A family is a domestic group of people, or a number of domestic groups, typically affiliated by birth or marriage, or by comparable legal relationships including adoption. There are a number of variations in the basic family structure. The nuclear family consists of husband and wife and their children, while the extended family includes grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Other family patterns include polygamous (usually patriarchal) and single-parent families (usually headed by a female).
Throughout history, families have been central to human society; a key indicator of a society's well-being is the health of its families. For this reason, as stated in Article 16(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "The [family is the] natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State." The family is the basic social unit for the expression of love between man and woman and the creation and raising of children. The family tames the wilder impulses of men to the responsibilities of fatherhood, enables young women to blossom as mothers, and cultivates morality in children. Moral virtues, empathy, and good human relationships are learned in the family.
All religions recognize the importance of the family and have moral teachings that support it. Some religions regard the family as an institution created by God for people to perfect themselves, become like God and experience oneness with God.
The family is universally formed to protect and nurture children. Although the term "dysfunctional" has often been applied to the family in modern times, in fact, the vast majorities of families produce viable, peaceable, and productive citizens. Children in average families outperform children in institutional settings according to numerous developmental measures, most importantly impulse control and pro-social behavior.  The three- or four-generation extended family, including grandparents in addition to parents and children, provides a rich network for human relationships and great support for the raising of children and continuation of the lineage.
Fostering the human need for love and intimacy is an important purpose of the family. The family is generally viewed as a haven from the world, supplying "intimacy, love and trust where individuals may escape the competition of dehumanizing forces in modern society." The family protects individuals from the rough and tumble of the industrialized world. The family is where warmth, tenderness, and understanding can be expected from a loving mother and protection from the world can be expected from the father. These purposes have declined as income levels allow for economic security independent of family support and as individuals enjoy increased civil rights and opportunities to pursue happiness outside the family setting.
Nevertheless, the family remains irreplaceable as the primary locus of love and personal fulfillment. Martin Luther termed the family "the school of love." It is in the family that people can realize love in all its dimensions: children's love for parents, love among siblings, conjugal love, and parental love. As people's hearts are cultivated through their family relationships, they can find fulfillment in their lives beyond what they could attain as unattached individuals.
The family is also the primary school of virtue, where children learn manners, obedience to their parents, helpfulness to their siblings, care for their younger siblings, and so on. More lessons are learned in the school of marriage and still more in the school of parenthood. Anthropologist James Q. Wilson has called the family "a continuing locus of moral instruction…we learn to cope with the people of the world because we learn to cope with members of our family." The family provides the socialization and character education required of good citizens, who practice these same virtues in the larger contexts of society.
However, family life can also magnify people's shortcomings. Family dysfunction can cause such emotional damage that people will risk everything to escape their families. Some lose confidence in family life and choose the option of remaining single. Indeed, there has never been an ideal human family. Christianity explains that this ideal—represented by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden—was lost at the Fall of Man. Marxism holds that the family is a structure of human domination. Nevertheless, utopian attempts to replace the family with collective social structures, viz the Kibbutz, have not had long-term success.
For better or worse, human beings seem to be programmed to live in families. Research indicates that most Americans (71 percent) still idealize the traditional family even as they grow more accepting of divorce (78 percent), cohabitation (49 percent), and single-parent families. Margaret Mead, based on her anthropological research, affirmed the centrality of the family in human society:
As far back as our knowledge takes us, human beings have lived in families. We know of no period where this was not so. We know of no people who have succeeded for long in dissolving the family or displacing it.… Again and again, in spite of proposals for change and actual experiments, human societies have reaffirmed their dependence on the family as the basic unit of human living—the family of father, mother and children.
The family is the primary means through which most people cultivate their character and learn about love. The family of origin is the context for a child's lessons about love and virtue, as he or she relates to parents and siblings. The challenges of marriage and parenting bring further lessons. Precisely because of this crucial role in character development, family dysfunction is the origin of some of the deepest emotional and psychological scars. Experiences of childhood sexual abuse, parents' divorce, and so forth lead to serious problems later in life.
The family structure provides the basic context for human development, as its members take on successive roles as children, siblings, spouses, parents, and grandparents. As educator Gabriel Moran put it, "The family teaches by its form." These different roles in the family describe a developmental sequence, the later roles building upon the earlier ones. Each role provides opportunities to develop a particular type of love, and carries with it specific norms and duties.
The heart of a son or daughter develops from that of a very young child and matures through a lifetime—from the toddler who clings trustingly to his or her parents’ hand to the adult child who nurses his or her elderly parents in their last years of life. Yet the essence of the child's love for parents remains the same: a heart of attachment, veneration, appreciation, and love that deepens and becomes more conscious and responsible over time.
In the East, a child’s devotion toward his or her parents is called filial piety and is considered the root of all goodness and morality. Confucius taught that responsiveness to one’s parents is the root or fountainhead of rén (仁), empathy for human beings in general.
Attachment theory says that children form "inner working models" for all future relationships from the interactions they have with their first caretakers—usually their mothers. Empathy is learned from following and imitating the expressions and levels of emotions expressed by mothers as they play with their child, soothe their child, and respond to the infant's needs. The first developmental "crisis" of trust versus mistrust, as Erik Erikson put it, is resolved positively by a parent's caring responses to her child. This crisis can also have a negative outcome—leading to a lifetime of mistrust—when parents fail to care adequately, either because they are preoccupied with their own personal issues or are just plain self-centered.
As the child grows, he or she internalizes the parents' values. Out of love for them and desire for their approval, the child learns obedience, self-control, cleanliness, diligence in doing schoolwork, and respectful behavior towards people and property. The child's developing attitude towards his or her parents will profoundly influence later attitudes toward authority figures in society, and also, for believers, the mental image of God. Studies of altruism following World War II showed that there was but one common factor among the people in Europe who risked themselves to save Jews from Nazi horrors: each rescuer had a warm, strong bond with one or more parent.
Conversely, children who are neglected or abandoned by their parents suffer from general moral impairment. Studies of children who were raised for the early years of their lives in institutions found them to be inordinately cruel to one another and to animals and severely lacking in impulse control, especially of aggressive impulses. They were often "unable in later years to bind themselves to other people, to love deeply."
In average families there is ambivalence in the love between a child and his or her parents, especially as it develops into the adolescent years. Children are quick to pick up on any hypocrisy in their parents. Hence, there is need for parents to be exemplary in loving their children and demonstrating in their own lives the ideals that they would wish to pass on to them.
Child's love reaches a new stage of maturity when he or she becomes an adult. New comprehension and sympathy for the parents may come as the son or daughter becomes a spouse, a breadwinner, a parent, a middle-aged caretaker of others, and a responsible community member. The child recognizes his or her debt to the parents and begins to repay it with gratitude. Mature children's love may also involve taking up the parents' unfinished tasks and unrealized dreams, desiring to make the parents proud of them and leave them a legacy.
The dynamic of a family changes when a sibling arrives on the scene. The older child in a family is challenged to shed layers of self-centeredness to respond to and keep the approbation of the most significant others—the parents. His areas of self-love are further impinged upon by the presence of another on the scene. He must learn many of the most important lessons of sibling’s love—to share, to give, and to forgive. These lessons will be of major importance in later life, especially in marriage.
Parents can help an older child become more other-centered in the early days of having a sibling by including the older child in the baby’s care, thus activating altruism and its rewards in the child’s heart. Benjamin Spock explains, “One of the ways in which a young child tries to get over the pain of having a younger rival is to act as if he himself were no longer a child, competing in the same league as the baby, but as if he were a third parent." By encouraging the older child in this, "the parents can help a child to actually transform resentful feelings into cooperativeness and genuine altruism."
The natural inequalities and differences between siblings—of age, ability, and positions in a family—can be sources of friction or contexts for growth. The older sibling has had a head start on garnering the attention of the parents and has greater command of things in the home. Now he or she must learn to give a portion of these advantages to the younger one. A younger sibling, on the other hand, is born sharing. He or she necessarily becomes other-focused in order to form an affiliation with the more powerful older sibling(s). Siblings must learn to cope with disputes over the use of possessions, taking turns, physical and verbal aggression, and other moral issues.
Parents have a central role in ameliorating sibling rivalries by affirming each child’s value in a manner consistent with the naturally unequal positions of elder and younger. Yet, it may be challenging for parents to show equal regard for siblings of widely differing abilities or moral qualities.
In cultures that practice primogeniture, codifying the distinction between elder and younger siblings into the norms of family life, the eldest son receives more privileges, but he is also expected to bear greater responsibility for the family's welfare. Younger children are expected to show deference to their elder siblings, but they can expect guidance, care, and leadership from them. When there is a fight between elder and younger, the father will scold the younger, "Respect your elders!" but then in private he will punish the elder sibling, whom he holds most responsible for the incident.
