewart's hos• tility to Kant even included the charge that he had virtually plagi• arized Reid.4 And Sir William Hamilton, who was much more thoroughly conversant with Kant, made his own terse remarks in the 1830s on, for example, Kant's indebtedness to Reid's notions of space.5 Thomas Chalmers also saw similarities between Reid and the Sage of Konigsberg. 6 But if Scottish influences on German writers and thinkers make problematic any study of the direct Scottish influences on Carlyle's work then, mutatis mutandis the same must be true of German influences on Carlyle. It is to be hoped that future studies of the German dimension of his works will bear this in mind and pay attention to the possibility of Scot• tish sources. TracLng Scottish philosophical influences is also made particu• larly difficult due to the very extent to which Carlyle's immediate intellectual milieu was saturated in the thought and philosophical concerns bequeathed to them by the dual driving energies of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume and Reid. All educated people in Scotland in Carlyle's day were to some degree familiar with the metaphysical debate concerning Hume's scepticism. In his Disserta• tion, Dugald Stewart claimed that 'all well-educated persons may be presumed to have acquired' a 'general acquaintance with xii Preface
Mr Hume's Theory of Causation'- a theory at the heart of Hume's sceptical metaphysics? He used this claim as an excuse for not outlining what was generally known about the question. But although one might expect such omissions to recur without formal announcement elsewhere in the literature of the period, one must be wary of inferring from a mere silence some conspiratorial sub• terfuge or an explicit influence. During Carlyle's student years and, perhaps even more so, during the late 1820s and early 1830s as Hamilton began to reinstate the importance of Reid's philosophy as a successful answer to Hume's scepticism, the philosophical issues articulated by Hume and Reid were so much in the air that Carlyle can hardly have failed to breathe in some of this heady ether. But to hypostatize such a vague claim as the basis of a study of Carlyle in connection with Scottish philosophy, would be to rely upon an assumption which the discipline of academic writing properly excludes. I therefore provide a certain amount of argument to substantiate my claim that in some crucial respects Carlyle was influenced by Scottish thought as written in the philosophical dis• courses of chiefly Hume, Reid and Hamilton. Thus I draw parallels, indicate allusions, suggest borrowings, highlight passages and elu• cidate certain strands of thought as one needs to do in attempting to establish specific claims concerning influence. However, influ• ence is complex as it involves disguises, responses, reactions and liftings from obvious and abstruse regions alike. I therefore will• ingly acknowledge the need for (and hope that my work invites) further studies of the Scottish influences on Carlyle to enrich our understanding of his texts and of the literature and philosophy of Scotland. Reid claimed that the famous maxim:
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas [happy is he who knows the causes of things], has always been a sentiment of human nature. But, as in the pursuit of other kinds of happiness men often mistake the road, so in none have they more frequently done it than in the philosophical pursuit of the causes of things.8
Cautioned by this and by the awarenesses one develops through both Hume and Reid concerning the intense difficulty of knowing the causes of things, I have attempted to be persistently alert to the danger of making the philosophy of Common Sense and certain textual similarities fit neatly into Carlyle as though the arguments Preface xiii of Scottish philosophers, substantiated with textual comparisons, might be taken as the key to understanding Carlyle's work and as providing satisfactory empirical evidence that he consciously drew upon their texts. Though there is a great deal of empirical evidence to lend support to 'German' readings of Carlyle, there is compara• tively little of such evidence to support a Scottish philosophical reading. However, although I attempt to uncover some crucial aspects of Carlyle's intellectual milieu and thus recover a neglected dimension of his work, I must stress that this book is not intended primarily as a study of influence. Therefore, while I do proffer some argument concerning influence, my main ambition has been to provide an interpretation of Scottish philosophy and to use this as an informing discourse which assists towards new readings of Carlyle's texts. I am therefore consciously avoiding ultimately inde• monstrable claims about the full extent and particulars of the Scottish philosophical influence on Carlyle. Instead I am recontex• tualizing Carlyle by attempting to influence and supplement the Carlyle text with readings of philosophical texts whose relevance to Carlyle and the intellectual discourses of early nineteenth-century Scotland is secured through a variety of contemporary and later suggestions, hints, declarations and even the status now accruing to Reid in the recent renaissance of philosophical studies of his work. With this recontextualization project in mind it is needful at this stage to emphasize something which may not at first sight seem obvious but which it is