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    Plan détaillé Texte intégral Invention: the rhetorical legacy Creativity: the logical legacy Ingenium: the medical legacy Conclusion Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Ordering Knowledge

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    Science, Poetry and Imagination: Disciplinary Negotiations in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Writings on Genius

    Sorana Corneanu

    p. 65-90

    Texte intégral Invention: the rhetorical legacy Creativity: the logical legacy Ingenium: the medical legacy Conclusion Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Texte intégral

    1The question of the relation between science and poetry1 was raised during the eighteenth-century conversation about structures and forms of knowledge in terms that we might call ‘disciplinary’ even if they belong to a period before the rise of modern disciplinarity.2 What was at stake was to identify the terms of the separation, but also the unifying ground of science and poetry, as well as the distinct or similar qualifications of the natural philosopher and the poet. In this chapter I aim to shed light on a particular mode of this discussion, one that did not involve traditional questions about the epistemological status of these disciplines – in the manner in which, say, the status of mixed mathematics was discussed. Instead, it took the form of an inquiry into the cognitive mechanisms at work in science and poetry and the cognitive abilities exhibited by the natural philosopher and the poet. In other words, the terms of this discussion were provided by accounts of the workings of the mind (or the ‘psychology’ of the faculties of the mind);3 prominent in this context was the inquiry into the functions of the imagination and the mechanism of invention and creativity.

    2The texts I will be concerned with here, as an instance of this type of conversation, are writings of several members of the Scottish Enlightenment, in the latter half of the eighteenth century. These texts have a common topic: the nature of genius, as it expresses itself in both poetry and science. Poetic genius had started to be a prominent topic of inquiry since the first decades of the eighteenth century, in both English and Scottish circles, but the two-headed investigation of poetic and natural philosophical genius was not a standard interest. Hence the special status of my texts, which were all produced in the context of the University of Aberdeen: Alexander Gerard’s An Essay on Genius (published in 1774, yet partly finished and presented to the Philosophical Society of Aberdeen in 1758, the year this Society was established); William Duff’s An Essay on Original Genius (1767); and James Beattie’s ‘Remarks on Genius’, included in his Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783). Beattie was Gerard’s successor as Professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic at the Marischal College in Aberdeen, and was among the audience hearing Gerard’s pieces on genius delivered at the Aberdeen Philosophical Society in the 1750s and 1760s.4 Since Gerard’s work was the inspiration for the other two authors, and it is also the more systematic account, I will use it as my main lead, and will include references to the other texts where relevant.

    3I aim to look at these texts neither in relation to the subsequent development of the Romantic notion of genius, nor as part of the specifically Scottish context in which they were born.5 However, the results of my investigation are relevant to both approaches: they can enrich the account of the gradual passage from the early modern culture of ingenuity to late eighteenth-century conceptions of Romantic genius;6 and they can add to our understanding of the Scottish debates around the cognitive role of the imagination in philosophical inquiry, alongside the more famous contributions of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith.7 Yet, my approach here is to read these texts as examples of the type of eighteenth-century negotiation of the relation between science and poetry that was concerned with investigating the cognitive processes involved in both scientific and poetic invention. The role of the imagination was key to this investigation. I propose therefore the Scottish writings on genius as a noteworthy case of the consequences that an interest in the interplay between cognition and imagination has for the account of the relation between the natural philosophical and the literary realms of creativity. These writings are thus aligned with the growing body of case studies brought up by the recent scholarly interest in the cognitive role of the imagination as a bridge across early modern disciplines, such as art, rhetoric, moral philosophy, philosophy of nature and of mind, or the mathematical sciences.8 This line of research is also adjacent to the equally recent and stimulating investigation of the imbrication of knowledge, sensory experience, and affect in early modern practices of description and representation at the crossroads of natural philosophy, poetry, religion, medicine, and aesthetics.9

    4Here I aim to understand the terms in which the negotiation of the unity and difference between science and poetry was carried out in the Scottish texts on genius. In particular, I would like to show that the terrain of the negotiation was circumscribed by the way in which the early modern accounts of how the mind works were able to ground both unifying accounts of human nature and analyses of human variability. This common terrain also exhibits disciplinary multiplicity: the psychological material is found in tracts that belong to the (ancient and early modern) disciplinary fields of rhetoric, logic and medicine. The double intention of the texts on genius will be illuminated thanks to the excavation of the use they make of these earlier resources: on the one hand, it will be seen that their move towards giving a unified account of poetic and natural philosophical genius owes its impetus to rhetoric and logic and takes the form of a variant of the eighteenth-century ‘science of man’; on the other, the move towards highlighting the differences between the two kinds of genius takes its cue from the medical-psychological topic of the ‘diversity of wits’, now translated into the language of the ‘varieties of genius’.

    Invention: the rhetorical legacy

    5Alexander Gerard makes it clear at the very beginning of his work that his investigation of genius is part of a larger ‘science of human nature’, understood as a systematic, analytical account of the ‘phenomena of the mind’, which starts from an identification of the ‘principles of human nature’.10 Genius is to be approached as a natural endowment, indeed as a ‘faculty’, or ‘power’ of the mind11 – the leading one, to be sure, whose foremost characteristic is that it is responsible for invention: ‘Genius is properly the faculty of invention, by means of which a man is qualified for making new discoveries in science, or for producing original works of art.’12 Invention, or discovery, is thus a function of the mind working similarly in science and poetry – a point that will come up repeatedly in the account of the cognitive make-up of genius. Gerard’s examples include Socrates, Aristotle, Bacon and Newton, as well as Homer, Milton and Shakespeare.

    6The key capacity of the mind conducive to invention is that of ‘assembling ideas in various positions and arrangements, that we may obtain uncommon views of them.’13 This capacity is indeed the ‘creative power’14 of the mind and it bears the name of imagination. For Gerard, the imagination’s capacity to assemble ideas is a natural given that can be analysed scientifically: it is the capacity that David Hume had called the associating power of the mind, a power with its own laws and principles. I will return to it in the next section and will comment on its logical pedigree. Here I will note the heavy rhetorical influence at work in Gerard’s account of invention in the first part of his Essay. The connection is already suggested in the following description of the imagination as the motor of invention and thus the origin of genius: the task of the imagination is the ‘discovering of fit intermediate ideas, or apposite experiments, and the disposing of them in such a manner that they may lead to just and important conclusions.’15 ‘Invention’ and ‘disposition’ are rhetorical terms of art, designating the first and second offices of a rhetorical composition. As we will see below, these terms – interpreted as offices of the imagination – provide Gerard with one tool for building a case for the unifying ground of poetry and science.

    7Invention and disposition are integrated with Gerard’s description of the qualities of the accomplished imagination. Gerard’s list of such qualities includes fertility (which accounts for the ‘inexhaustible copiousness of invention’, ‘the most essential constituent of genius’ – as was displayed, for instance, by Homer or Newton),16 regularity (by which ideas are introduced so as to be conducive to the design of the whole)17 and activity (which makes the imagination ‘swift at illuminating all possible views of the ideas which are presented’).18 Activity is the feature that describes the imagination’s role as an ‘internal stimulus’ of mental work and, moreover, as the power capable of playing with perspectives in such a way that the force of an argument, the relevance of an experiment, or the effect of a poetic image is quickly and justly ascertained.19 Together with fertility, it ensures the copiousness and felicity of invention.