A certain amount of sibling rivalry is to be expected, but whether it is channeled into constructive competition or destructive jealousy depends on how they are raised by their parents. When parents are negligent, a festering sibling rivalry can even result in fratricide, as in the Bible's story of Cain and Abel. Another biblical story, the parable of the Prodigal Son, contains a moment of parental intervention to diffuse a sibling rivalry when the father affirms his equal love for both sons, the faithful and the prodigal (Luke 15:25–32).
Sibling relationships are training for living in a world of diversity. Though born of the same parents, siblings often differ from one another widely in temperament, personality, tastes, preferences, talents, and even political leanings. Living amidst a large or extended family provides training in tolerance, charity, and acceptance of differences. It helps ingrain the lesson that although people differ, they are fundamentally related and may still treat one another with respect, appreciation, and love based on their common bonds.
Marriage encourages and requires a high degree of other-centered love. No relationship prior to marriage has the same potential for human oneness, and thus no other relationship entails the same demands for surrender of the self. In this way, marriage promotes true love, which is to live for the sake of others.
The passion of romantic love in the early years of marriage is meant to foster the habit of self-surrender and care for one's spouse. Yet few marriages survive for long on passion alone. Commitment and effort by each partner are required to make a marriage last. Marital expert Judith Wallerstein said, “A marriage that commands loyalty…requires each partner to relinquish self-centeredness.” Catholic psychologist Marshall Fightlin asserts that it is the daily task of a husband to “mortify” the impulses to act like a single man and to concern himself with his other—his wife. Thus, marriage requires renunciation of all other romantic or sexual relationships in favor of the spouse; it also means renunciation of many aspects of one’s own habits and attitudes that interfere with a life shared with someone who is physically, emotionally, and mentally "other"—a member of the opposite sex.
Paradoxically, renunciation of the self in favor of the other enriches and enhances the self. Joy and excitement are increased. Theologian Karl Barth taught, “It is always in relationship to their opposite that man and woman are what they are in themselves.”
It stands to reason that virtue or good character is the bedrock of a happy marriage. This finding is backed up by research. According to Wallerstein, "Happiness in marriage meant feeling respected and cherished…based on integrity. A partner was admired and loved for his or her honesty, compassion, generosity of spirit, decency, loyalty to the family, and fairness…. The value these couples place on the partner’s moral qualities…helps explain why many divorcing people speak so vehemently of losing respect for their former partners." Marital therapist Blaine Fowers says, "As I have observed many different couples, I have become convinced that strong marriages are built on the virtues or character strengths of the spouses. In other words, the best way to have a good marriage is to be a good person."
Religious teachings hold that marriage also brings a couple closer to God. The rabbis taught that the union of a man and a woman into one person or one flesh is the only full representation of the image of God. Karl Barth discerned a theology of marriage in the Trinity: God exists in a community of three persons, so a solitary, isolated human being without a counterpart is necessarily incomplete. Many religious teachings advise couples to put God at the center of their marriage, to provide them the strength to persevere through the vicissitudes of life together. At times when one's spouse may seem like one’s worst enemy, faith can provide couples with the emotional resources to be patient and forgiving, and to continue steadfast throughout the years.
Parenthood makes sacrifice an ordinary part of life. A father takes an extra job to afford a house with a yard or save up for his child's college education; a mother who formerly spent hours on makeup and stylish dresses sits happily with tousled hair and a stained shirt while her toddlers clamber around a messy house. Parents sacrifice their interests, plans, and dreams to attend to their children's needs. As one child psychologist said, "If it is to be done well, childrearing requires, more than most activities of life, a good deal of de-centering from one’s own needs and perspectives."
Being a good parent requires patience and forbearance, as when answering their child's 50th question in a row while trying to prepare dinner. It requires firmness and fortitude, as when their defiant 15-year-old demands to know why he or she is not allowed to stay out late when all of his or her friends are doing it. The responsibility of caring for children bring out latent moral qualities in parents, presenting "opportunities to love when I would rather be alone, to be gentle when I would rather be efficient, and to surrender when I would rather be in control." The experience spurs on the parents' growth in heart.
Becoming a parent is a life-altering transition. Being totally accountable for the welfare of one's children gives parents a different outlook on life. Eldridge Cleaver, a former Black Panther who was trained as a communist in the former Soviet Union, experienced such a transformation when his daughter was born. Surely, he thought, this beautiful child, and the love he felt for her, were not products of economic forces. It reawakened Cleaver's belief in God. Parenthood likewise affects attitudes on social issues, which now must take into account how those matters will affect the lives of the next generation. One survey found that the most marked differences of attitudes on cultural issues are between those who have children and those who do not. These differences transcend economic, political, racial, and other demographic factors.
Good parenting requires harmony between husband and wife. A harmonious partnership allows the parents to integrate the complementary dimensions of parental love—the warm supportiveness of a mother's love and the firm and challenging qualities of a father's love. Research has shown that a balanced approach to parental authority pairs high levels of compassion and care with an equally high degree of firmness. Psychologist Diane Baumrind calls this “authoritative parenting.” She found that children of authoritative parents are the most well adjusted and well behaved.
Parental love is a definition of unconditional love. Parents give and give and forget what they have given, compelled by their love to give more. Parental love is fraught with risk, for there is always the possibility of loss. Fathers and mothers cannot anticipate how their children will turn out—as children have free will. In spite of it all, parents' continual caring is the surest lifeline for even the most incorrigible child.
Grandparents are an invaluable source of rootedness for a child. Children who have relationships with their grandparents are more trusting, calmer, and quieter than those who do not. Grandparents are the link to all that has gone before and they give a sense of continuity and reassurance. Grandparents help children to know what life was like long before they were born—where they have come from and the kind of people they have sprung from. They are the family's link to the chain of history.
Grandparents can provide a safe haven when their children and grandchildren are experiencing turbulence in their relationships. Certain of who they are, grandparents stand for verities of the human experience that go beyond current fashions.
The heart of grandparents has an innate need to give from their lifetime storehouse of knowledge and experience to nurture and enrich the younger generations. Erik Erikson and his colleagues have characterized the primary challenge in old age as one of "integrity versus despair," with the possibility of culminating in a profound awareness or higher sense of self. By giving to their grandchildren, they can experience their personhood as that which "transcends time-bound identities." Those who do not have grandchildren will often seek surrogates for the same reason. By sharing their stories, insights, and values with the young generation, grandparents receive affirmation and comfort that their legacy will live on.
Despite controversies over what the "family" is, there is considerable evidence about what the consequences of family life are for individuals.
Men and women who are in their first marriages, on average, enjoy significantly higher levels of physical and mental health than those who are either single, divorced, or living together. Social scientist James Q. Wilson explains:
Married people are happier than unmarried ones of the same age, not only in the United States, but in at least seventeen other countries where similar inquiries have been made. And there seems to be good reasons for that happiness. People who are married not only have higher incomes and enjoy greater emotional support, they tend to be healthier. Married people live longer than unmarried ones, not only in the United States but abroad.
Married people, whether men or women, enjoy higher levels of sexual pleasure and fulfillment than do single people. Among the various life spheres Americans report as being sources of a "great deal of satisfaction," studies consistently show family life as the most important. Three-fourths of Americans interviewed claimed that family life was their most important value, in surveys by Yankelovich between 1973 and 1981.
All things being equal, children with married parents consistently do better in every measure of well-being than their peers who have single, cohabiting, divorced, or step-parents. Being raised by a father and mother is a stronger indicator of well-being than race, economic, or educational status, or neighborhood. According to the Center for Law and Social Policy, a child advocacy organization, "Most researchers now agree…studies support the notion that, on average, children do best when raised by their two married biological parents." Evidence points out that:
Marriage and family life have been shown in numerous studies to have a variety of health benefits for both adults and children:
In traditional societies, the family was the primary economic unit. This persists for rural families, where every family member has a role in agricultural production. This role has diminished in modern industrialized societies; nevertheless it persists. Among immigrant families, the mom-and-pop business offers economies of labor. The contemporary trend towards dual-earner households, necessitated by the decline in real wages in the United States, reinforces the importance of the family for wealth creation.
Married people are wealthier than their unmarried peers. They earn more money and are more likely to invest some of what they earn. They make more reliable employees, and so get promoted to better positions.
Strong families have long been grounded in religious values, for religion provides many buttresses to strengthen family bonds. In his letter to the Ephesians (5:25), Saint Paul likened the virtues of love in a Christian marriage to the love of Christ for the church. It is, first and foremost, a giving love, a sacrificial love that resembles the love of Jesus. Christian marital love has been characterized as “a love that seeks to give way to the other whenever possible.” Thus religion, by cultivating character virtues such as steadfastness, responsibility, and modesty, and by promoting the ethics of sacrifice, humility, and charity, provides valuable support for family members as they seek to maintain lasting love amidst the demands of family life.
