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Wit, Judgment, and the Misprisions of Similitude
- Journal of the History of Ideas
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 65, Number 1, January 2004
- pp. 53-75
- 10.1353/jhi.2004.0017
- Article
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This essay discusses the attempt by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British writers to achieve a clear definition of "wit." I provide a number of quotations from Hobbes, Locke, Pope, Addison, Dryden, and others to make the point that there was an unresolved tension between wit and judgment, imagination and reason, and rhetoric and philosophy, throughout the period.