    8The rhetorical background to this discussion is obvious, and Gerard’s main reference throughout is Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria. While this is unproblematically pertinent to the poetic field, we may ask, what were the resources that allowed Gerard to extend the same to the field of natural philosophy? The likely answer is that what Gerard has in mind is Baconian natural history and the ‘articles of inquiry’ that were used to prompt, direct, and organize experimental research in the latter half of the seventeenth century.20 Bacon himself had explicitly included such articles in his account of the method of invention relevant to natural philosophical inquiry, and modelled them on rhetorical examples.21 This was an integral part of his scientific method (in his own terms, his ‘logic’), alongside the modes of experimentation (experientia literata), the tables and the induction by elimination. As will be seen below, Gerard was aware of Bacon’s works and used them explicitly to support other points about the work of the imagination. It is thus possible that Bacon is also behind his inclusive notion of invention.

    9While fertility and activity are the key ingredients of invention, regularity is ever their necessary companion. Gerard compares its work with the acuteness of smell in a dog, carrying it along the path of the game it pursues, and thus giving purpose and design to the search. This recalls Thomas Hobbes’s similar metaphor,22 but Gerard’s explicit reference is to the rhetorical pairing of inventio and dispositio in Quintilian: there is a long quoted passage from the Roman orator which says that the collection that invention performs is not enough; unless disposition and collocation are added, we will be left with a ‘confused mass and heap’ of materials. This is why disposition is rightly considered the second of the five parts of oratory, right after invention.23 But disposition (the other name of imagination’s regularity) is not simply an oratorical feature; rather, as a function of the imagination, it is relevant to both rhetoric and science, just like invention.24

    10Invention and disposition are intimately connected, according to Gerard; in fact, disposition may be considered an office of invention.25 However, the relationship between what could be called the principle of discovery and the principle of ordered search – as they manifest themselves in both poetry and science – is more complicated than that. To express the idea, Gerard engages in another exercise of syncretic-creative usage of his rhetorical sources. He picks up the Ciceronian rhetorical pair of invention-judgment from Quintilian and operates a double conflation: of judgement with disposition (via ‘regularity’26) and of invention with the imagination. Both conflations had been introduced by late Renaissance rhetorical and poetic treatises (owing to their importation of faculty psychology into the realm of rhetoric) and taken over by early modern and neoclassical criticism.27

    11The complications in the picture of the relationship between discovery and ordered search (now rendered as the relationship between imagination and judgment) take two forms. On the one hand, judgement may itself become a motor (albeit not an agent) of invention: judgment ‘not only regulates the imagination…but often likewise supplies it with new materials’: while judgment cannot suggest a ‘train of ideas’ itself, so it cannot invent, it is nevertheless able to inspire the imagination to seek one – as when judgment based on a sequence of events in an epic poem, on several topics in a rhetorical composition, or on a few experiments in a scientific query, makes it possible to imagine further incidents, topics, or experiments.28 On the other hand, discovery may act against the principle of ordered search (and thus become divorced from what should be part of its own legitimate nature). In this case, the imagination needs to be restrained by judgment. Here, as well as in the previous observation, Gerard refers his reader again to Quintilian.29

    12Let me insist a bit on this latter point, as it is yet another occasion for Gerard to suggest the unity of science and poetry at the level of the faculty psychology at work in both domains. Gerard has repeated warnings against the extravagance of the imagination. ‘If fancy were left entirely to itself’, he writes, ‘it would run into wild caprice and extravagance, unworthy to be called invention.’30 There is a false type of fertility, as well as a false type of agility of the imagination – the former ‘arises from a disordered and irregular fancy’, as can be seen in Ariosto and Spenser, or in Montaigne and Locke, while the latter ‘produces mere useless musing, or endless reveries’.31 Without the accompaniment of judgement, the imagination leads to ‘whimsical hypotheses’ in science (as were, for instance, some of Bacon’s conjectures) and ‘superfluity of ideas’ in poetry (the examples here are from Shakespeare’s plays).32 On this point, William Duff is equally eloquent: he tells us that ‘the excursions of a wanton imagination’, unbridled by judgement, produce ‘false and fallacious systems’ in science and ‘irregular and illegitimate performances’ in art; instead of the ‘flights of Genius’, they beget ‘the reveries of a Lunatic’.33

    13The theme of the extravagance of the imagination was current in early modern natural philosophical contexts, which created the vocabulary Gerard and Duff drew on, ie the vocabulary that associates the imagination with the mind’s flight to ungrounded conclusions or with the propensity to form hypotheses unanchored in sufficient experimentation and to build fanciful theoretical systems.34 Gerard and Duff echo this theme in their writings, and attribute it rather to the Roman rhetorical tradition, as we have seen. The same idea is present in James Beattie’s ‘Remarks on Genius’. Beattie explains that the thesis about the union of imagination and judgment in invention is a response to the view that poetical genius lies solely in ‘a certain warmth of fancy, or enthusiasm of mind, which is all-sufficient in itself, and stands in no need of judgment, or good sense, to give it direction and regularity.’35 Beattie’s remark contextualizes the discussions of poetic genius in an interesting way: he develops an account of genius that allows creative flights while also incorporating classical sobriety out of a need to block what we might call proto-Romantic notions of poetic inspiration, which he perceives as a species of self-involved, anti-social ‘enthusiasm’. The latter term referred to an attitude to knowledge and creativity that was hotly debated not only in religion and literature, but also in the natural philosophy of the time, where accusations of ‘enthusiasm’ often referred to the speculative hypotheses of philosophers carried away by their warm, unregulated imagination.36

    Creativity: the logical legacy

    14The key function of the imagination in all the texts considered here is that of combining ideas in novel, uncommon ways and, in so doing, of discovering new ideas. This does not, however, suggest unbounded freedom: the scientific character of the inquiry into human nature is grounded in the notion that the imagination acts according to a number of principles or laws, themselves dictated by a number of specific relations of ideas which, as Gerard puts it, ‘fit them for being associated’.37 The main inspiration behind this approach was David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40). Gerard duly references the place in the Treatise where Hume listed resemblance, contiguity and cause and effect as the main laws of the association of ideas performed by the imagination.38 These are also Beattie’s examples, to which he adds contrariety; Gerard also adds contrariety, as well as co-existence and order as complex principles of association, while Duff has a less technical description of the imagination’s aptitude ‘to associate and compound, to divide and transform’.39 In the later Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume himself wrote more succinctly and generally that ‘all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded by the senses and experience’ (italics mine).40

    15In this section I aim to show that the notion of the creativity of the mind is a second major tool with which Gerard and his followers build the case for the unity of science and poetry. It is able to fulfil this role because, like invention, it is explained as a function of the imagination, acting in similar ways in natural philosophical and poetic discovery. I also aim to establish that the ingredients of this account are indebted to an early modern logical tradition which is likely the background to the theory of the associative imagination in the Scottish science of human nature.