The family's efficacy for personal growth is such that some religious traditions equate honorable and loving relationships in the family with a template for a person’s right relationship with God. In the Talmud, for instance, it is written, "When a man honors his father and mother, God says, 'I regard it as though I had dwelt among them and they had honored me'" (Kiddushin 30b). Confucius said, “Surely proper behavior toward parents and elder brothers is the trunk of goodness” (Analects 1.2). Jesus encouraged his disciples to relate to God as a loving father, calling him "Abba."
Furthermore, traditional religious teachings lift up the expectation that marriage should last a lifetime. They decry divorce as a moral failure. "I hate divorce," declares God through the prophet Malachi (2:16). When Muhammad was asked about divorce, he said it was "the lawful thing that God hates most" (Hadith of Abu Dawud). When Jesus was asked about divorce, he said that God only allowed it because of people’s hardness of heart, and that it was not His way "from the beginning," adding "What God has joined together, let no man separate" (Matthew 19:5–8). Religions likewise condemn sex outside the context of marriage and family, teaching that it violates the sanctity of marriage and creates difficult entanglements of soul and spirit that can interfere with a person's eventual marriage.
These normative teachings provide both resources and sanctions that predispose traditional believers to maintain and make the best of even a difficult marriage. Not surprisingly, religion and family tend to go hand in hand. A 2004 survey by the National Marriage Project (Rutgers University) found that married men are more religiously active than unmarried men. Nearly half of married men say that they go to religious services several times a month, versus less than a quarter of unmarried men. Compared to unmarried men, married men are also significantly more likely (75 percent versus 59 percent) to agree that "children should be raised in a religion." Also, unmarried men who attend religious services several times per month or more are more disposed to marry.
Nevertheless, it is not the case that religious belief is the main factor in maintaining strong families. Believing does not always translate into the morality of daily life. Religious affiliation ranks fourth among the factors that reduce the risk of divorce, as shown in the following U.S. statistics (the norm without any of these factors is a 50 percent divorce rate):
|Annual income over $50,000 (vs. under $25,000)||-30%|
|Having a baby seven months or more after marriage (vs. before marriage)||-24%|
|Marrying over 25 years of age (vs. under 18)||-24%|
|Own family of origin intact (vs. divorced parents)||-14%|
|Religious affiliation (vs. none)||-14%|
|Some college (vs. high-school dropout)||-13%|
Studies in the psychology of religion suggest that how one practices religion, or "what kind of religion," is more significant for the quality of family relationships than how strongly one believes in a religion, or "how much religion." Participants with rigid, literalistic or guilt-driven approaches to religion reported an increased emphasis on control, difficulties in communication, and lower levels of marital satisfaction. In contrast, participants who identified with and maintained an open approach to religious sentiment and tended to promote independence in their children, were more likely to have affectionate and warm relationships with their children, and experience increased marital satisfaction.
While religious faith leads some people to be less accepting of alternative family patterns, it can also promote compassion for people struggling in less than ideal family situations. In every faith, God offers forgiveness to sinners, especially those who sincerely wish to mend past mistakes. There is recognition that the ideal of the God-centered family runs up against the corruption of the human heart due to the Fall of Man, which caused widespread difficulties between men and women, parents and children ever since. Almost all the families in the Bible seem to be dysfunctional to one degree or another, and the protagonist is sometimes challenged to overcome a festering family problem—Jacob and Joseph are two notable examples. Therefore, the centering of marriage upon God and striving to practice true love—divine love—within marriage can be viewed as a redemptive act that opens the way to divine healing and personal growth. For believers who practice a life of faith, marriage and family can be a blessing, a restorative relationship to heal the most primal of human wounds and open the way to future hope.
According to sociology and anthropology, the primary function of the family is to reproduce society, biologically and socially. For children, the family plays a major role in their socialization. From the point of view of the parent(s), the family's purpose is to produce and socialize children within a culture. However, producing children is not the only function of the family. In societies with a sexual division of labor, marriage and the resulting relationship between a husband and wife is necessary for the formation of an economically productive household. In modern societies, marriage entails particular rights and privilege that encourage the formation of new families even when there is no intention of having children.
The structure of families can be classified into four major types: consanguineal, conjugal, patrifocal, and matrifocal. (Note: these are ideal types. In all societies there are acceptable deviations from the norm, owing either to incidental circumstances such as the death of a family member, infertility, or personal preferences.)
French sociologists Frédéric Le Play (1806-1882) and Emmanuel Todd have studied the connection between family type and social values. Le Play developed a four-fold typology of the family, each which inculcated a certain set of values. These values are passed on as each generation unconsciously absorbs the values of their parents. Todd added some additional types and went on to demonstrate that a country's adoption of a particular political ideology—liberal democracy or communism or fascism—correlated with its family system; and he even hypothesized "the ideological system is everywhere the intellectual embodiment of family structure."
Thus, a people's love of liberty or acceptance of authority is determined by the relationship between fathers and sons in the family. If a grown child continues to live with his parents after marriage, forming a vertical relationship within the extended family, such a family is regarded as 'authoritarian'. Within the family and within the society respect for authority has a high premium. On the other hand if a grown child leaves his family, marries and sets up an independent household, this family model is regarded as 'liberal' as it, and the society composed of such families, puts a high premium on individual independence.
Furthermore, the relationship between brothers inculcates the ideal of equality or acceptance of inequality as the natural order of things. If inheritance is by custom the equal division of the parent's property among the sons, they form egalitarian relationships. If the inheritance is by custom weighted towards the eldest son, so that brothers naturally accept the inequality among them, the values of the society include an acceptance of inequality.
Todd found a surprising correspondence between Le Play's typology of family structures with the country or region's dominant social and political values and institutions:
These findings from anthropology seem to support the view that the family is the foundation of society and its values. Todd theorized that social and political arrangements such as are found in liberal democracies or in socialist states are, "a transposition into social relations of the fundamental values which govern elementary human relations" in the family.
Today, many people tend to idealize the two-parent nuclear family as the ideal family structure. The man typically is responsible for income and support, the woman for home and family matters. Social conservatives often express concern over a purported decay of the family and see this as a sign of the crumbling of contemporary society. They look with alarm at the dramatic increase in households headed by single mothers and by same-sex couples. Yet anthropologists point out that these are merely variations on family types that have existed in other societies.
Even when people bypass the traditional configuration of father, mother, and their biological children, they tend to follow its patterns anyway, showing the fundamental need they feel for its structure. Couples live together and raise children, even children from previous relationships. Same-sex couples assume masculine and feminine roles and demand legal recognition of their unions; many seek to adopt children. Homeless children tend to congregate in gangs that serve as surrogate families. On the other hand, as families universally are built around the marriage bond and the responsibilities for raising children, there would seem to be some rationality to giving preference to the two-parent nuclear family—particularly over family structures headed by only one parent. As James Q. Wilson has stated:
In virtually every society in which historians or anthropologists have inquired, one finds people living together on the basis of kinship ties and having responsibility for raising children. The kinship ties invariably imply restrictions on who has sexual access to whom; the child-care responsibilities invariably imply both economic and non-economic obligations. And in virtually every society, the family is defined by marriage; that is, by a publicly announced contract that makes legitimate the sexual union of a man and a woman.
In other words, while single-parent and matrifocal families form a recognizable type, they are not the first choice where there is the possibility of forming stable two-parent families. However, where men are not strongly bound to the family unit, i.e., where a culture does not support lasting marriage or where economic hardships cause men to be apart from their wives for long periods of time, this family type becomes prevalent.
By the same token, societies where patrifocal families are the norm are vulnerable to movements for women's rights and human rights that attack marriage arrangements that do not give wives equal status with their husbands. This may lead, in the long run, to the decline of polygamy.
In many cultures, the need to be self-supporting is hard to meet, particularly where rents and property values are very high, and the foundation of a new household can be an obstacle to nuclear family formation. In these cases, extended families form. People remain single and live with their parents for a long period of time. Generally, the trend to shift from extended to nuclear family structures has been supported by increasing mobility and modernization.
Still, some argue that the extended family, or at least the three-generational family including grandparents, provides a broader and deeper foundation for raising children as well as support for the new parents. In particular, the role of grandparents has been recognized as an important aspect of the family dynamic. Having experienced the challenges of creating a family themselves, they offer wisdom and encouragement to the young parents and become a reassuring presence in the lives of their grandchildren. Abraham Maslow described the love of grandparents as "the purest love for the being of the other."
