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Mental Activity and the Perception of Beauty in Jonathan Edwards
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
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Recent scholarship on Jonathan Edwards has been quite attentive to his view that the true apprehension of reality is achieved through an integrated act of aesthetic perception in which the whole personality of the knower is engaged. It has also been suggested that Edwards viewed the mind as making an active contribution to perception itself. What has been lacking however, is a systematic explication of what Edwards believed to be the psychological mechanism of the mind's active role in experience. No doubt this lack is due, at least in part, to the fact that Edwards nowhere sets out whole a theory of mental activity. We believe, however, that operating in his system of thought is a very forward-looking conception of the creative process involved in aesthetic perception and in experience in general. We also believe that it is possible to piece together at least the principal aspects of that conception on the basis of Edwards's own discussions found at various places in his works. An understanding of that theory would not only help us in gaining a greater appreciation of Edwards's place in the history of modern aesthetics and epistemology; it may also throw some further light upon a number of interpretative issues emerging out of recent discussions of Edwards's thought. For example: Is it accurate to describe Edwards's “sense of the heart” as a “sixth sense”? Is Edwards a “mystic”? In exactly what sense did Edwards go beyond Locke? This essay aims to make a contribution toward the reconstruction of Edwards's theory of mental activity and its role in experience with a special emphasis upon its role in the perception of beauty. Our focus is on psychology, although some of the broader philosophical and theological underpinnings and ramifications will be discussed also.
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1976
References
This essay represents part of a longer study being undertaken with the assistance of a fellowship from The American Council of Learned Societies. The permission to quote from the unpublished manuscripts of Edwards was kindly extended to me by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
1 See, for example, Smith, Claude A., “Jonathan Edwards and ‘The Way of Ideas,’” HTR 59 (1966) 153–73;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMiller, Perry, Jonathan Edwards (Cleveland: World, 1959) 65–66;Google ScholarSmith, John E., “Editor's Introduction,” Religious Affections (New Haven: Yale University, 1959) 11–14;Google ScholarDelattre, Roland, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University, 1968) 3–9.Google Scholar
2 Edwards's first reading of Locke's Essay has been dated as early as his second year in college. Wallace E. Anderson of Ohio State University believes that Edwards must have read it certainly by 1723, the first year after his graduate studies. The latest and most complete discussion of this matter will appear in Anderson's “Editor's Introduction” to the forthcoming volume of the Yale edition of Edwards's scientific and philosophical writings.
3 “The Mind,” no. 42, The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards (ed. Townsend, Harvey G.; Eugene: University of Oregon, 1955) 45.Google Scholar
4 Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (ed. Yolton, John W.; London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1961), II, xi, 2–6Google Scholar; III, iv, 16; IV, ii, 1. Another strategy taken up by Locke was to argue that the mind is capable of directly intuiting the relations among some of its ideas. But such a view would be inconsistent with a strict doctrine of simple ideas.
5 See, e.g., Morris, C. R., Locke-Berkeley-Hume (Oxford: Oxford University, 1931) 26.Google Scholar
6 Edwards wrote: “…there never can be any idea, thought, or act of the mind unless the mind first received some ideas from sensation” (“Subjects to be handled in the Treatise on the mind,” no. 29, Townsend, p. 71).
7 Willey, Basil, The Seventeenth Century Background (Garden City: Doubleday, 1953) 160–61.Google Scholar
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11 Edwards encountered the idea of habit in the writings of Locke himself. In the Essay, Locke mentions the force of habit or custom as the cause of the “unnatural” associations among ideas. Being too much of a rationalist, Locke would not employ the idea of such a nondiscursive and spontaneous force as habit to explain the “natural” connections among ideas. Nevertheless, his recognition of the influence of a spontaneous force upon the mind's experience of the relations among ideas played a crucial role in the emergence of the aesthetics of romanticism (Locke, Essay, II, xxxiii, l–6; cf. Tuveson, Ernest, The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and Aesthetics of Romanticism [Berkeley: University of California, 1960Google Scholar] chap. 1). Edwards also was familiar with the Aristotelian notion of habit through the writings of Franciscus Burgersdicius, Ephraim Chambers, and Francis Turrettini. For a fuller treatment of this matter, see the author's unpublished Ph.D. thesis, “The Concept of Habit in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards” (Harvard University, 1972)Google Scholar.