    16The list of the operations of the mind in Hume’s Enquiry looks like a direct replica of what Pierre Gassendi had identified in his Logica (1658) as the four processes whereby a simple apprehension (apprehensio simplex) – a notion, an idea, or a mental image, as it was also called – can be formed starting from the perceptions of the senses: composition, enlargement, diminution and transfer (or similitude). Composition gives us such ideas as a golden mountain (obtained from mountain and gold), a centaur (from man and horse) or a chimera (from lion, snake and goat); enlargement and diminution create such ideas as a giant and a pygmy; transfer, or similitude, is responsible for the formation of the idea of a city we have not seen starting from the idea of a city we are familiar with.41 The source of this is the Epicurean view of the ways of forming new concepts starting from sensation, which Diogenes Laertius describes under the rubric of dialectic: composition, analogy (corresponding to both enlargement and diminution) and resemblance (corresponding to transfer).42 A more extended variant is the Stoic list of procedures for obtaining phantasiai logikai (rational impressions), which includes again composition (eg the centaur), analogy (through varying proportions, eg the cyclop, the pygmy) and similitude (eg a man, such as Socrates, from his statue), but also several others, such as transposition (eg creatures with eyes on the chest), contrariety (eg death), translation (through transition to the realm of the imperceptible, eg space) and privation (eg a man without hands).43

    17So in a logical context, similitude, analogy, contrariety and the rest are compositive ways of producing a ‘simple apprehension’ (apprehensio simplex). The late scholastic logics naturally ascribed this operation – together with the two other acts of the mind, judgement and reasoning – to the intellect, in conformity with the Aristotelian tradition.44 In contrast, Gassendi’s Logica brushes aside the standard attribution of these acts to the intellect and assigns them rather to the imagination.45 So does Joseph Glanvill, probably following Gassendi, in his Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661).46

    18There is evidence that these early modern texts were known to the Aberdeen scholars. Witness Beattie, who, in his teaching as Professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic at Marischal College, recommended the study of Gassendi alongside that of Locke.47 Closer to his time, other logicians had also used the three acts of the intellect as the organizing scheme of their tracts, for instance Isaac Watts’s Logick: or, The Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth (1725) or William Duncan’s Elements of Logick (1748). However, neither of them attributes the three acts to the imagination in the manner of Gassendi or Glanvill. Moreover, there seems to be an anonymous reference to Glanvill in Beattie’s Dissertations, when he defines the imagination as ‘the simple apprehension of corporeal objects when absent’.48 Beattie continues by invoking ‘the language of modern philosophy’ as provider of the conception of the imagination he will employ in his own tract: ‘the word imagination seems to denote; first, the power of apprehending or conceiving ideas, simply as they are in themselves, without any view to their reality; and secondly, the power of combining into new forms, or assemblages, those thoughts, ideas, or notions, which we have derived from experience, or from information’ – in short, ‘simple apprehension and combination’.49 As examples of combination, Beattie gives us a creature with a dog’s head, a man’s body, wings, horns and cloven feet (a sort of chimera, then), an ivory (rather than golden) mountain and the monstrous picture at the beginning of Horace’s Art of Poetry (another sort of chimera, with a man’s head, a horse’s neck, feathers of different birds, limbs of various beasts and the tail of a fish).50

    19In sum, we have seen that what Hume called ‘the creative power of the mind’, which was responsible for the laws of the association of ideas, has a logical pedigree, insofar as logic had been cross-fertilized with faculty psychology in some early modern authors, such as Gassendi and Glanvill. It was owing to this cross-fertilization that the imagination had taken over the functions of the intellect, including those responsible for the creation of new ideas starting from the perceptions of the senses. In the remainder of this section I would like to look more closely at several instances of the way in which Gerard brings together poetry and science in his description of the mind’s associative creativity.51

    20In explaining the work of the ‘associating power of the imagination’, Gerard establishes direct parallelism between the operations of the mind in poetic discovery and the experimental procedures of natural philosophical discovery. Gerard is quite clear here: he refers in the same breath to ‘the discovering of fit intermediate ideas, or apposite experiments’.52 In both cases, of ideas and experiments, he describes a two-way collaboration between imagination and judgement: the imagination finds the materials and orders them; then, judgement examines whether the disposition is such that it conduces to the perception of the connections, and in case it is not, the imagination intervenes again to re-arrange and vary the disposition of the materials, followed by a new survey of reason, and so on.53

    21The re-arrangement and variation of materials is indeed key to the experimental method inherited from Bacon, which Gerard references explicitly when he discusses the Humean laws of association that govern the work of the imagination. As an example of resemblance, he refers to an experiment from Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum IX (exp. 83): ‘It hath been observed, says Lord Verulam, by the ancients, that salt water will dissolve salt put into it, in less time than fresh water will dissolve it. – Try it with sugar put into water formerly sugared, and into other water unsugared.’ Gerard comments: ‘here one fact suggests an analogous or similar trial’.54 This was indeed, for Bacon, an example of what in De augmentis scientiarum he called variatio, which was one of the ‘modes of experimentation’ that made up his art of experientia literata.55 Further, as an example of contrariety, Gerard refers to Bacon’s ‘Inquisitio de calore et frigore’ (‘The sun-beams, says Verulam, do turn wine into vinegar; but Qu[ery] Whether they would not sweeten verjuice?’) and comments: ‘In this case, one effect of the sun-beams leads him to conceive a contrary effect in a contrary subject.’56 In Bacon’s list, this would have been an example of the mode of inversio.57

    22The logical connection is again apparent, since the experientia literata is part of logic in Bacon’s scheme of the branches of knowledge. Its modes of experimentation are experimental procedures which, starting from one or several known experiments, seek to obtain other informative experiments by means of various transfers. The structural rationale of the modes is therefore similar to the procedures for obtaining new ideas in the Hellenistic and Gassendist logics.

    23The same laws of association are exemplified in Gerard’s text with literary instances as well. As an illustration of resemblance, he gives us a passage from Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV (I.1.68–74) where Northumberland sees Morton coming back from the battlefield, ‘pale, trembling, agitated’, about to inform him of his son’s death, which puts him in mind of a similar (literary) event. This, Gerard notes, is a representation of him ‘as guided by this associating quality’:

    ’Thou tremblest, and the whiteness of thy cheek
    Is apter than thy tongue to tell thy errand.
    Ev’n such a man, so faint, so spiritless,
    So dull, so dead in look, so woe-be-gone,
    Drew Priam’s curtain in the dead of night.58

    24From the same play (III.2) comes an illustration of the principle of contrariety. Gerard notes: ‘Enmity arising between old friends, suggests the idea of their intimacy in times past. Shakespear introduces King Henry as saying, when he heard of Northumberland’s rebellion,

    ’Tis not ten years gone
    Since Richard and Northumberland, great friends,
    Did feast together; and in two years after
    Were they at wars…’59

    25Thus, from Gerard’s point of view, what brings together Bacon’s solubility experiment and Shakespeare’s representation of prescient grief, in other words, the common ground unifying a mode of experimentation and a poetic image, is the common structure of the cognitive operation involved in their creation – which in this case Gerard identifies as resemblance. Likewise, the common ground behind the Baconian experiment with the alteration of liquids and the Shakespearean rendering of nostalgia for better times is the same type of operation of the imagination responsible for their discovery – this time, contrariety.

    26I have suggested that the Humean ‘resemblance’ is of the same order as Gassendi’s ‘transfer or similitude’, the ancient antecedents of which had been the Epicurean ‘resemblance’ and the Stoic ‘similitude’. This is a logical common ground in the sense that it pertains to the logical topic of the generation of new notions starting from the materials of sensitive experience, a topic which Gassendi took over from Hellenistic logic and grafted onto the format of late scholastic logic. The additional grafting of psychological material made it possible to attribute this power to the imagination. This attribution became a matter of course in Hume, Gerard and other eighteenth-century authors.

    27Moreover, thus understood, the creative work of the imagination is the core motor of invention. Rhetorical invention, the legacy of which we have reviewed in the first section, is thus reinterpreted as the logical generation of notions. I have explained that the psychologization of both rhetoric and logic in the early modern period ensured that these operations were attributed to the faculty of the imagination. One result of this development, we have seen, was that poetic creation and natural philosophical discovery could be understood as germane processes against a common logico-rhetorical model.