The emotional pull of these intergenerational encounters remains strong even for those who have split off to form nuclear families. Individuals who leave the village and their extended families for the economic benefits of life in the city may feel a sense of isolation and a longing for the thick relationships and warm love of the extended family of their origin. This suggests that, economic issues aside, people are happiest living in extended families, or in nuclear families that treasure close bonds with their kinfolk.
A strong nuclear or extended family provides a haven of love and intimacy. It offers maximum opportunities for personal growth through its matrix of relationships—with spouse, parents, grandparents, siblings, and children. A strong family provides a social support network that its members are able to rely on in times of stress. The rise of single-parent households due to the absence of husbands represents reversion to a different family structure, one that is prone to isolation and provides weaker social support.
The two-parent family is important in the development of children and beneficial to their mental and emotional health. A strong conjugal bond between the parents provides the child security and a model for conjugal love to which he or she can aspire. The father's steady and responsible provision for the family provides a positive male role model for boys and a model of an ideal husband for young girls. Thus from an early age, children gain a positive sense of self-worth, sexual identity, and confidence about their future. Divorce or the chronic absence of one parent teaches the opposite lesson: that life is insecure, that the child is not lovable, that the child cannot hope for a successful marriage, that men are irresponsible and unsuitable as marriage partners, and so on. Statistically, children of single-parent families have a higher incidence of criminality, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, and depression.
The extended family provides a superior alternative to the nuclear family in many cultures, expanding the family dynamic intergenerationally. Grandparents offer a unique form of support to the family, both to the parents and to the children. When a newly married couple moves far away from their parents, establishing their own nuclear family, isolation from their extended family may prove stressful. Families in which three generations interact in close harmony provide the greatest support for successfully raising children, connecting them to their family traditions and giving value to their lineage.
All links retrieved October 15, 2013.
New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:
Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.


Bagpipes in Peacetime
by Greg Dawson Allen
The clann (children)
A patriarchal system has existed in the highlands and borders for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Under the social organisation of the clann chief each member or tenant had his or her own position, role and status. Those attending to the chief and his family included a harper (or clarsach player as in the Gaelic) and a bard or poet, then latterly, with the introduction of the bag-pipes to Scotland around the 15th century, a clann piper.
Stories abound of notable bards who composed intricate verse in honour of victory in battle, at times of bereavement and in general praise of significant events, or, of reverence and gratitude to the chief. The bardic verse rallying men and women to battle is much older than that of the role of the piper. Tyrtaeus, the Lacedomian (680 BC) was the composer of five books of war verse. Tacitus, the Roman scribe, describes, albeit with some flattery to his father-in-law, Agricola’s achievements including Calgacus’s speech to his Pictish warriors before the decisive battle of Mons Graupious (allegedly fought at the foothills of Bennachie in 55 AD) as well as one notable poem celebrating the work of Arminius, an heroic figure famous for his struggles for freedom. (LOGAN P222)
The piper and his bagpipes followed on from the harper and bard. The hills and glens were appropriate for an instrument meant to be played in the great outdoors. Playing the bagpipes indoors was, more or less, a lowland and English custom. The fierce sound of the Piob Mhor takes on a natural sound as it joins in with the sounds of the wind and the river. Even when, during social occasions, the piper played the dance or entertainment was held out of doors. (MANSON P82/83) As with the bard and harper, the piper held prominence beside the clann chief and often son followed in father’s footsteps and position.
The MacCrimmons were perhaps the best known of the distinguished piping families. In all seven generations of pipers and seven years of personal tuition was required for bestowing the true title of Hereditary Piper. (MANSON P257) The MacCrimmons were the pipers to the family of MacLeod of Dunvegan in the Island of Skye. The progenitor of the MacCrimmons was said to be of Italian descent from Cremona in Italy, with the unlikely name of Donald, who arrived in Scotland and settled in Glenelg on the west coast on the opposite side of the Minch from Skye.
Supposedly his son, Iain Odhar became the first of his line of the great MacCrimmon pipers to MacLeod of Macleod. Other heredity pipers include the MacKays of Gairloch and Raasay, the Rankins (Clann Raing) in Mull, who were descended from Clann MacLean of Duart and went on to become pipers to the MacLeans of Coll after the former lost lands in the early 18th century. The list also includes the MacIntyres of Rannoch, the Cummings of Badenoch and Strathspey, who were official pipers for that clann until the Jacobite defeat at Culloden in 1746, and the MacArthurs, pipers to the MacDonald of the Isles.
The MacCrimmons and the MacArthurs were said to have been the finest pipers and exponents of the piobaireachd and history relates great rivalry between the families for supremacy. Both the MacCrimmons and the MacArthurs had colleges for piping students; the former on the farm of Boreraig, eight miles south west of Dunvegan Castle on Skye, the latter at Ulva near Mull. For the MacCrimmon pupils seven years study was necessary in their apprenticeship. The pupils had a solitary designated area of open space in which to practice the scales and tunes on the chanter, the Small Pipes and Piob Mhor before being allowed to perform for their Master Tutor. The college at Ulva had four rooms; one for cattle, one for guests to stay, one for practice and one specifically for the use of students. In both cases the countryside was preferred for practice as was, and still is, deemed correct for the Piob Mhor. (MANSON 272-274)
Incidentally, the bards too had to devote much time and effort to their learning. Bardic studies in Ireland lasted twelve years before being given the title of “Bard”, and learning comprised of committing to memory sixty thousand verses which they had to be able to recite on the command of the chief. The notion that clann society was ignorant and backward could not be further from the truth. (LOGAN 223)
Piobaireachd or Pibroch, as Sir Walter Scott phonetically introduced the word into his text, means "pipe playing", but it is the Ceol Mor – the Great Music, the classical repertoire of the bagpipes and is separated from the Ceol Beag (Little Music) of the reels, strathspeys and marches.
There are three further distinctions, which categorise the composition
of the piobaireachd:
Joseph MacDonald in his “Compleat Theory Of The Scots Highland Bagpipe” published in 1803 gives a variation on the terminology "Invented and taught by the first Masters of this instrument in the Islands of Sky and Mull".
Poirst Tinali (Port Tionail): A gathering of the Highland Clans
Cumhe (Cumha): A lament
Failte: A salutation.
Connections with the types of music played on the bagpipes can also be made with the cruit (harp). The god Dagda played "The three things whereby cruit-players are distinguished".
Sleep-strain: Music to induce sleep
Smile-strain: Music to bring laughter
Wail-strain: Music to shed tears.
In piping music the three definitions can be interpreted as lullaby, dance tune and lament.
Piping teachers of the 15th century wrote no music. Instead, their students learned to hear and translate the music to their instruments by ear alone, becoming instinctive to the tuning, tunes and intricacies of the piece. Music was taught in the musical and oral tradition, and although a pupil may have a particular skill with the pipes, if he could not learn to play by ear and retain the tunes, then he had little future as a piper.
Teaching was in three parts, all of which took place in the open air:
At first the students were taught and asked to repeat the ‘words’ known as the Canntaireachd, spoken in syllables.
The second stage saw the students fingering the tunes on the chanter as heard from the Canntaireachd.
The third stage was to ease the tune from the chanter by blowing.
The last, and ultimate challenge, was to play on the full set of pipes – the Piob Mhor.
Individual teachers had their own method and style of teaching. The MacCrimmon’s Canntaireachd was written down in 1828 by Captain Neil MacLeod of Gesto, containing twenty Piobaireachd.
A proficient player of the bagpipes can sight read the Canntaireachd and immediately transpose the ‘urlar’ ( ground or theme) to music. The vowels represent notes and the consonants finger movements or grips that ornament them. (PURSER)
In combining the versatility of the intricate varieties of grace notes and vibrating capable on the bagpipes, the piper can use the nine notes available and play a tunes from the Canntaireachd containing more than sixty syllables. An example from Captain Neil MacLeod of Gesto as taken from John MacCrimmon, piper to the old Laird of MacLeod and his grandson, the late General MacLeod of MacLeod is as follows;
COGHIEGH NHA SHIE – WAR OR PEACE
(The True Gathering Of The Clans)
I hodroho, hodroho, haninin hiechin,
hodroha, hodroho, hodroho hachin,
hiodroho, hodroho, haninin hiechin,
hodroha, hodroha, hodroha, hodroha,
hodroha, hodroho, hodroho hachin,
hiodroho, hodroho, haninin hiechin,
hodroha, hodroho, hodroho, hodroha,
haninun, haninun, haninun, haninun.
Ist. Var. I hodroho, hodroho, haninin, hodroho,
hodroha, hodroho, hodroho, hodroha. . . .
And so forth for another six blocks with instructions for ‘Doubling’ and ‘2nd, 3rd and 4th Variations’ with a final “Crouluigh Mach” or “Finishing Measure” which could be compared with an ‘Envoy’ which finalises a Sonnet in poetry;
hiodratatateriri, hodratatateriri, hiendatatateriri, hodratatateriri,
hadratatateriri, hadratatateri, hodratatateriri, hadratatateriri,
And so on.
