William Wordsworth and Philosophical Necessity
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt both testified that William Wordsworth in his radical years believed in the doctrine of philosophical necessity. Prompted by that testimony, this essay undertakes a detailed reconstruction of Wordsworth’s necessitarianism. Wordsworth was most probably converted to necessity by his reading of William Godwin’s Political Justice. As a convert to the doctrine in its Godwinian formulation, Wordsworth would have accepted several ideas implicated in the necessitarian infrastructure of Political Justice: the human mind’s deterministic obligation to reasoned preference, the principle of universal benevolence, a marginalization of human agency and guilt, a prospective approach to ethical questions, and the inevitable triumph of reason and social reform. Wordsworth apparently believed in this complex of ideas only briefly, for the moral pessimism of Adventures on Salisbury Plain intimates a lapsing of the poet’s Godwinism, including his loss of faith in necessity, by late 1795. By 1797, however, Coleridge allowed Wordsworth to reclaim his necessitarianism by introducing him to an alternate version of the doctrine indebted to Hartleyan associationism and freed from its objectionable Godwinian features. Wordsworth grandly expounds this new version of philosophical necessity in 1798 poetry written for The Recluse, but then suddenly seems to lose interest in the idea. In concluding, the essay invokes both Coleridge’s 1799 dissatisfaction with necessity and Wordsworth’s later writing, especially The Excursion, to speculate about the poet’s reasons for finally rejecting the doctrine of philosophical necessity in late 1798.
Virtue of Necessity: Coleridge’s Unitarian Moral Theory*
c 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2005/10203-0003$10.00 Writing to Robert Southey in December 1794, Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared himself “a Unitarian Christian and an Advocate for the Automatism of Man.”1 This last phrase refers to David Hartley’s associationist explanation of human behavior as accommodated to Unitarian doctrine by Joseph Priestley, and implicitly summons the idea of Necessity that contemporaneous statements by Coleridge invoke. The poet told John Thelwall in May 1796, for example, that “Guilt is out of the Question—I am a Necessarian, and of course deny the possibility of it” (CL 1:213). Reconciling these two comments poses few problems: as the vehicles of an ineluctable Necessity, persons can easily seem to be automatons, lacking moral agency and incapable of incurring guilt for their actions. What poses considerable problems, however, is reconciling such statements with the notable recognition of guilt and evil apparent in other assertions from Coleridge’s Unitarian
Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and Wordsworth's Salisbury Plain
D'un echo, non seulement du Contrat Social dans A Letter to the Bishop of LLandaff, mais aussi du Discours sur l'Origine de l'Inegalite parmi les Hommes: influence de la vision de l'homme primitif de R. sur la conception wordsworthienne des rapports homme/nature.