    28We have also seen that the principles of association contribute to Gerard’s analysis of human nature and as such function as a way to envisage the unity between the poet and the natural philosopher. At the same time, however, the same principles open up the possibility of thinking about the variety of genius. Indeed, the chapter on association is the first in the second part of Gerard’s Essay, devoted to ‘the general sources of the varieties of genius’. While the laws of association themselves do not introduce variety, their combinations and modifications do, as well as the fact that, in various people, one or another of these principles will be the predominant one. Add to this the influence of habit and the passions, the temporal variability of the imagination, as well as the influence of the varieties of judgement and memory on the mind of genius, and what we get is a map of differences of genius, based on a map of the various ‘constitutions of the mind’.60 So it is to variety that I now turn.

    Ingenium: the medical legacy

    29Recall the qualities of the accomplished imagination in Gerard: fertility, regularity and activity. Behind these lie a number of features which characterize the operations of both imagination and judgement. The noteworthy thing here is that these features admit of degrees, and are thus apt to account for the superiority of genius without threatening its smooth inscription in a general science of human nature. The paramount feature in Gerard’s tract is vigour – whether of imagination, or else of the associating principles, or of judgement. In the case of the imagination itself, the more frequent features are liveliness, vivacity, agility, readiness, quickness and brightness. As for judgement, its main features are soundness, depth, penetration, acuteness and quickness. This will serve as the basis for the differentiation between poetic and natural philosophical genius, but not in a simplistic way that would assign the former set of features uniquely to the poet and the latter uniquely to the natural philosopher. Indeed, the features themselves often overlap: for instance, in one place penetration is analysed as the union of fertility and regularity, which are qualities of the imagination, and in another, as a combination of acuteness and quickness, where quickness is a feature of both imagination and understanding.61

    30Duff’s analysis is not very different, but has new accents. Vigour and vividness are again important features, but we also learn that the imagination is plastic and warm, and that genius has a natural effervescence and an irresistible energy.62 True, he does talk, like Gerard, of the union of an imagination that is copious and plastic, vivid and extensive, with regularity, clearness, accuracy; or of a comprehensive imagination with a penetrating judgment.63 But he differentiates between poetic and natural philosophical genius in a more straightforward way than Gerard: the ‘indications’ of the former are the utmost exuberance, fecundity and happy fertility of invention, while the signs of the latter include regularity and accuracy of imagination; acuteness of perception, alongside shrewdness and sagacity in observations, comparisons, connections and judgments; and a powerful tendency to speculation, coupled with delight in investigating unknown causes.64

    31The features of the imagination and judgement are meant to add psychological flesh to the schema of the operations of the mind in poetic and natural philosophical creation, and thus to the core unified account of human nature. Their detail, however, drives the discussion in the opposite direction and ends up grounding an account of human variability, the ultimate consequence of which is the distinction (rather than unification) of poetic and natural philosophical genius. The background to this move, I will argue in this section, is the medico-psychological literature on the nature and variety of ingenium.

    32The term ingenium features frequently in both Gerard and Duff, with reference to passages from Quintilian that speak of the features of this human capacity. The early modern period had been intensely interested in this topic, in the wake of the classical and medieval explorations, which were partly logical, partly rhetorical, and partly medical. One helpful synthesis of the views on this topic is in Rudolph Goclenius’s Lexicon philosophicum (1613). Ingenium ‘most properly stated is the constitution of the faculty of the rational soul for understanding, discovering (invenire), or learning.’ It includes ‘the right constitution for learning’, good judgement, as well as dexterity, sharpness and a ‘quickness of discovering the causes of things’ (solertia). After this general presentation that draws on logico-rhetorical material, Goclenius closes his entry by considering the topic of the variety of ingenia from a medical point of view: this variety, he tells us, ‘depends sometimes on the temperaments of the body, sometimes on the various dispositions of the mind and on the constitution of the organs and of the assisting faculties, such as the imagination.’ He continues: ‘The distinctions of ingenium are various; for the ingenium is subtle or dense, acute or dull, penetrating or less penetrating, quick or slow, sharp or less sharp.’65

    33The medical background to the latter part of the description of ingenium is clear. The source here is Galen’s Ars medica, where the virtues and vices of the main operations of the mind are correlated with the various constitutions of the brain: thus, solertia indicates a fine substance of the brain, while tarditas, a thick substance, etc.66 Thus the main contribution of the medical background is that it introduces variability in cognitive performance based on the particular psychological-corporeal characteristics of individuals. The same background also provides the complex and rather fluctuating vocabulary that describes the features of both imagination and judgment as aspects of ingenium. For example, in the mid-seventeenth century, Nicholas Culpeper translates Galen’s Ars medica and renders solertia as ‘subtil wit’. ‘Wit’ is also one standard English translation of ingenium.67 While the main sense of solertia in the Renaissance medical commentaries was that of ‘quickness’ of apprehension, there was also the interpretation that solertia in fact stands for ‘depth’ and ‘penetration’ since it consists in ‘weighing carefully’ and is thus absent in easy learners who use their powers ‘precipitately’ and ‘suddenly’.68

    34In some early modern quarters, ingenium/wit becomes connected with the imagination. Here is, for example, Juan Huarte in his famous Examen de ingenios (1575): ‘the prudence and readiness of the mind which Galen speaketh of, appertaineth to the imagination.…The readinesse of the mind is that, which commonly they call a sharpenesse in imagining.’69 In the second volume of the Académie Françoise (1580), Pierre de la Primaudaye likewise describes the ‘great spirites, that conceive many things at once’ (which is one type of wit, alongside the sharp and the subtle) as having ‘a readie imagination and fantasie, their memorie like to an open treasurie, a quick consideration, and a prefect and sound remembraunce.’70 However, the features of ingenium may very well be attributed to judgment as well. Culpeper renders Galen’s discendi facilitas (facility of learning) as ‘a ready Apprehension [and] a sound Judgment’.71 In Walter Charleton’s Discourse Concerning the Different Wits of Men (1669), subtilitas ingenii is an equivalent of judgement, or the mind’s power to establish rightful distinctions, while the imagination is the capacity to conceive resemblances (a distinction borrowed from Hobbes, which will become standard in English criticism).72 In a further reassignment of features to faculties, Antoine le Grand in his Institutio philosophiae (1678) has a Cartesian description of wit, as consisting of ‘Celerity of Thinking, Facility of distinctly Imagining, and Capacity and use of Memory’.73

    35In sum, the early modern discussions of ingenium identify its positive features as quickness, readiness, vivacity, subtlety, acuteness, sharpness, penetration, each with various descriptions and varyingly distributed between the faculties of imagination and judgment. Such variability is also discernible in Gerard’s and Duff’s descriptions of the features of the two faculties in genius, as we have seen. In addition, the early modern descriptions of these features form the ground of a thesis about the diversity of minds, or of natural mental inclinations, themselves rooted in natural mental and corporeal constitutions.