Canntaireachd remained in the oral tradition of song and music for the past two centuries, but a tutor published in 1803 attempted to set the difficult and often carefully guarded methods of piping in print.
Sir John Murray MacGregor, Chief of clann MacGregor and Auditor General of Bengal found the ‘Treatise’ written “In the course of a tedious voyage to India” in Bengal.
The writer was Joseph MacDonald, an officer in the service of The India Company. It was compiled over three years, between 1760 and 1763 by MacDonald, the third son of the eleven children of the Reverend Murdo MacDonald, minister in the parish of Durness in north west Sutherland. (DONALDSON 2)
"The Compleat Theory Of The Scots Highland Bagpipe" was published in 1803, posthumously by Patrick MacDonald, brother of Joseph, as MacDonald died in Calcutta of a malignant fever at the young age of twenty four. He would never see his work in print. (MACDONALD. HIGHLAND VOCAL AIRS PREFACE).
Joseph MacDonald was born on 26th February 1739 and music featured largely in his childhood, being able to lead the psalmody in the church of Durness by the age of eight years. As well as the pipes, Joseph could play the fiddle, flute, and oboe, and was gifted in learning; he could speak and write French, Latin and Gaelic.
Through his father’s far-reaching contacts, the fifteen-year-old Joseph was sent to study at the grammar school in Haddington in East Lothian. He kept up his musical tuition, studying under the classical Italian violinist and composer, Nicolo Pasquali.
It is for the bag-pipes, however, that Joseph MacDonald is remembered. ‘The Compleat Theory Of The Scots Highland Bagpipe’ has become a fitting legacy for the young MacDonald, this being the first publication of its type and so specific was it that it is of a standard other exponents in the same field strive for today. There was very little MacDonald left out in his manuscript, the title page listing the contents:
"A Compleat Theory of the Scots Highland Bagpipe"
Containing All the Shakes, Introductions, Graces, & Cuttings which are peculiar to this Instrument.
Reduc’d to Order & Method: fully explain’d & noted at Large in 58 Tables & Examples.
The Piper in peace time
The Piper in peace time, whether attached to the clann system or not, had an important role in day to day society. At celebrations, such as anniversaries and weddings, the piper had a privileged position. In the 19th century the piper piped in the morning of the wedding and followed the bride and groom as they separately led processions of their relatives and friend around the houses. The joining of the couple in marriage heralded a united march through the neighbourhood. The title of ‘piper’ eventually gave way to other occupations and in the much sought after skills of his music his daily trade was set aside to provide the entertainment.
"I am a jolly miller
I come o’ the millers o’
And if you do not know me
My name is Willy Spro,
I play upon the bagpipes
Wi’ mickle mirth and glee
And I care for nobody, no, not I
And nobody cares for me"
The piper was also present at the more sombre occasions of funerals. A lament on the pipes accompanied the coronach, a mournful recitation of cries in remembrance of the dead, immediately after the death. (MANSON 152)
The coronach gradually faded into obscurity but the presence of the piper continued, particularly in Aberdeenshire. The death of a clann chief in the highlands brought the whole population of the area to the graveside. The death of a chief in Skye was recorded as having a procession of two miles in length with six men walking abreast. Apparently seven pipers were in attendance and played the lament, each placed along the route from the house to the cemetery; "Upwards of three hundred gallons of whisky was provided for the occasion, with every other necessary refreshment." (MANSON 153)
A parody of the last Will and testament of Andrew Kennedy by William Dunbar, "Testament Of Mr Andro Kennedy", describes custom pertaining to customs of the Carrick district of Ayrshire and is representative of Wills of the 15th century; it follows a strict format, firstly commending the soul to the Lord God in Heaven, secondly, makes provision for the deceased’s request for the burial, thirdly, dispenses goods and chattels to friends and relatives, and lastly, outlines plans for the funeral:
"I will na preistis for me sing,
Dies illa, dies ire, Na yit na bellis for me ring
Sicut semper solet fieri,
Bot a bag pipe to play a spryng
Et unum ail wosp ante me
In stayd of baneris for to bring
Quatuor lagenas cervisie,
Within the graif to set sic thing
In modum crucis juxta me,
To fle the fendis than hardely sing De terra plasmasti me."
Dunbar, "Maister", as he was known was present in the court of King James IV but little is known of him other than his poetic works and regular accounts of salary paid to him by the Royal Treasury. He is believed to have died just prior to 1515.
The piper was, and still is, a lifter of the burden of dreary toil, and brought a respite from the physical and mental drudgery of hard labour. In 1786 squads of workers, linking communities together, with passable stone based roads each had a piper to help ease the tedious, heavy lifting. Likewise, the launching of a boat across single beaches was aided by the piper setting a rhythm to which the men could co-ordinate their efforts as one. The reapers during harvest welcomed the steady pipe music to assist in the swing of their scythes, and, in the celebrations of the “Meal an’ Ale” when the harvest was in, the piper was an honoured guest, to take the farm workers’ minds off the bleak winter ahead.
Many of the Scottish travelling people are exponents of the bagpipes and incorporate the music of the pipes in their style of singing the “Muckle Sangs” or big ballads. Here they are overlapping one tradition with another – that of storytelling and music, and presenting the whole in accented story/song, sung with true feeling and realism. The kirk session, the great defenders of Scottish morality, served to document local social issues and it is from these sources that the piper can be identified as the “Deil’s” provider of music and dancing;
"A winnock bunker in the east,
There sat Auld Nick in shape o’ beast;
A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large,
To gi’e them music was his charge;
He screw’d the pipes and gart them skirl,
Till roof and rafters a’ did dirl."
Robert Burns, when writing “Tam O’ Shanter”, conjured up the spirit of the presbytery’s opinion on the bagpipes and their use for providing music for dancing. Probably most elders of the Kirk session didn’t oppose the use of pipes, preferring the “skirl” of the pipes to the chant of the psalms.
The bagpipe in the late 18th century and early 19th century was as common place in the western highlands as the fiddle was in the bothys and houses in the east. However, neither were exclusive to any one place and, where entertainment was to be had, music, in all its forms was called upon.
Puirt a beul (mouth-music), diddling and cantering, all consisting of nonsensical verses, but which kept a time without the elaboration of balladry words, were engaged in creating a jovial atmosphere. (CANNON 105)
The Small Pipes were more commonly used indoors for dances but neither the players of the latter or the Piob Mhor were refused at any social event.
The most frequently performed dances of both east and west were the Reels (ruidhle), Jigs and Strathspeys.
The Reel, usually a combination of a three person dance, using a figure of eight configuration, is said to be the oldest and of Norse origin. In a piper’s repertoire the Reel is played in Alla Breva time, 2/2, with two beats to the bar. Jigs are composed in 6/8 time and are fast in tempo. The tradition of the Jig is more upheld in Ireland where it is also a solo step-dance. Piping tutors in Scotland, printed in the 19th century, on average, contained around twenty Jigs within a hundred tunes, but the decline in the Jig saw, in 1900, only five Jigs per one hundred tunes. Strathspeys are more associated with the fiddle but equally have their place in pipe music. A distinctive style of Reel, the Strathspey had prominence in Aberdeenshire and in districts around, also in Deeside, Moray and Buchan. The Strathspey Reel uses extreme “pointing”, dotted rhythms played as if double dotted with a reverse accent made (as in fiddles playing) with the bow. The Strathspey for the pipes are mainly arranged from the original fiddle tunes. (CANNON 110-112)
One of the best known tunes for both pipers and fiddlers, to which the Rev. John Skinner of Longside in Aberdeenshire in the 18th century added words, is “Tullochgorum”, described by Robert Burns as , “The best Scotch song ever Scotland saw.”
"What needs there be sae great a fraise
Wi’ dringing, dull, Italian lays;
I wadnae gie our ain strathspeys
For half a hunder score o’ them;
They’re dowf and dowie at the best,
Dowf and dowie, dowf and dowie,
Dowf and dowie at the best,
Wi’ a’ their variorum;
They’re dowf and dowie at the best,
Their allegros an’ a’ the rest,
They canna please a Scottish taste
Compared with Tullochgorum."
The piper in Scottish society from the Highlands to the Borders is an accepted and welcome figure. His, and her position is set upon a solid foundation of fact and folklore and a staunch musical and bardic tradition, which, can be said, has occurred, historically speaking, in recent times. Yet, to try and untwine one tradition from the other would be impossible as one is inextricably bound in the other and therefore inseparable.