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14 “Miscellanies,” no. 241, Unpublished Manuscripts of Edwards, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. (I am grateful to Thomas Schafer for the use of his typescript of the “Miscellanies.”)
15 “The Mind,” no. 69, Townsend, p. 67.
16 Original Sin (ed. Holbrook, Clyde; New Haven: Yale University, 1970) 120–21.Google Scholar
17 Charity and Its Fruits (ed. Edwards, Tyron; New York: Anson Randolph, 1851) 329–30.Google Scholar
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19 “Subjects to be handled…,” no. 36, Townsend, p. 72.
20 “Of Being,” Townsend, p. 13; “Miscellanies,” no. 125, Townsend, p. 76. I have benefited from Herbert W. Richardson's discussion of this point (see his “The Glory of God in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards” [Ph. D. diss., Harvard University, 1963] chap. 3).Google Scholar
21 “Miscellanies,” nos. “aa,” 123, 238, Townsend, pp. 244–47.
22 “The Mind,” no. l, Townsend, pp. 25–26. A clarification of Edwards's use of the term “imagination” is necessary at this point. His explicit use of it is in reference to the power of the mind “whereby it can have a conception, or idea of things of an external or outward nature … when those things are not present, and be not perceived by the senses” (Religious Affections, 210–11). Edwards, therefore, uses the term in a narrow sense and not in reference to the mind's activity of ordering all sorts of ideas (the ideas of both the “outward” and the “mental” things) into various relationships. In order to avoid any confusion, we will adhere, as far as it is possible, to Edwards's usage.
23 “The Mind,” no. 42, Townsend, p. 46. In analyzing Edwards's concept of mental activity, I found Ray Hart's typological study of various theories of imagination very illuminating (Unfinished Man and the Imagination [New York: Herder and Herder, 1968] 315ff.).Google Scholar
24 “Miscellanies,” no. 81, Yale MSS.
25 “Miscellanies,” no. 408, Townsend, p. 249. Also see “The Mind,” no. 1, Townsend, p. 27; “Notes on Natural Science,” no. 49, Townsend, p. 18.
26 Cf. “Miscellanies,” no. 94, Townsend, pp. 252–58.
27 True Virtue, 29.
28 “The Mind,” no. 34, Townsend, p. 40.
29 “Subjects to be handled…,” no. 43, Townsend, p. 72. Townsend omits the italics which appear in Sereno E. Dwight's edition of the text (see The Works of President Edwards [New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill, 1830], 1. 667).Google Scholar Notice also the striking similarity between Edwards's account of the rules governing the connections among ideas and that of David Hume (see Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature [ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1960], I, i. 4).Google Scholar
30 Cf. Kallich, Martin, “The Association of Ideas and the Critical Theory: Hobbes, Locke and Addison,” Journal of English Literary History 12 (1945) 297.Google Scholar
31 See, for example, “The Mind,” no. 59, Townsend, pp. 56–58.
32 “Miscellanies,” no. 782, Townsend, pp. 115–18.
33 “Subjects to be handled…,” no. 2, Townsend, p. 69.
34 Cf. ibid., no. 10, Townsend, p. 70: “The Mind,” no. 1, Townsend, pp. 22–23.
35 Religious Affections, 206.
36 “The Mind,” no. 1, Townsend, p. 23. For a comprehensive treatment of this point, see Delattre, Beauty, esp. pp. 15–26.
37 “The Mind,” no. 1, Townsend, pp. 21–27; Images or Shadows of Divine Things (ed. Miller, Perry; New Haven: Yale University, 1948) 44.Google Scholar
38 “The Mind,” no. 1, Townsend, pp. 22–23. (The distance between B and C is one half of the distance between A and B, and the distance between C and D is one half of the distance between B and C. A ′B′ and B ′C′ are of equal length.)
39 ibid.., no. 1, Townsend, p. 23.
40 True Virtue, 32–33.
41 ibid..; Original Sin, 380–83.