    36There are two consequences of this view. One has to do with the final causes of the diversity of wits. The early modern texts advance the hypothesis that the diversity of mental and corporeal endowments is a providential plan meant to ensure the harmony of civil life (on the assumption that harmony is made of distinct, rather than uniform, elements).74 The idea is transferred unchanged to the account of genius in Duff or Beattie: the diversity of genius is (divinely) meant to serve the order of society.75 Here is Beattie’s rationale for this expression of ‘the will of our Creator’:

    As providence has made us differ in the form of our bodies; and some are swift, and others unwieldy, some weak, and others strong; it would seem to be no less the intention of providence, that we should differ in the capacity of our minds: for thus we are the better qualified to discharge, with pleasure to ourselves, and with benefit to the publick, the duties belonging to the different professions that take place in society.76

    37The second consequence is the identification of the arts and sciences most suited to the various wits: a step consecrated by Huarte and rehearsed in other texts as well, for instance in Charleton’s tract. I want to suggest that this is the background to the eighteenth-century theme of the varieties of genius, which stands as a counterpart to the unifying move of the science-of-man perspective investigated in the first two sections. Once the theme of psychological diversity is introduced, the natural philosopher and the poet start to inhabit different psychological worlds.77

    38Even if, according to Gerard, the easy pairing of poetic genius with the imagination and of natural philosophical genius with judgement is inaccurate, the various combinations, modifications and predominance of the associating principles, together with the varieties of imagination, memory and judgement assisting them, do distinguish, sometimes rather sharply, between these two kinds of genius.78 Gerard establishes a multitude of differences and shades of difference. I will give only three examples here. First example: the natural philosopher is mostly dominated by the principles of causation and co-existence, while the poet by that of resemblance. All of the principles are present in either of them, but the predominant one will make the others subservient to it; for instance, noticing causes will serve the poet’s final end, the discovery of the apt metaphor; and the use of resemblance in the art of experimentation will serve the natural philosopher’s ultimate purpose, the discovery of causes.79 Moreover, resemblance is an intuitive relation, the other two are not.80 Second example: the quickness of imagination in a poet is such that it may well do without the assistance of judgement (provided it abides by the architectonic quality of regularity) and will produce ‘a noble boldness of manner’; but in science this ‘could produce only absurdity and error’.81 Third example: the judgement needed in poetical invention is necessary, but differs from the scientific type: when it refers to observations in which a natural philosopher will also be interested, for instance the perception of mathematical truths, it will be directed rather to their practical results than to the theoretical demonstration; and when it refers strictly to questions of beauty, it bears the name of taste, which is a type of judgment mostly intuitive that has no relevance for science.82

    39How does all of this relate to the theme of enthusiasm? We have seen Beattie on his guard against this notion, as to him it connoted the socially dangerous self-sufficiency of genius. As such, the term still carried the older meaning of self-involved madness, an outgrowth of the deranged imagination. However, the notion was slowly changing course and had already started to connote noble inspiration and transports of visionary fancy. Gerard acknowledges this new semantic load, but seems to have difficulty fitting it with his overall analysis. The ‘fire of genius’, the ‘ardour’ of inspiration that comes with an ‘elevation and warmth of imagination’, is there, but analysed in terms of how it acts as a further impetus to the ‘vigour and activity of the associating power’.83 For Gerard, enthusiasm is simply extra-quickness. Duff, however, is more comfortable with the theme, precisely, I would say, because his analysis is less systematic. I mentioned earlier that among the features of the imagination of genius he already introduces ‘warmth’ and ‘plasticity’ as self-standing features, not reducible to something else. Moreover, in describing original genius in poetry, he elaborates on three distinguishing features, which he calls ‘irregular greatness’, ‘wildness’ and ‘enthusiasm’.84 The pre-Romantic themes of the sublime, the grotesque and of inspiration as ‘the very soul of poetry’, over and above any rule, find their natural home here.

    40The eighteenth-century Scottish writings on genius still share with the previous age the attack on the extravagant flight of the unbridled imagination in both science and poetry. But Duff seems much more inclined to allow the speculative flight of the imagination a positive, refreshing, liberating role, and thus opens the door to Romantic conceptions. This is not, however, the sign of the final split between poetry and science. There was going to be a Romantic scientific genius just as there was going to be a poetic one, and the animating principle behind both was going to be a soaring imagination. Duff is again pointing in that direction: the inventive faculty, he writes, ‘enables the Philosopher, by its active, vigorous, and exploring power, to conjecture shrewdly, if not to comprehend fully, the various springs which actuate the visible system of Nature and Providence; to frame the most ingenious theories for the solution of natural Phenomena; to invent Systems, and to new-model the natural and moral World to his own mind.’85 Ironically, thus understood, the imagination of the Romantic scientific genius was going to be pitted against what came to be perceived as the toilsome, cautious, boring experimental-inductive work associated with an outdated Baconian model of science. Romanticism was going to re-habilitate the ‘lunatic’ and the extravagant imagination would no longer connote vice, but rather noble madness, in both science and poetry.86

    Conclusion

    41While the eighteenth-century texts on genius investigated here form an important chapter in the history of the notion of genius, as well as in the history of the transformation of early modern ingenuity into Romantic conceptions of the exceptional individual,87 they are also, I have suggested, an interesting case study for understanding the shapes of Enlightenment disciplinary negotiations. In this chapter I set myself the task of investigating the terms in which they addressed the relationship between science and poetry – an issue visible in the conversation of the time, yet one that is not addressed in the usual manner of questions about the epistemological status of the disciplines in question.

    42The outcome of the investigation is that the terrain of this particular negotiation in these particular texts was constituted by questions about the workings of the mind. Does the poet’s mind work in similar ways to the natural philosopher’s mind when they go about their respective tasks, poetic invention and creation and scientific discovery and theory building? Do the cognitive endowments and processes typical of the poetic mind differ in any significant way from those of the natural philosophical mind? The answers to these questions pointed in two divergent directions: the two types of mind are instances of the same mental mechanism that accounts for a basic definition of unified human nature; however, when you inquire into the details (the particular features and combinations of features) of that mechanism, a divergent picture emerges, whereby the poet and the natural philosopher look like they inhabit different mental worlds.

    43I have argued that in order to understand this double-headed picture, we need to pay attention to the intellectual resources that informed the discussion about the workings of the mind in which that picture was grounded. It has emerged that the impetus towards a unified view of science and poetry came from resources typical of the logico-rhetorical tradition, while the opposite direction, towards the differentiation of science and poetry, was owing to specific developments in the medical tradition. All these older disciplinary legacies offered the Aberdeen intellectuals the tools for their investigation because they had been permeated in various ways by the psychological study of the mind (ie the kind of study focused on the nature and work of the mental faculties). Rhetoric, logic and medicine had seen, in some of their manifestations, a rise in importance of the faculty of the imagination, which came to colonize the rhetorical inventio, the logical apprehensio simplex, and the medical ingenium.

    44The imagination became thus the all-important faculty in the eighteenth-century accounts of genius, in a manner that sometimes announces Romantic conceptions, but is overall much more visibly anchored in the intellectual culture of its time. I have suggested that these accounts provide valuable resources for understanding the way that culture negotiated the relationship between poetry and science. Part of what it did, it seems, was use and rearrange insights from older disciplinary traditions.

    Notes de bas de page

    1 I am grateful to Rob Iliffe for the many conversations on genius and imagination that are in the background of this chapter; also to Jean-Jacques Chardin for inviting me to be part of this book project, and to Richard Somerset for the enthusiasm and diligence with which he has seen it through.

    2 See Donald R. Kelley, ed., History and the Disciplines: the Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997). In this chapter I use ‘disciplines’ and ‘disciplinary’ to refer precisely to this early modern (proto-disciplinary) territory of forms and structures of knowledge. I also use ‘science’ as an equivalent of ‘natural philosophy’, as the term is already thus used in my eighteenth-century texts, but not ‘scientist’, as this term had not yet replaced ‘natural philosopher.’ For the complex history of such terms as ‘science’, ‘literature’ or ‘poetry’, see Raymond Williams, Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, new ed.), q.v. ‘literature’ and ‘science.’

    3 I use ‘psychology’ and ‘psychological’ as anachronistic shorthand for the theoretical accounts of the workings of the mind specific of the period under investigation.