Preromanticism refers to the period in European literature that occurred between the Augustan age and the era of Romanticism, covering the years from approximately the middle of the eighteenth century to the early 1790s. In this period rigid notions about style and the absolute authority of religion and science began to yield to an emphasis on personal thoughts and feelings, often triggered by observation of nature. The search for meaning led within, to the probing of the mind and a focus on the inner self, and to an individual, personal interpretation of the world.
While controversy has abounded in many aspects of discussion of Preromanticism, there are some areas of general agreement, including subject matter. The scholar Bertrand H. Bronson has offered a list of favorite topics of the Preromantics: "Country Pleasures, Times of the Day, Seasons of the Year; Abstractions—Fancy, Solitude, Sleep, Death—inviting description, evoking feeling, tempting the moral comment." Bronson also quotes Josephine Miles's example of an ideal poetic sentence for the time, a construction she based on statistical count and analysis of the works of the Preromantic poets: "Rise, fair day, before the eyes and soul of man." Bronson points out the use of the invocatory form of the verb and "the tendency to apostrophize and implore" as characteristic of the period.
The Preromantics also highly stressed the idea of originality in writing. Many poets of this period felt restricted by the precedents established by classic works of the past and the prevalent attitude that the greatest literature had already been written. Walter Jackson Bate has argued that it was because of having to face the question "What is there left to write?" that the Preromantics so emphasized the ideals of originality and sincerity. No one championed these ideals more than Edward Young, who extolled subjectivity in his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), urging that poets look within for originality and not attempt to copy the ancients. Nature served an important role in realizing these goals; for example, in James Thomson's nature poetry, the poet experiences the world primarily through his senses and eventually comes to realize his part in it. According to Margaret Sherwood, Thomson's work represents "a new self-consciousness in regard to nature…. Here is beauty, no longer an abstract conception of fitness of organism to its use, but a joy, brought home through the senses, which stir feeling and mild reflection." Some scholars have gone so far as to state that the concept of the self was "invented" shortly after the middle of the eighteenth century, and that before that people thought of themselves mainly according to their set roles in society rather than as individuals. According to John O. Lyons, this self "first was treated as the whole organic complex of the perceiving being in sympathetic relation to the world around it. Such a concept of the self was expressed in the concern with the passions, the minute perception of human motive, and the reality of nature, for it assumed the efficacy of inductive science."
Yet the emphasis on self did not create self-centeredness to the detriment of others. To the contrary, the Preromantics believed that the person who sought self-knowledge would became more sympathetic to the suffering of others. Feelings were emphasized to such an extent that man began to relate to nature and animals on a different level than in previous times, to actually feel akin to them and sympathize with them. In the immensely popular "novels of sensibility" there was great emphasis on sentiment and sympathy, with plot being little more than a means of setting up a context for these feelings. Howard Mumford Jones has described the standard themes in novels of sensibility as "undeserved poverty, divine benevolence, or virtue in distress." He has enumerated some of the plot devices of this genre as "the orphan of mysterious but noble parentage, attempts at seduction or rape, imprisonment in jail or convent," forced exile, and many others, often shared with Gothic horror novels. Interest in the uniqueness of individuals also extended into respect for folk culture, and an area that gained great attention was the collection and preservation of folk songs. Robert Burns, for example, devoted much of his later life to transcribing and editing old Scottish airs. The Preromantic period also saw an unprecedented demand for histories and biographies; personal details that would previously have been thought outside the proper scope of literature were now deemed acceptable.
The use of the term Preromanticism has been adamantly debated by scholars. Some prefer to call the period the age of sensibility, others the post-Augustan era, while others deny that it should be considered a separate period at all, viewing it as simply occurring late in the Augustan era. Bronson and other critics have pointed out the problems in defining the terms Augustan and Romantic, and therefore the difficulties in attempting to define either "post-Augustan" or "Preromantic." Even though Augustan and Romantic are theoretically opposites, in practice, "post-Augustan" and "Preromantic" are often used interchangeably. In arguing against the term Preromantic, Northrop Frye has written: "Not only did the 'pre-romantics' not know that the Romantic movement was going to succeed them, but there has probably never been a case on record of a poet's having regarded a later poet's work as the fulfillment of his own." Many scholars have pointed out, however, that the terms Romantic and Romanticism were not used by the writers in question themselves, but are of later origin, and the same is true of the term Preromanticism. A lively debate continues regarding Preromanticism, as does critical interest in the writers and works associated with the period.]
Margaret Sherwood (essay date 1934)
SOURCE: "Some Phases of Development of Thought in the World of Letters in the Eighteenth Century," in Undercurrents of Influence in English Romantic Poetry, AMS Press, 1971, pp. 28-113.
[In the following excerpt from a work originally published in 1934, Sherwood describes how eighteenth-century authors reacted against prevailing religious and scientific notions through a new emphasis on subjectivism.]
The great flowering of poetry in the so-called romantic period of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries in England was not a sudden portent; growth was swift, but not sudden. More and more the student turns back to the eighteenth century to study origins, trace influences, search out undercurrents of thought, that he may better understand that rich, complex, modern product. Throughout a great part of this century groping for fuller life is revealed in the form and in the content of the poetry that is written; wandering in that world of letters of the mid-eighteenth century is like wandering in the forest when spring draws near, when one hears a faint murmur and rustle of life, everywhere an air of expectancy, of awaiting. As the century goes on there is increasingly a reaching out for fuller existence, a release of human nature from the bonds of convention, a slow liberation of emotion, imagination, and the deeper powers of the human mind. Such conditions prevail only when great ideas are stirring beneath the surface, waiting to emerge.
Today our thought and our imaginative insight are dominated by evolutionary conceptions; our tendency is to interpret all aspects of man's life in terms of growth and development; to think of the past as indissolubly bound up with the present; we are constantly questioning, in every department of thinking, how things came to be. Our literature, our scholarship, our philosophy, our psychology reflect these habits of mind. It is of singular interest to turn back to a period when these ideas did not prevail, to try to trace, in the minds of a few thinkers, incipient stages of these tendencies, to follow the deepening life of the thought of man as his very vocabulary changes from abstract rationalistic terms to terms of growth; fascinating to question whether the tendency which developed into the historical method in the humanities, into the evolutionary conception in science, may not have manifested itself in minor forms, in subtler ways; to question literature here and there to see in how far it reveals the slow changing of the very texture of man's thought, as a consciousness of process, of life opening out endlessly, replaces the desire for abstract finalities of judgment. Back of all the varied apprehensions of growth, of life in things, lies the ground idea of our modern thought, of the oneness of the universe, which finds its spiritual counterpart in the idea of the close interrelatedness of all human lives, society as one; as the idea of physical development, evolution, finds its counterpart in the idea of spiritual evolution. In searching for glimmerings of these ideas in the period to which we turn, no claim is made that the writers in question were the first to suggest them. This is a dangerous assertion to make in regard to any idea, and especially in regard to evolutionary ideas, which go back to the very dawn of man's thought, in Greece.
In the early eighteenth century certain reactionary tendencies begin to appear against the prevailing modes of thought of the preceding century. We of the complex present have difficulty in finding our way back into the simplicity and objectivity of seventeenth century thought, in its dominant trend. One knew where one was in that period; law was law, and conformity was expected of the right-minded citizen. The dogmas of church and of state had the authority of long tradition; science was establishing its creed of unquestionable law throughout the physical universe; kings were upon their thrones, the critics upon theirs, and absolute power in carrying out decrees was as evident in the world of literature as in the political world. It was not, outwardly, a world of perplexity, of mystery; all was clear and above-board. Whatever your private reserves, your duty was not to thread your way through intricate mazes of speculation in regard to the ultimate realities, or in regard to matters of right and wrong. Reason was adequate to reach the truth of things; duty was conformity, at least of one's outer or official self, to an objective standard; one gave official consent to creeds established by law. Wandering back to that world of hard, definite mountain outlines and unshaded plains, we should feel as lost in it as did Sir Thomas Browne, with that questioning mind: "I love to lose myself in a mystery; to pursue my reason to an O Altitudo!" …" Where there is an obscurity too deep for our reason, 'tis good to sit down with a description, periphrasis, or adumbration."
His distinctive figure, standing in the market-place at Norwich, with a look of whimsical thoughtfulness upon his face, might well symbolize that human instinct that will not down, that is forever alert in periods of dogmatic certainties as in others, searching beyond the found. He was not alone in that seventeenth century in pursuing thought to an O Altitudo! but he and his like were not the dominant voices. The seventeenth century had its mystics; the outcast philosopher Spinoza had achieved that which would compel future generations to think more deeply; the thought of Plato and of Plotinus was creeping in through the influential Cambridge group, to become more and more potent in the minds of certain thinkers in later days,—the subtlest and the most pervasive influence helping bring about the romantic movement in literature and in philosophy.
