The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition

Abrams shifts to another element of Romantic philosophy and literary criticism: Psychology. Philosophers like Alexander Gerard (1728-1795), Locke, Hume, and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) all incorporated the creative act into their philosophy of mind, which is the philosophic precursor to modern psychological science. This philosophy generally centered around a tension between imagination (sometimes referred to as “fancy”) and judgment.

In focusing on “descriptive psychology” (158), Abrams examines the Romantic view of the mental creative process. Abrams establishes Coleridge as marking a movement away from the earlier mechanical analogies of creative thought to analogies of living plants in the Romantic period and beyond.

The 18th century in England was defined by the Enlightenment and British Empiricism, both philosophical and scientific movements that significantly advanced science and an understanding of the physical world. Philosophers like Hume sought to apply empirical scientific principles to understanding the human mind, thereby establishing an initial psychological science.

Hume and Hobbes posited that the mind worked similarly to the physical world as understood through Newton’s laws of motion. Therefore, as the world is made of particles, the mind is made of ideas and sensations. Those ideas and sensations are compilations of the sense experience, especially the sight, of the individual. In this view, the imagination is the mechanism by which the mind analyzes and synthesizes sense experience.