    4 See Elizabeth Larsen, ‘Re-Inventing Invention: Alexander Gerard and An Essay on Genius,’ Rhetorica: a Journal of the History of Rhetoric 11, no 2 (1993): 181–97; Ronnie Young, ‘James Beattie and the Progress of Genius in the Aberdeen Enlightenment,’ Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 36, no 2 (2013): 245–61.

    5 For the former approach, see James Engel, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Peter Kivy, ‘Genius and the Creative Imagination,’ in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, ed. James A. Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). For the latter, see Young, ‘James Beattie and the Progress of Genius.’

    6 See Alexander Marr et al., ed., Logodaedalus: Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018).

    7 See Catherine Packham, ‘Feigning Fictions: Imagination, Hypothesis and Philosophical Writing in the Scottish Enlightenment,’ The Eighteenth Century 48, no 2 (2007): 149–71.

    8 See Marta Fattori and Massimo L. Bianchi, ed., Phantasia-Imaginatio (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1998); Lodi Nauta and Detlev Pätzold, ed., Imagination in the Later Middle Ages and Early Modern Times (Leuven: Peeters, 2004); Chantal Jacquet et Tamás Pavlovits, ed., Les facultés de l’âme à l’âge classique: imagination, entendement et jugement (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2006); Christoph Lüthy, Claudia Swan, Paul Bakker and Claus Zittel, ed., Image, Imagination, and Cognition: Medieval and Early Modern Theory and Practice (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

    9 See Courtney Weiss Smith, Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2016); Alexander Wragge-Morley, Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650–1720 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

    10 Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Genius (London, 1774), 2, 3.

    11 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 3, 6.

    12 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 8. The Aberdonian context relevant to this approach includes the discussions of the ‘Wise Club’ of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, whose members included Thomas Reid, George Campbell, John Gregory, besides Gerard and Beattie. Duff shared the approach and was, like Gerard and Beattie, educated at Marischal College. See Young, ‘James Beattie and the Progress of Genius,’ 10–11.

    13 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 27.

    14 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 31.

    15 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 35–6.

    16 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 44–5.

    17 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 46.

    18 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 57.

    19 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 58–9.

    20 See, eg, Peter Anstey and Michael Hunter, ‘Robert Boyle’s “Designe about Natural History”,’ Early Science and Medicine 13 (2008): 83–126.

    21 See Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: from Magic to Science (London: Routledge, 2013), chap. VI; Matthew Sharpe, ‘The Topics Transformed: Reframing the Baconian Prerogative Instances,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 56, no 3 (2018): 429–454.

    22 Hobbes used the hunting metaphor in order to illustrate one variety of ‘train of thought’, which he called ‘sagacity’, or the faculty of invention: Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), part I, chap. 4, sect. 4; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis & Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 1994), part I, chap. III, sect. 5, 13.

    23 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 61. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. by Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), III, bk. 7, ‘Prooemium,’ sect. 1–3, 150–51.

    24 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 63.

    25 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 60, 66.

    26 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 81.

    27 Murray W. Bundy, ‘“Invention” and “Imagination” in the Renaissance,’ The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 29, no 4 (1930): 535–45, at p. 541; James Sambrook, ‘The Psychology of Literary Creation and Literary Response,’ in The Eighteenth Century, volume IV of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. H. B. Nisbet and C. Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 614–632.

    28 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 91–94, with reference to Quintilian, Orator’s Education, II, bk. 5, chap. 10, sect. 122–3, 428–9. In this place Quintilian writes in fact about the invention of arguments in rhetorical composition and contrasts the expert’s with the beginner’s use of the topics.

    29 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 36–7. Quintilian, Orator’s Education, II, bk. 3, chap. 3, sect. 5, 24–25. The same idea and reference are present in Duff’s text: William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (London, 1767), 9.

    30 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 36.

    31 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 49, 52, 58.

    32 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 76, 79, 81, 83.

    33 William Duff, Essay on Original Genius, 7–8, 24, 102.

    34 On Bacon, see Sorana Corneanu and Koen Vermeir, ‘Idols of the Imagination: Francis Bacon on the Imagination and the Medicine of the Mind,’ Perspectives on Science 20, no 2 (2012): 183–206. On Newton, see Rob Iliffe, Priest of Nature: the Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 351–3. More generally, see Lorraine Daston, ‘Fear and Loathing of the Imagination in Science,’ Daedalus 134, no 4 (2005): 16–30.

    35 James Beattie, ‘Remarks on Genius,’ Dissertations Moral and Critical, volume I of The Works of James Beattie (Philadelphia: Hopkins and Earle, 1809), 214.

    36 See Young, ‘James Beattie and the Progress of Genius’, for an analysis of the way Beattie’s work was both influenced by and responded critically to the primitivism of Thomas Blackwell and James Macpherson, in the context of the University of Aberdeen. Further on literary, religious and natural philosophical ‘enthusiasm’, see Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 160–169; Michael Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1995).

    37 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 109.

    38 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 108ff. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), I.1.4, 11. The ‘association of ideas’ was a mental mechanism identified by John Locke in his analysis of human understanding. For Locke – as largely for Hutcheson, who also used the notion in his writings – the association of ideas was a malfunction of the mind. In contrast to both, Hume introduced the notion that the association of ideas was a natural principle of the functioning of the human mind. The point is well brought out in Peter R. Anstey, ‘The Experimental History of the Understanding from Locke to Sterne,’ Eighteenth-Century Thought 4 (2009): 143–169.

    39 William Duff, Essay on Original Genius, 94. James Beattie, ‘Of Imagination,’ in Dissertations Moral and Critical, chap. II.

    40 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in Enquiries, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd rev, ed. by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), II.13, 19.

    41 Pierre Gassendi, Institutio logica, in Opera omnia (London, 1658), vol. I, part 1, canon III, 93.

    42 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks (London: William Heinemann; New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925), bk. X, sect. 32, 560–63.

    43 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, bk. VII, sect. 52–3, 160–63.

    44 For the late scholastic logics, see Roger Ariew, Descartes and the First Cartesians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), chap. 2, sect. 1.

    45 Pierre Gassendi, Institutio logica, in Opera omnia, vol. I, part 1, preliminaries, 92. See further Sorana Corneanu, ‘Logic and the Movement of Reasoning: Pierre Gassendi on the Three Acts of the Mind,’ Perspectives on Science 29, no 3 (2021): 1–35.

    46 Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (London, 1661), chap. XI. See further Sorana Corneanu, ‘Joseph Glanvill on Imagination, Method and the Art of Thinking,’ in Testimonies: States of Mind and States of the Body in the Early Modern Period, ed. Gideon Manning (New York: Springer, 2020), 139–168.

    47 Alexander Bower, An Account of the Life of James Beattie (London: C.&P. Baldwin, 1804), 154.

    48 Beattie, ‘Of Imagination,’ 106. Cf. Glanvill, Vanity, 96–7.

    49 Beattie, ‘Of Imagination,’ 107.

    50 Beattie, ‘Of Imagination,’ 107, 110.

    51 That association in Gerard is a tool of creativity rather than mere assemblage is well brought out in Elizabeth Larsen, ‘Re-Inventing Invention’.

    52 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 35.

    53 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 34.

    54 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 110.

    55 Francis Bacon, De augmentis scientiarum, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R.L. Ellis and D.D. Heath, 14 vol. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1963–1994), vol. IV, 413.

    56 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 111.

    57 Francis Bacon, De augmentis scientiarum, in The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. IV, 418.

    58 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 110.

    59 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 113–14. The passage is slightly misquoted by Gerard.

    60 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 217.

    61 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 32, 41, 52, 54, 69, 71, 322, 325, 371, 373.