But the dominant note was the note of outer authority. Periods of over-assurance are weather breeders; too clear a sky is a sure token of mysteriously dispersed clouds that gather quickly, and over-confident assertion is the mother of doubt. The coming of new moods, new mental attitudes, new inquiries that meant, in time, the breaking of the certainties, was but natural sequence; submerged currents of thought and feeling began to emerge; men reached out to new ways of conceiving and interpreting life; questioning of every kind of authority went hand in hand with search for deeper truth than any formula, political, scientific, philosophic had yet found. The slow approach of revolution in every department of thought ended, toward the close of the eighteenth century in a period that was revolution indeed. Contemplation of that outer world of illimitable spaces and certain movements that had been gloriously revealed by seventeenth century science was not enough; men became increasingly conscious of realities that the laws of physics did not reach. Reason was supreme, but, in the skepticism of Hume, reason began to doubt itself, inquiring into the nature of the instrument by which these outer facts were known. The trend of speculative thought turned from without to within. In philosophy came a curiosity and desire to probe the nature of the mind, a movement that, toward the end of the century, in the philosophy of Kant, transferred the seat of authority from outer law to the human mind itself. The drift of interest in the world of letters was from objective to subjective; many were filled with longing to explore their own inner experience and that of others, to make conquest of the world within. From that standard of impersonality in the pseudo-classic canon of literature, that endeavor to present, in rendering human experience, only the typical, that which is true of all men, men passed to a belief in the profound significance of the personal reaction to life, the interpretation of the world as individually possessed; passed, too, from a conception of a law of form, imposed from without, to a conception of individual shaping power, working, imaginatively, from within. In science itself came a movement that, toward the end of the century, brought, not abandonment of the idea of universal law, but discovery that man must dig more deeply into the hidden nature of things to find reality of law; and the static conceptions of the seventeenth century began to give way to a tentative conception of the dynamic, of law at work within the universe, in incessant activity and change, the beginning of the modern idea of evolution. Dogmatic theology trembled, as it trembles still, at the thought of God, changing from that of a power, sitting apart in a long seventh day of rest, to that of a power still mysteriously working within.
Yet seventeenth century philosophy, seventeenth century science alike had their own awe-inspiring sublimities, which stimulated the minds and imaginations of men in ways which we have only partially divined. The vast oneness of all that is was a dominant seventeenth century affirmation; in metaphysics as in science, philosopher and scientist were groping toward the infinite along different trails. Spinoza in his Ethic (1677), affirmed the one absolutely infinite substance, God, as the only existence; while the scientific discoveries, the Copernican-Galilean revelation of the vastness of the universe, and of the laws that govern it, stretched the mind of man toward the infinite of the world of matter. To Galileo's proved vision of a vast system, one in its working, in which earth was only an atom, no longer the center of the universe, was added knowledge more significant still. Men's thought was different after Newton discovered the law of gravitation and, in his Principia (1687), revealed the interdependence of all that is, body answering body by virtue of an inner bond, reaching from inmost center to inmost center, known in its working but not in its ultimate nature, every atom affecting every other atom. No more important idea was ever launched; it deeply influenced thought, and not scientific thought alone.
Swiftly on the trail of the scientists' "what" followed, as usual, the speculation and affirmation of those who must know "why." Contemplation of the working of the laws of the universe revealed to certain thinkers that the old conception of God, inherited from the Hebrew people, was not great enough for the God manifest in the laws ruling through infinite space. These laws had been clearly demonstrated; the Deists, holding their reason adequate to solve all problems, imagined that they could demonstrate as clearly the God who made the law. Working back to the creator from the created, they claimed that no further revelation of him was necessary than that made manifest in his works. Out of questions regarding the nature of the universe, ruled, in both scientific and in theological thought, by power from outside, developed fierce debate. There was consternation in theological circles over the newly-discovered truths of science; in England the Deist controversy made up an important part of the thought of the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries, centering in the question of a God revealed through nature, versus a God revealed through Scripture; natural law versus supernatural happenings. Hard blows were given and received; and, as in "battles long ago," "much slaughter was of people on both parties"; "and either smote other in middes of their shields." "Then they stood together and gave many sad strokes on divers places of their bodies, and the blood brast out on many sides and places." The theologians were rather the victors, but, as is usual in the irony of life, their victory was loss; in grasping the weapons of their opponents, in over-rationalizing the religion they were defending, they went far toward deadening the very springs of faith in the Church they served. Out of the perplexity and turmoil of these troubled times emerged thought and feeling which were to have vast consequences in the literature of a later period….
Bertrand H. Bronson (lecture date 1971)
SOURCE: "The Retreat from Reason," in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, edited by Harold E. Pagliaro, The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972, pp. 225-38.
[In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1971, Bronson examines the eighteenth-century attack on reason as it led up to Preromanticism.]
Lest I stumble, and because the time is short, I will state at once the propositions I would try to illustrate in what follows. As generalities, they are unlikely to excite disagreement, and the interest must lie in the fluctuations of thought and feeling that differentiate those generations, chronologically viewed.
1. At the opening of the eighteenth century there is a weakening of conviction of the importance of man's personal relation to God the Father.
2. There is a depersonalizing of external nature, from the cooperative universal Mother to universal, unalterable physical laws.
3. There is a shrinkage of assurance of the potency of man's rational powers, no longer seen as "infinite in faculty," yet a keener sense of reliance on them.
As the century passes its meridian, values are gradually rescaled and redefined, roughly as follows:
4. Nature in a "state of nature" is preferred to nature domesticated.
5. Irregularity enforces a lawless appeal that surpasses rational ordering.
6. Sudden irrational conversion and conviction of salvation by faith returns to religion.
7. Emotional assurance tends to supplant the appeal to reason as expressed in logical trains of thought.
It may be laid down as an axiom, as Dr. Johnson would say, that everything had already begun before we realized. In the context of the moment, this truth if pursued would take me back straightway into the seventeenth century, where I have no wish to go, further than to acknowledge that the beginnings are there, Pyrrhonism and all.
About 1700 there was an unusually pervasive sense of the opening of a century as a true beginning: almost the birth of a "brave new world." The shadows and superstitions of the past were being dispersed by Newton's universal light, swept away like ghosts:
'Tis well an Old Age is out,
And time to begin a New.1
As Newton had disclosed the laws of celestial mechanics, Locke had found a key to the inner world, which could open the mechanics of the mind—or a clue, a method, if not a key. The new revelations, fortunately, did not require the sacrifice of cherished beliefs. Locke and Newton were devout. God was still Creator and Lord of all, and the natural universe bore witness to His power and glory: "The works of Nature everywhere sufficiently evidence a Deity," declared Locke. "The spangled heavens proclaim their great Original," sang Addison. But now the old ideal system of orders, each hierarchically ascending, and bound together in mutual cooperative obedience to divine command, needed reformulation in less spiritual terms—the political order in Britain having already been reconstituted by the simple stroke of an ax. The new world-view still assumed a Divine Author, but shifted the focus of attention, in Tuveson's phrase, from why to how He did it.
The prevailing optimism of the age rested in the conviction that the physical universe was based on natural laws which could be discovered—gradually—by man, and understood as being fixed, regular, unalterable procedures; not beyond the capacity of human mentality to grasp as principles, though too vast to be comprehended as a whole, and too complicated to be known except piecemeal; but not supernatural, not outside or alien to intellectual process as we know it. Underlying this confidence is faith—faith in the Creator, faith in the stability of Nature, and faith in rationality as humanly conceived. The supreme expression of this confidence is paragraph IX of the first Epistle of Pope's Essay on Man, beginning:
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.
Because of its very lack of philosophical originality, Pope's statement is a paradigm of its century's characteristic attitude toward the Cosmos; it was so widely accepted as to be translated into twenty languages, and into some of them many times. Catholics, Protestants, and deists could join in adopting it, punctuating or footnoting to suit themselves.
But when God said, "Let Newton be!" a part of His meaning perhaps was, "If undisturbed, he will look after things so competently that I can afford to relax." If, in other words, the physical universe was so perfectly organized as Newton had made manifest, it needed no divine tinkering to keep it going—had needed, did, and would need none. This thought, of course, had far-reaching implications that could be chilling. How could man know that he was an object of any concern or interest to a God so impalpable and aloof? It was easy to believe in a divine original, a causa causons; but revelation might be essential to convince us any longer of our own importance. On the other hand, the deist position was a great simplifier, liberating those who embraced it from a load of worrying theological dogma. The climate of optimism, an inherited feeling-tone common to the age, and not directly subverted by the new world-view, remained emotionally operative.
