Dr. Johnson and Science

REVIEWS 409 material from Hawthorne's own work. Sometimes he presents a series of details about minor characters which are -unrelated to the theme of the book, and sometimes his interpretation of the factual data is over-dramatic, but at least the book is lively r.eading. The Hawthorne enthusiast must thank Mr. Cantwell for his exhaustive research and for making the facts he has collected easily available. It probably will be long before any biography supersedes his as a storehouse or' Hawthorniana. And although he seems to have overdone it in this volume, his stress on the activ~ instead of the passive Hawthorne is a contribution towards a more balanced under-_ standing of the mystery of Hawthorne's personality. DR. JOHNSON AND rSCIENCE* Dorus B. SAUNDERS Philosophic Words> by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., is ·another significant, if somewhat specialized study to be ~dded to that ever growing cmpus of material known as Johnsoniana. Mr. Wimsatt, who is Professor of English and Fellow of Silliman College at Yale, is well qualified to- write this "Study of Style and Meaning in 'the Rambler and Dictionary of Samuel Johnson." It was completed during his tenure of a Guggenheim fellowship and is an extension of his previous book, The Prose Style of Samuel johnson. He writes with the sense of assurance that comes only to one who is familiar with the best of the published bibliographical studies and the important, but unpublished,. doctoral dissertations on the scholarly writers of the eighteenth century. The author informs the reader in the Preface that he will not find the familiar Boswellian anecdotes, but in this critical study of Johnson's prose, "a rich account of Johnson's philosophic mind.'-' It is at this point that we should, 'perhaps, define the meaning of "philosophic." "Throughout the present study," writes Mr. Wimsatt, "the terms 'philosophic' and 'scientific' will be used almost, but .not quite, interchangeably-the latter in contexts where the emphasis is upon experimental and physical origins, the former for the most part where the emphasis is on the dignity connoted by a kind of diction." Boswell, apparently, was so unacquainted with the sciences "that he failed completely to record an important side of John· son's character." This deficiency in Boswell left the way open for the present study: "an attempt to refine upon a widely current and traditional idea of Johnson's Latinate, abstract, and sesquipedalian diction; to expound the 'philosophical' implications of his diction.'' The author is also desirous that we should see the greater significance of this study as "of an age and intellectual climate." In .the historical sketch the author indic~tes that the English have always favoured pom·pous and grandiloquent diction. In the fourteenth *Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the Rambler and Dictionary of Samuel johnson. By W. K. WIMSATT~ JR. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1948. Pp. xx, 167. ($3.75) 410 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY century such words were referred to as "flourished," in the fifteenth as "aureate," in the sixteenth as "inkhorn," and in the seventeenth and eighteenth as "hard." An amusing parody of "inkhorn" is this from ·Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique: "You know my literature, you knowe the pastorall promotion, I obtestate your clemencie, to invigilate thus much for me, according to my confidence, and as you knowe my condigne merits for such a compendious living. But now I relinquish to fatigate your intelligence , with any more frivolous verbosities, and therefore he that rules the climates, be evermore your beautreux, your fortresse, and your bulwarke . Amen." It is not, however, with ''inkhorn" that Mr. Wimsatt is concerned but with the "hard" words which were brought into the vocabulary by the scientific and metaphysical writers of the seventeenth century who contributed to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Such philosophic diction is to be found in the writings of Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Wilkins, Newton, Browne, Arbuthnot, Chambers, More, Burnet, Ray, Bentley, and others. As most of these scientists wrote in both Latin and English, and translated much from the Latin, the vocabulary of science was naturally Latinized. Mr. Wimsatt is not the first to point out the fact that...