important for the reader of this book to appreciate. My study is not entirely centred on Carlyle but is a dual study of both Carlyle and Scottish thought as articulated in a few of the most important philosophical discourses produced in eight• eenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland. Particular attention is given to Reidian Common Sense as in certain respects embracing the intuitionist strand of Scottish thought which was of such impor• tance in countering the arguably Anglicized empiricism of Hume (which itself forms another strand of Enlightenment and post• Enlightenment Scottish thought). In addition to providing a study of Carlyle, I am therefore also attempting to make a contribution to philosophical studies and our understanding of Common-Sense discourse in relation to Humean scepticism and the representation• ism and mechanism which Reidian philosophy continually strives to undermine and replace. (Thus I hope at least some of Chapter 3 and Chapters 4 and 5 will be of more particular interest to xiv Preface historians of ideas and to philosophers with interests in Hume, Reid and Hamilton.) Though I do not believe that a purely Car• lyle-led reading would be a particularly virtuous route to follow, some of Carlyle's texts have nevertheless helped to focus my read• ing of the philosophy of Common Sense through their obsessions with, for example, scepticism, nescience, mind-body dualism and their opposition to mechanistic construals of the mind. The study therefore aims to be truly interdisciplinary by writing within the disciplines of literature and philosophy while to some extent using each to inform the other. As already indicated, the nature of my project has dictated certain limitations on the scope of philosophical texts discussed. Though I do survey some of the vast periodical literature of the first two decades of the nineteenth century for indications of a more popular engagement with philosophical discourse, I have given much greater weight to Reid's Inquiry and Essays on the Intellectual Powers and to Hamilton's two early essays for the Edinburgh Review than to any other works in the Scottish philosophical tradition. I have given much less attention to Dugald Stewart and to another Common• Sense philosopher, Stewart's brilliant, young and somewhat roman• tic successor, Thomas Brown. While the omission of Brown may be a fairly minor sin, encouraged by Carlyle's open dislike of the man and his lectures, greater attention than I have been able to give to Stewart's texts is certainly deserved. I have tended to regard Stew• art as the conduit through which Reid's philosophy was passed on to the intelligentsia of Carlyle's Edinburgh days. This is hardly accurate, however, as Stewart did not simply advocate slavishly the philosophy of Reid. But Reid's texts seem to provide with greater immediacy a much richer source of material in beginning to under• stand the philosophical spirit and concerns of Carlyle's Edinburgh and of Carlyle's hostility to the frenzied spread of materialist and utilitarian philosophies. I have generally concentrated on the more metaphysically orientated aspects of Reid's works and have not dealt with his moral theory as expounded in the Essays on the Active Powers. This would have required a chapter to itself and a corre• sponding chapter on Carlyle. I have also given less attention to Hume than is deserved. I have indicated elsewhere some of the specific allusions and reactions in Sartor Resartus to Hume's theory of causality and to his famous subversive essay 'Of Miracles'.9 But we still need to know more about Carlyle's understanding and use of Hume in his work. Preface XV
From the time I first glimpsed the presence of Scottish Common• Sense philosophy in Carlyle's writing I have received invaluable assistance from many sources. I would like to express my gratitude to the National Trust and to the custodians of Carlyle's Birthplace at Ecclefechan and especially his House at Cheyne Row. Several libraries have provided me with excellent services and facilities. In particular, I am indebted to the National Library of Scotland, the British Library and to the university libraries of Cambridge, Edin• burgh and Glasgow. Whenever I sought individual help in these libraries the staff have been consistently responsive and attentive. For financial assistance I appreciate the help of Churchill College, Cambridge, and the Departments of English Literature and Philo• sophy at the University of Glasgow. The work of many Carlyle scholars continues to be of immeasurable value. I wish to express my gratitude to the editors of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle for the high standard of their scholarship. For their enduring and painstaking work in editing these crucial volumes, I am particularly grateful to Charles Richard Sanders, Clyde de L. Ryals, Kenneth J. Fielding, Ian Campbell, Aileen Christianson, John Clubbe and Hilary J. Smith. Roger L. Tarr's two substantial works of bibliography are also major resources for researchers which will remain unsurpassed for many years. I have found the work of several other Carlyle scholars of particular value in helping me to become familiar with Carlyle's life and his texts. Though James Anthony Froude's four volume biography continues to be of intri• guing interest, the three very different biographies of Carlyle by Ian Campbell, Fred Kaplan and recently