    62 Duff, Essay on Original Genius, 7, 28.

    63 Duff, Essay on Original Genius, 88, 96.

    64 Duff, Essay on Original Genius, 33–6.

    65 Rudolph Goclenius, Lexicon philosophicum (Frankfurt, 1613), 241–2.

    66 Galen, Ars medica, in Medicorum graecorum opera, vol. I, ed. C.G. Kuhn (Leipzig, 1821), 322.

    67 Nicholas Culpeper, Galen’s Art of Physick (London, 1652), 17. The connection between solertia and ingenium was established in the early sixteenth century thanks to works such as Niccolo Leoniceno’s translation of the same Galenic text. See Christopher F. Goodey, ‘Intellectual Ability and Speed of Performance: Galen to Galton,’ History of Science 42 (2004): 465–95, at p. 472.

    68 Goodey, ‘Intellectual Ability,’ 476.

    69 Juan Huarte, The Examination of Mens Wits (London, 1594), 85–6.

    70 Pierre de la Primaudaye, The French Academy (London, 1594), vol. II, 181.

    71 Culpeper, Galen’s Art of Physick, 17.

    72 Walter Charleton, Brief Discourse Concerning the Different Wits of Men (London, 1669), 19–20.

    73 Antoine le Grand, An Entire Body of Philosophy according to the Principles of the Famous Renate Des Cartes (London, 1694), 331.

    74 Charleton, Brief Discourse, 36–7. Cf., in a natural philosophical context, Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society (London, 1667), 85.

    75 Duff, Essay on Original Genius, 3–4; Beattie, ‘Remarks on Genius,’ 215–22.

    76 Beattie, ‘Remarks on Genius,’ 215–16.

    77 The two great kinds that Gerard differentiates are the poetic and the natural philosophical; but even within the latter camp, say, we need to differentiate, for instance, between a genius for natural history and a genius for natural science. According to Gerard, Newton had both, but Boyle only the former: Gerard, Essay on Genius, 305–7.

    78 Gerard, Essay on Genius, part II, sect. 5-10.

    79 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 329–45.

    80 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 375.

    81 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 371.

    82 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 376–7.

    83 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 69.

    84 Duff, Essay on Original Genius, 162–72.

    85 Duff, Essay on Original Genius, 95.

    86 For details of this history, see Richard Yeo, ‘Genius, Method and Morality: Images of Newton in Britain, 1760-1860,’ Science in Context 2, no 2 (1988): 257–84; Richard C. Sha, ‘Romantic Physiology and the Work of Romantic Imagination: Hypothesis and Speculation in Science and Coleridge,’ European Romantic Review 24, no 4 (2013): 403–19; Mary Fairclough, ‘Dr Thomas Beddoes and the Politics of the Imagination,’ Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no 1 (2014): 79–96.

    87 See Marr et al., Logodaedalus.

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    • Sorana Corneanu
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    1 I am grateful to Rob Iliffe for the many conversations on genius and imagination that are in the background of this chapter; also to Jean-Jacques Chardin for inviting me to be part of this book project, and to Richard Somerset for the enthusiasm and diligence with which he has seen it through.

    2 See Donald R. Kelley, ed., History and the Disciplines: the Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1997). In this chapter I use ‘disciplines’ and ‘disciplinary’ to refer precisely to this early modern (proto-disciplinary) territory of forms and structures of knowledge. I also use ‘science’ as an equivalent of ‘natural philosophy’, as the term is already thus used in my eighteenth-century texts, but not ‘scientist’, as this term had not yet replaced ‘natural philosopher.’ For the complex history of such terms as ‘science’, ‘literature’ or ‘poetry’, see Raymond Williams, Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, new ed.), q.v. ‘literature’ and ‘science.’

    3 I use ‘psychology’ and ‘psychological’ as anachronistic shorthand for the theoretical accounts of the workings of the mind specific of the period under investigation.

    4 See Elizabeth Larsen, ‘Re-Inventing Invention: Alexander Gerard and An Essay on Genius,’ Rhetorica: a Journal of the History of Rhetoric 11, no 2 (1993): 181–97; Ronnie Young, ‘James Beattie and the Progress of Genius in the Aberdeen Enlightenment,’ Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 36, no 2 (2013): 245–61.

    5 For the former approach, see James Engel, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Peter Kivy, ‘Genius and the Creative Imagination,’ in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, ed. James A. Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). For the latter, see Young, ‘James Beattie and the Progress of Genius.’

    6 See Alexander Marr et al., ed., Logodaedalus: Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018).

    7 See Catherine Packham, ‘Feigning Fictions: Imagination, Hypothesis and Philosophical Writing in the Scottish Enlightenment,’ The Eighteenth Century 48, no 2 (2007): 149–71.

    8 See Marta Fattori and Massimo L. Bianchi, ed., Phantasia-Imaginatio (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1998); Lodi Nauta and Detlev Pätzold, ed., Imagination in the Later Middle Ages and Early Modern Times (Leuven: Peeters, 2004); Chantal Jacquet et Tamás Pavlovits, ed., Les facultés de l’âme à l’âge classique: imagination, entendement et jugement (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2006); Christoph Lüthy, Claudia Swan, Paul Bakker and Claus Zittel, ed., Image, Imagination, and Cognition: Medieval and Early Modern Theory and Practice (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

    9 See Courtney Weiss Smith, Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2016); Alexander Wragge-Morley, Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650–1720 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

    10 Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Genius (London, 1774), 2, 3.

    11 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 3, 6.

    12 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 8. The Aberdonian context relevant to this approach includes the discussions of the ‘Wise Club’ of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, whose members included Thomas Reid, George Campbell, John Gregory, besides Gerard and Beattie. Duff shared the approach and was, like Gerard and Beattie, educated at Marischal College. See Young, ‘James Beattie and the Progress of Genius,’ 10–11.

    13 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 27.

    14 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 31.

    15 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 35–6.

    16 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 44–5.

    17 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 46.

    18 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 57.

    19 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 58–9.

    20 See, eg, Peter Anstey and Michael Hunter, ‘Robert Boyle’s “Designe about Natural History”,’ Early Science and Medicine 13 (2008): 83–126.

    21 See Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: from Magic to Science (London: Routledge, 2013), chap. VI; Matthew Sharpe, ‘The Topics Transformed: Reframing the Baconian Prerogative Instances,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 56, no 3 (2018): 429–454.

    22 Hobbes used the hunting metaphor in order to illustrate one variety of ‘train of thought’, which he called ‘sagacity’, or the faculty of invention: Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), part I, chap. 4, sect. 4; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis & Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 1994), part I, chap. III, sect. 5, 13.

    23 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 61. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. by Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), III, bk. 7, ‘Prooemium,’ sect. 1–3, 150–51.

    24 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 63.

    25 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 60, 66.

    26 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 81.

    27 Murray W. Bundy, ‘“Invention” and “Imagination” in the Renaissance,’ The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 29, no 4 (1930): 535–45, at p. 541; James Sambrook, ‘The Psychology of Literary Creation and Literary Response,’ in The Eighteenth Century, volume IV of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. H. B. Nisbet and C. Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 614–632.

    28 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 91–94, with reference to Quintilian, Orator’s Education, II, bk. 5, chap. 10, sect. 122–3, 428–9. In this place Quintilian writes in fact about the invention of arguments in rhetorical composition and contrasts the expert’s with the beginner’s use of the topics.

    29 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 36–7. Quintilian, Orator’s Education, II, bk. 3, chap. 3, sect. 5, 24–25. The same idea and reference are present in Duff’s text: William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (London, 1767), 9.

    30 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 36.

    31 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 49, 52, 58.

    32 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 76, 79, 81, 83.