42 “Miscellanies,” nos. “l”and “p,” Yale MSS.; “Treatise on Grace,” Puritan Sage (ed. Ferm, V.; New York: Philosophical Library, 1953) 539–73.Google Scholar Cf. also Cherry, Conrad, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards: A Reappraisal (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966) 35.Google Scholar
43 Cf. Bate, Walter Jackson, From Classic to Romantic (New York: Harper and Row, 1961)Google Scholar chaps. 1–4; Stolnitz, Jerome, “Beauty: Some Stages in the History of an Idea,” Journal of the History of Ideas 38 (1961) 185–204;CrossRefGoogle ScholarNicolson, Marjorie Hope, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (New York: Norton, 1959).Google Scholar
44 In an instructive essay, David C. Pierce has recently argued that at the center of Edwards's thought is a sometimes destructive tension between the “way of order” (which emphasizes the ideas of harmony and of the divine providential order) and the “way of enlargement” (which led Edwards to recognize the divine glory even in the indeterminate vastness of nature). Pierce's delineation of the two contrasting elements in Edwards's thought in the context of the eighteenth-century aesthetic theories is very illuminating. However, instead of leaving those two elements in a destructive tension, Edwards's conception of beauty seems to bring them together into a unified view (see Pierce, David C., “Jonathan Edwards and the ‘New Sense’ of Glory,” The New England Quarterly 41 [1968] 82–95).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
45 “The Mind,” no. 43, Townsend, p. 46; also cf. ibid.., no. 59, Townsend, pp. 56–58.
46 See n. 23.
47 “The Mind,” no. 59, Townsend, pp. 56–58; “Miscellanies,” no. 268, Townsend, pp. 78–79.
48 “The Mind,” no. 19, Townsend, p. 33.
49 Religious Affections, 282–84.
50 “Letter to Joseph Bellamy,” Jonathan Edwards: Representative Selections (eds. Faust, C. H. and Johnson, T. H.; New York: Hill and Wang, 1962) 390.Google Scholar
51 Religious Affections, 281–84; True Virtue, 5.
52 See, for example, Lyttle, David, “The Sixth Sense of Jonathan Edwards,” CQR 167 (1966) 50–59.Google Scholar
53 Edwards, for example, speaks of the “sense of the heart” as being involved in the perception of both the divine and also the “inferior” beauty (“Miscellanies,” no. 732, Townsend, p. 112).
54 Lyttle, , “The Sixth Sense”; also, White, Morton, Science and Sentiment in America (New York: Oxford University, 1972) 49–54, 295.Google Scholar
55 In light of the interpretation offered here, White's judgment that Edwards was one of the originators of an “anti-intellectualistic” strain in American thought seems quite unfair. Not only did Edwards see the sensation of beauty as involving the particular ideas received through the regular sense-organs, he also insisted that the aesthetic sensibility has a positive interrelationship with the functioning of discursive intellect. Through the habit's integrative control over the whole self, the mind's perception of a beautiful relation can “positively help reason” in conceptually understanding the nature of that beautiful relation. Far from being an anti-intellectualist, Edwards tried to view the human self as an integrated whole (see White, Science and Sentiment; Religious Affections, 307). For a much more balanced exposition of Edwards's thought on this issue, see John E. Smith, “Editor's Introduction,” Religious Affections, 13.
56 Religious Affections, 96.
57 ibid.., 208–09.
58 ibid.., 205.
59 A similar interpretation can be found in Herbert W. Richardson, “The Glory of God,” chap. 3.
60 Locke, Human Understanding, II, ii, 1–2.
61 Virtue, 98.
62 Religious Affections, 205.
63 “The Mind,” no. 66, Townsend, p. 66.
64 Abrams, M. H., “Mechanical and Organic Psychologies of Literary Invention,” English Literature and British Philosophy (ed. Rosenbaum, S. P.; Chicago: University of Chicago, 1971) 136–67.Google Scholar
65 ibid.., 150.
66 “Personal Narrative,” Faust and Johnson, Jonathan Edwards, 60.