by Simon Heffer are all admir• able in the scope, depth and selectivity of their research. The work of many other Carlyle scholars, though often addressing very dif• ferent subjects from those of more immediate concern to my work, has stimulated and helped to guide my own endeavours during this book's lengthy gestation period. I have in mind the work of several commentators most of whom are included in the footnotes: Ruth apRoberts, Gillian Beer, Chris Vanden Bossche, Mark Cum• ming, Steven Helmling, Albert J. LaValley, A.L. Le Quesne, George Levine, Anne K. Mellor, Hillis Miller, John D. Rosenberg, Jules Paul Seigel, Joseph Sigman, G.B. Tennyson, Michael Timko and D.J. Trela. My philosophical work has also been shaped and stimulated by several key scholars working in the field of Hume and Reid studies. I am indebted to the work of Melvin Dalgamo, George Elder Davie, Timothy Duggan, M. Jamie Ferreira, Antony Flew, xvi Preface
Keith Lehrer, Alasdair Macintyre, Edward H. Madden, Eric Mat• thews and Barry Stroud. I am grateful to my former teachers at the University of Glasgow some of whom are now colleagues. I am particularly indebted to Alexander Broadie and Richard Stailey who first introduced me to the philosophy of the Scottish Enlight• enment and who have since continued to express interest in my work. Robert Crawford, another most stimulating former teacher at Glasgow, actively encouraged and inspired me in my undergrad• uate studies in English Literature. I still value his continued interest in my work. I must also thank the Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, Robin Downie, for an important token of practical encouragement by generously giving me my first set of Carlyle's complete works as I was about to embark on my doctoral thesis some years ago at the University of Cambridge. I am also indebted to many other colleagues at Glasgow for their support, advice and friendship, especially, in the English Literature Department, Richard Cronin, Stuart Gillespie, Andrew Hook, Paddy Lyons, Dorothy McMillan, Donald MacKenzie, Willy Maley and Patrick Reilly; in the Scottish Literature Department, Douglas Gifford; and in the Philosophy Department, Paul Brownsey, David Campbell, Dudley Knowles, Angus McKay and Elizabeth Telfer. Knud Haa• konssen provided valuable information on secondary material con• cerning Reid when this project was at an early stage. David Fate Norton still deserves an adequate answer from me concerning an unresolved disagreement we have concerning Humean scepticism. I appreciate the care, attention and advice of those who most closely read this work in its earlier forms. Gillian Beer deserves my thanks for shaking certain complacencies out of my early attempts to write about Carlyle. Ian Campbell and Susan Manning offered much advice and good discussion when examining my work. But I am especially indebted to a most dedicated, thorough and witty supervisor who read most of this work several years ago when it was in a very raw condition, Stefan Collini at the Univer• sity of Cambridge. He was quick to recognize the value of my having studied both English Literature and Philosophy and he thus actively encouraged me to continue working in both disciplines through an interdisciplinary study of Carlyle and Scottish philoso• phy. In reading my work he has spotted many a blunder - those that remain are certainly all my own. To end this testimony of gratitude on a much more personal level: I would like to thank my father who has always unquestioningly supported my efforts Preface xvii and who was perhaps first responsible for awakening in me a sense of the power, pleasure, seriousness and fun of writing and argu• mentation. For help of various kinds along the way my thanks to Wendy and Djuna Thurley and to my two children lain and Sarah. Finally and surpassing all words, my greatest gratitude is to my joyous intellectual and emotional partner, to whom this book is dedicated, Sharon. List of Abbreviations
The following forms of reference are used throughout:
AP Essays on the Active Powers of Man, The Works of Thomas Reid, preface, notes and supplementary dissertations by Sir William Hamilton (Edinburgh: MacLachlan, Stewart; London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1846). Where relevant, references to AP, Intellectual Powers (IP), and Inquiry (INQ) are given in the form: AP, I.i, 514Ld. CL The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Duke• Edinburgh edn (Durham, North Carolina: Duke Univer• sity Press, 1970- ). References are given in the form: CL, 1:46. CME Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, The Works of Thomas Car• lyle, ed. by H.D. Traill, Centenary Edition, 30 vols (Lon• don: Chapman and Hall, 1896-99). ECHU David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. by L.A. Selby• Bigge, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975; repr. 1979). INQ An Inquiry into the Human Mind: On the Principles of Com• mon Sense, Works of Thomas Reid (see AP above). IP Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Works of Thomas Reid (see AP above). SR Sartor Resartus, Works of Thomas Carlyle, Centenary Edi• tion, vol. 1. ST 'Signs of the Times', Works of Thomas Carlyle, Centenary Edition. vol. 27 (CME, 2). WR 'Wotton Reinfred', in Last Words of Thomas Carlyle, with an introduction by K.J. Fielding (London: Longmans, Green, 1892; repr. Farnborough: Gregg, 1971), 1-147.
xviii