    33 William Duff, Essay on Original Genius, 7–8, 24, 102.

    34 On Bacon, see Sorana Corneanu and Koen Vermeir, ‘Idols of the Imagination: Francis Bacon on the Imagination and the Medicine of the Mind,’ Perspectives on Science 20, no 2 (2012): 183–206. On Newton, see Rob Iliffe, Priest of Nature: the Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 351–3. More generally, see Lorraine Daston, ‘Fear and Loathing of the Imagination in Science,’ Daedalus 134, no 4 (2005): 16–30.

    35 James Beattie, ‘Remarks on Genius,’ Dissertations Moral and Critical, volume I of The Works of James Beattie (Philadelphia: Hopkins and Earle, 1809), 214.

    36 See Young, ‘James Beattie and the Progress of Genius’, for an analysis of the way Beattie’s work was both influenced by and responded critically to the primitivism of Thomas Blackwell and James Macpherson, in the context of the University of Aberdeen. Further on literary, religious and natural philosophical ‘enthusiasm’, see Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 160–169; Michael Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1995).

    37 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 109.

    38 Gerard, An Essay on Genius, 108ff. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), I.1.4, 11. The ‘association of ideas’ was a mental mechanism identified by John Locke in his analysis of human understanding. For Locke – as largely for Hutcheson, who also used the notion in his writings – the association of ideas was a malfunction of the mind. In contrast to both, Hume introduced the notion that the association of ideas was a natural principle of the functioning of the human mind. The point is well brought out in Peter R. Anstey, ‘The Experimental History of the Understanding from Locke to Sterne,’ Eighteenth-Century Thought 4 (2009): 143–169.

    39 William Duff, Essay on Original Genius, 94. James Beattie, ‘Of Imagination,’ in Dissertations Moral and Critical, chap. II.

    40 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in Enquiries, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd rev, ed. by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), II.13, 19.

    41 Pierre Gassendi, Institutio logica, in Opera omnia (London, 1658), vol. I, part 1, canon III, 93.

    42 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks (London: William Heinemann; New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925), bk. X, sect. 32, 560–63.

    43 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, bk. VII, sect. 52–3, 160–63.

    44 For the late scholastic logics, see Roger Ariew, Descartes and the First Cartesians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), chap. 2, sect. 1.

    45 Pierre Gassendi, Institutio logica, in Opera omnia, vol. I, part 1, preliminaries, 92. See further Sorana Corneanu, ‘Logic and the Movement of Reasoning: Pierre Gassendi on the Three Acts of the Mind,’ Perspectives on Science 29, no 3 (2021): 1–35.

    46 Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (London, 1661), chap. XI. See further Sorana Corneanu, ‘Joseph Glanvill on Imagination, Method and the Art of Thinking,’ in Testimonies: States of Mind and States of the Body in the Early Modern Period, ed. Gideon Manning (New York: Springer, 2020), 139–168.

    47 Alexander Bower, An Account of the Life of James Beattie (London: C.&P. Baldwin, 1804), 154.

    48 Beattie, ‘Of Imagination,’ 106. Cf. Glanvill, Vanity, 96–7.

    49 Beattie, ‘Of Imagination,’ 107.

    50 Beattie, ‘Of Imagination,’ 107, 110.

    51 That association in Gerard is a tool of creativity rather than mere assemblage is well brought out in Elizabeth Larsen, ‘Re-Inventing Invention’.

    52 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 35.

    53 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 34.

    54 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 110.

    55 Francis Bacon, De augmentis scientiarum, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R.L. Ellis and D.D. Heath, 14 vol. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1963–1994), vol. IV, 413.

    56 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 111.

    57 Francis Bacon, De augmentis scientiarum, in The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. IV, 418.

    58 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 110.

    59 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 113–14. The passage is slightly misquoted by Gerard.

    60 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 217.

    61 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 32, 41, 52, 54, 69, 71, 322, 325, 371, 373.

    62 Duff, Essay on Original Genius, 7, 28.

    63 Duff, Essay on Original Genius, 88, 96.

    64 Duff, Essay on Original Genius, 33–6.

    65 Rudolph Goclenius, Lexicon philosophicum (Frankfurt, 1613), 241–2.

    66 Galen, Ars medica, in Medicorum graecorum opera, vol. I, ed. C.G. Kuhn (Leipzig, 1821), 322.

    67 Nicholas Culpeper, Galen’s Art of Physick (London, 1652), 17. The connection between solertia and ingenium was established in the early sixteenth century thanks to works such as Niccolo Leoniceno’s translation of the same Galenic text. See Christopher F. Goodey, ‘Intellectual Ability and Speed of Performance: Galen to Galton,’ History of Science 42 (2004): 465–95, at p. 472.

    68 Goodey, ‘Intellectual Ability,’ 476.

    69 Juan Huarte, The Examination of Mens Wits (London, 1594), 85–6.

    70 Pierre de la Primaudaye, The French Academy (London, 1594), vol. II, 181.

    71 Culpeper, Galen’s Art of Physick, 17.

    72 Walter Charleton, Brief Discourse Concerning the Different Wits of Men (London, 1669), 19–20.

    73 Antoine le Grand, An Entire Body of Philosophy according to the Principles of the Famous Renate Des Cartes (London, 1694), 331.

    74 Charleton, Brief Discourse, 36–7. Cf., in a natural philosophical context, Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society (London, 1667), 85.

    75 Duff, Essay on Original Genius, 3–4; Beattie, ‘Remarks on Genius,’ 215–22.

    76 Beattie, ‘Remarks on Genius,’ 215–16.

    77 The two great kinds that Gerard differentiates are the poetic and the natural philosophical; but even within the latter camp, say, we need to differentiate, for instance, between a genius for natural history and a genius for natural science. According to Gerard, Newton had both, but Boyle only the former: Gerard, Essay on Genius, 305–7.

    78 Gerard, Essay on Genius, part II, sect. 5-10.

    79 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 329–45.

    80 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 375.

    81 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 371.

    82 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 376–7.

    83 Gerard, Essay on Genius, 69.

    84 Duff, Essay on Original Genius, 162–72.

    85 Duff, Essay on Original Genius, 95.

    86 For details of this history, see Richard Yeo, ‘Genius, Method and Morality: Images of Newton in Britain, 1760-1860,’ Science in Context 2, no 2 (1988): 257–84; Richard C. Sha, ‘Romantic Physiology and the Work of Romantic Imagination: Hypothesis and Speculation in Science and Coleridge,’ European Romantic Review 24, no 4 (2013): 403–19; Mary Fairclough, ‘Dr Thomas Beddoes and the Politics of the Imagination,’ Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no 1 (2014): 79–96.

    87 See Marr et al., Logodaedalus.

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    Corneanu, S. (2023). Science, Poetry and Imagination: Disciplinary Negotiations in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Writings on Genius. In J.-J. Chardin, S. Corneanu, & R. Somerset (éds.), Ordering Knowledge. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pus.32740
    Corneanu, Sorana. « Science, Poetry and Imagination: Disciplinary Negotiations in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Writings on Genius ». In Ordering Knowledge, édité par Jean-Jacques Chardin, Sorana Corneanu, et Richard Somerset. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2023. doi:10.4000/books.pus.32740.
    Corneanu, Sorana. « Science, Poetry and Imagination: Disciplinary Negotiations in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Writings on Genius ». Ordering Knowledge, édité par Jean-Jacques Chardin et al., Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2023, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pus.32740.

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    Chardin, Jean-Jacques, Sorana Corneanu, et Richard Somerset, éd. Ordering Knowledge. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2023. doi:10.4000/books.pus.32660.
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