Review Article
Review Article Nailing Jelly to a Wall: Possibilities in Intellectual History by TERRY COOK A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era. A.B. McKILLOP, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1979. xii, 287p. ISBN 0-7735-0343-9 $21.95 ISBN 0-7735-0344-7 $9.95 pa. Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and the Idea of the West, 1856-1900. DOUG OWRAM. Toronto, et. a].: University of Toronto Press, 1980. x, 264p. ISBN 0-8020-5483-8 $25.00 ISBN 0-8020-6385-3 $10.00 pa. Writing intellectual history, its principal Canadian pioneer once claimed, is like trying to nail jelly to a wall.' The subject is amorphous and difficult to pin down, its practi- tioners forced to sift through an ethereal realm of ideas, myths, attitudes, assumptions, values, feelings, and beliefs, rather than through concrete, quantifiable data of events and facts familiar to most other historians. While the outcome of a clash of two armies in the field, of two politicians on the hustings, of union and management in the streets, of two corporations in the stock market is relatively clear, the result of a conflict be- tween two thinkers, two ideas, or two general sets of values is immeasurably less so. Quite simply, the remains left by most historical figures - acts of state implemented, constituency organizations established, wages earned, profits posted, goods exported, factories started, railways built, territories explored - are more concrete and their causative historical impact far more measurable than is the legacy left by intellectuals. The concrete remains of the intellectual - books, articles, manuscripts, reports of speeches - are of little help.
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