67 “Letter to Lady Pepperell,” Works (1830), 1. 482.Google Scholar
68 David Lyttle has observed that Edwards's intention in using the term “simple idea” in reference to the saint's perception of God's beauty is to point to the distinctiveness of that perception. Lyttle then goes on to conclude that the saint's knowledge of God is “passive,” and that it does not happen “in any way that has anything to do with the five natural senses” (Lyttle, “The Sixth Sense,” 56–57). This last observation by Lyttle seems questionable. The saint's new sensation has its own distinctive content; in pointing this out, Lyttle is right. However, the distinctiveness of the converted person's new perception does not mean that no ordering activity of the mind is involved. The saint's new habit, according to Edwards, “is united to human faculties, acts very much after the manner of a natural principle or habit,” and thus operates only in and through the full functioning of his active as well as passive powers (“Treatise on Grace,” 572–73). Edwards also points out that in the operation of grace (i.e., the newly infused habit of mind), the regenerate person is “in different respects, wholly passive, and wholly active” (“Efficacious Grace,” The Works of President Edwards [New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1868], 2. 580).Google Scholar
In light of the interpretation offered here, we can also understand Edwards's meaning when he says that no “new composition of ideas” of the divine things will give an unconverted person the new sensation a saint is capable of. What Edwards is saying is that a new way of compounding the ideas of divine things would not produce the sensation or “simple idea” of the distinctive quality of the divine beauty unless a new direction of habit enables one's mind to “blend” those ideas into a unitary whole that they are in their true nature. There is no denial here of the involvement of an ordering activity in the saint's new sensation. The difference in the direction of this ordering activity and in the nature of the resultant “simple idea” is Edwards's point (see Religious Affections, 209).
69 Cf. Thorpe. “On Imagination.” 229.
70 One of the merits of Harold Simonson's recent book on Edwards is his recognition that Edwards viewed the mind as an “imaginative” or creative power. His discussion becomes clouded, however, when he says that since Edwards viewed the “imagination” as a power of intuiting or discerning what is objectively real, it has little to do with the Coleridgian conception of it as an organic or synthesizing power which makes something “new” out of particular ideas. Edwards's own view seems to be that the creative activity of the ordering power of the mind is itself the act of discerning what is objectively real, and is not unlike Coleridge's conception (see Simonson, Harold, Jonathan Edwards: Theologian of the Heart [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974] 80).Google Scholar
71 See “The Mind,” no. 34, Townsend, p. 39; “Miscellanies,” nos. 94 and 697, Townsend, pp. 252–54, 262.
72 Edwards wrote: “For intelligent beings are created to be the consciousness of the universe, that they may perceive what God is and does. This can be nothing else but to perceive the excellency of what He is and does” (“Miscellanies,” no. 87, Townsend, pp. 128–29).
73 Edwards tells us that the “being of a closing with and adhering to Christ lies more in the transitive acts of a principle of union … than in that principle itself (“Miscellanies,” no. 819, Yale MSS).
74 “Miscellanies,” no. 247, Townsend, p. 129. The implications of this point for the new long-standing debate about the nature of Edwards's “idealism” cannot be discussed within the scope of this paper. Let it simply be said that in seeing the complete actualization of an entity as being brought about via experience, Edwards does embrace a kind of idealism. However, he is also a realist in holding that the essence of an entity has a mode of reality as a real possibility even before its full actualization. Edwards, therefore, cannot be categorized as a subjectivistic idealist. For a recent discussion of the issue, see Rupp, George, “The ‘Idealism’ of Jonathan Edwards,” HTR 62 (1969) 209–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
75 Implicit herein is a relational and dynamic conception of beauty. Beauty is neither some static quality in the object nor something that is only in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is rather the total relational reality/process constituted by the coming together of the relational tendencies of the object and of the subject. Not that beauty has no objective structure; the point is rather that the objective structure of beauty is relational and dynamic, and that it becomes fully explicit via a creative experience. (For a similar interpretation, see Delattre, Beauty, 22–26.)
76 See “Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World,” Works (1868), 2. esp. pp. 199–211Google Scholar, 252–57. For a fuller treatment of the ontological and theological implications of Edwards's concept of habit, see the author's unpublished thesis, 243ff.