If there was a slackening in man's communion with a personal God as the Age of Enlightenment began, two concomitants—and perhaps, partly, consequences—were: (1) the elevation of Nature as a surrogate for a present, immanent Deity; and (2) a closer scrutiny of the thinking process. Descartes had failed to break out of the octopus-like stranglehold of seventeenth-century Pyrrhonism to any objective truth ("I thought, then perhaps I was," in Pierre-Daniel Huet's wicked paraphrase of 1689). But Locke had begun to collect the evidence of what seems normally to be going on in our minds, and this appeared to be a hopeful method and a stimulating exercise. Perhaps God had, after all, provided us with the necessary tools for acquiring knowledge suited to existence on this "isthmus of a middle state."
Following the hopeful track, Shaftesbury, Locke's too-bright pupil, discovered that man is naturally virtuous, sociable, beauty-loving. And why not? For proof, one need only consult one's uncorrupted responses to the positives and negatives of experience, and find where one's instinctive preferences lie. For Shaftesbury, to cultivate and possess the social affections completely is, in his words, "to live according to Nature, and the Dictates and Rules of supreme Wisdom. This is Morality, Justice, Piety, and natural Religion." It is only necessary, for everyone's good, to restrain the "selfaffections." Shaftesbury, Basil Willey declares, is the typical English moralist of the "Enlightenment"; and Hume notices that he first occasions the distinction between two theories of morals, "that which derives them from Reason, and that which derives them from 'an immediate feeling and finer internal sense.'"
Already, then, in the century's first decade, the breeze is setting toward "immediate, undefmable perception" as a more dependable criterion than reason, in moral discriminations as in questions of art. This tendency picks up strength from the academic authority and respectability of Hutcheson, who systematized Shaftesbury's elegant rhapsodizing. Sorley has neatly summarized his work in a sentence: "Hutcheson maintained the disinterestedness of benevolence; he assimilated moral and aesthetic judgments; he elaborated the doctrine of the moral sense…; and he identified virtue with universal benevolence: in the tendency towards general happiness he found the standard of goodness."2
To make the emotions a basis of ethics is something like inverting Pope's dictum to read, "Passion the card, while Reason trims the sail." To accept it, one must have faith in natural instincts, must believe in the morality of Nature, and that human nature, as servant of that divinity, is most moral when likest to her. Shaftesbury's impassioned invocation exemplifies the faith: "O Glorious Naturel supremely Fair, and soveraignly Good! All-loving, and All-lovely, All-divine! … Ï mighty Nature! Wise Substitute of Providence! impower'd Creatress! … Thee I invoke, and Thee alone adore."3 The date of this outburst is 1709. It could be part of the youthful Goethe's pantheistic hymn "Ganymed" ("Wie im Morgenglanze Du rings mich angliihst, Friihling, Geliebter!"), the pitch of exaltation is so close. How wholeheartedly Thomson would have endorsed this natural morality I must leave to Professor Cohen to determine. The Seasons is descriptive rather than prescriptive; but in general, Nature and God are not indistinguishable in Thomson, however harmonious; and I suspect that he would not have subscribed to the ethics of cultural primitivism. Nevertheless, the doctrine of the moral sense, as taught by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, was potent, both at home and abroad. It suited an age of sensibility, and increasingly as the century wore on. Anyone who has leafed through the amazing compilation of Margaret Fitzgerald, First Follow Nature, and the equally surprising survey by Lois Whitney of primitivistic popular fiction must realize how inescapable the sympathetic theme of rural felicity soon became.4
In contrast, Johnson placed the Golden Age firmly in pre-lapsarian days. His suspicions of hypothetical subsequent golden ages in conditions of pastoral life were confirmed by sociological enquiry in the Highlands and Western Islands, of which he gave a remarkably fair-minded and dispassionate report. Apart from human hardships and deprivations, his reaction to wild Nature deserves to be recalled in this connection:
Regions mountainous and wild, thinly inhabited, and little cultivated, make a great part of the earth, and he that has never seen them, must live unacquainted with much of the face of nature, and with one of the great scenes of human existence…; the imaginations excited by the view of unknown and untravelled wilderness are not such as arise in the artificial solitude of parks and gardens, a flattering notion of self-sufficiency, a placid indulgence of voluntary delusions, a secure expansion of the fancy, or a cool concentration of the mental powers. The phantoms which haunt a desert are want, and misery, and danger; the evils of dereliction rush upon the thoughts; man is made unwillingly acquainted with his own weakness, and meditation shews him only how little he can sustain, and how little he can perform.5
Very different was the purely aesthetic response of Gray to untouched natural grandeur. Extremely different were the sentiments and operations on Nature of the landscape gardeners of the age, whether Pope, or Shenstone, or Jago, or Capability Brown, or Repton. Pope had said,
But treat the Goddess like a modest fair,
Nor over-dress, nor leave her wholly bare;
Let not each beauty ev'ry where be spy'd,
Where half the skill is decently to hide.6
In fact, for such as these nature was something of a commodity to be altered at will and exploited to suit man's immediate taste and enjoyment. The point of view was not, any more than Johnson's, indicative of union with Nature. Rather, it was basically utilitarian, and exclusive of objectionable society. Only that part of external Nature was required that could serve as the club-house grounds. There were members privileged to use the grounds for health and pleasure, and others who worked on them for a livelihood, furthering thereby the aesthetic enjoyment of the members.
It is clear that the aesthetic tastes of the members were changing rapidly as the century proceeded. There was a growing appetite for more challenging, more esoteric, excitements than domesticated nature could supply. A clear preference was developing for the irregular—even the disorderly and wild.
A. R. Humphreys makes a startling generalization in his admirable little book on Shenstone: "The attack on geometry is perhaps the most significant fact of eighteenth-century aesthetics."7 Certainly, the statement could be amply illustrated in the arts of gardening, architecture, and interior decoration. As the decades pass, we can observe everywhere a relinquishing of mathematical rule, exact equations, right lines; and everywhere a liberation of fancy. There is nothing serpentine—or even symmetrical—about a subterranean grotto: "Would not this, Dr. Johnson, make a pretty, cool place in summer?" "Madam, I think it would—for a toad." Crudely put, the movement is from reason to imagination, from rational to whimsical. Simultaneously, the temperature gradually rises, the pitch of excitement increases—more often to hot tears than to laughter.
The signs of a will to escape from common daylight are everywhere. Into the Past, through Gothicizing (Strawberry Hill, Abbotsford, Fonthill Abbey) and bogus ruins in landscaping (Sanderson Miller,...
(The entire section is 10458 words.)
Bertrand H. Bronson (essay date 1953)
SOURCE: "The Pre-Romantic or Post-Augustan Mode," in ELH: A Journal of English Literary History, Vol. 20, No. 1, March, 1953, pp. 15-28.
[In the following excerpt Bronson details why no individual post-Augustan poet adequately exemplifies the Preromantic period.]
The topic that confronts us is one that carries doubt in its very face. "Pray," asks Christian, "who are your Kindred, if a man may be so bold?" "Almost the whole Town," answers By-ends; "and in particular, my Lord Turnabout, my Lord Time-server, my Lord Fair-spech…. Also Mr. Smooth-man, Mr. Facing-bothways, Mr. Any-thing; and the Parson of our...
(The entire section is 7968 words.)
Walter Jackson Bate (essay date 1946)
SOURCE: "The Growth of Individualism: The Premise of the Association of Ideas," in From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946, pp. 129-59.
[In the following excerpt from his highly influential work From Classic to Romantic, Bate describes how a new emphasis on feelings led poets to experiment with sympathy, synaesthesia, suggestiveness, and sublimity.]
"Poetry," said Wordsworth, "is the history, or science, of the feelings"; for it is the "heart" which seeks "the light of truth." A rather general reliance on feeling as a...
(The entire section is 20632 words.)
Christopher Fox (essay date 1988)
SOURCE: "Some Problems of Perspective," in Locke and the Scriblerians: Identity and Consciousness in Early-Eighteenth-Century Britain, University of California Press, 1988, pp. 7-26.
[In the following excerpt Fox examines changing views regarding personal identity and consciousness during the late eighteenth century.]
You deny that we have any Consciousness at all, that we continue the same individual Being at differ-ent times. If so; it can be to no great Purpose for us to dispute about any Thing; For, before you receive my Reply, you may happen possibly to be entirely changed...
(The entire section is 8424 words.)
Arthos, John. The Language of Natural Description in Eighteenth-Century Poetry. 1949. Reprint. New York: Octagon Books, 1970, 463 p.
Discusses the influence of natural science on eighteenth-century descriptive poetry, tracing the ways various poets shaped and transcended the conventional terminology of scientific description.
Bogel, Fredric V. Literature and Insubstantiality in Later Eighteenth-Century England. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984, 226 p.
Discusses many of the Preromantic writers in the context of the literature of sensibility.
(The entire section is 553 words.)