The English Augustans: The Life of Reason; Hobbes, Locke, Bolingbroke by D. G. James (review)

SHORTER NOTICES 207 present collection (which gives over 11,000 proverbs) is documented historically, after the manner of the NED, and incorporates not only Professor Tilley's own researches but also materials brought to his attention as an associate editor of the Early Modem English Dictionary at the University of Michigan. Besides the Dictionary proper, there is a bibliography of all the works used therein and two indexes, one for the important words appearing in the proverbs and the other (doubtless the most complete extant) for the proverbs used by Shakespeare. The book is not merely a monument of painstaking scholarship; it is a joy to look at and to handle, for its splendid format, and altogether one of the pleasantest things that have come in our way for a long time. SHORTER NOTICES The English Augustam: The Life of Reason; Hobbes, Locke, Bolingbroke . By D. G. JAMES. London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co. 1949. Pp. xiv, 272. $5.00. The literary reader of Mr. James's book will have the pleasure of discovering that these three essays on Hobbes, Locke, and Bolingbroke are, in their main intention, studies in the imagination. Mr. james's concept of the imagination is neo-Kantian. He thinks traditionally of the imagination as that faculty operating midway between sense and reason. Such an imagination may hold the image of experience, organize it somewhat in presenting it to the reason, and then finally, after the reason has done its best, keep that image as the symbol of an unfulfilled knowledge beyond the reason. Thus thing becomes image, becomes idea, becomes symbol. "The eternity of the ideas is imaged to the imagination in the symbols of time...." Mr. James has thought carefully and interestingly about the imagination, and he particularly illuminates the tension belonging to the menage of reason and imagination. In spite of the occasional domestic metaphor, this discussion is attractive as it makes its appearance in intervals through these studies, which are at once essays in biography, exposition, and aesthetic theory. It is one of Mr. James's contentions that none of these English Augustan philosophers had a place for the imagination in his system of knowledge. Hobbes was contemptuous of the faculty that, in his pages, passes under the description of "decaying sense." Locke was somewhat kinder to the concept of imagination, and one may almost find in him the pattern of "sense: image: idea: symbol." But Locke's terminology was of no help in fostering a real language of imagination, 208 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY and his unfortunate attack on "Enthusiasm," added to the last edition of the Essay in 1700, exercised a harmful influence in circles hostile to rivals of reason. On the whole, though, Mr. James is fond of Locke, and his essay on this central English philosopher is calculated to enhance a reputation. Of Locke he says, ':There is not in the history of English culture a more attractive person." But the reader will perhaps be even more attracted to Hobbes and Bolingbroke because of the author's sharp irritation with them as people and thinkers. Bolingbroke particularly is castigated for his want of sympathy with the high symbolic offerings of the imagination. It is a second, and perhaps somewhat different, contention of Mr. James that the deficiencies of the Augustan Age consisted principally in a failure to recognize symbolism. "I shall argue that the chief lack in the Augustan mind is that it was not aware of symbolism. ..." What Mr. James considers a want in that age may to others appear to have been its best advantage. Surely there is some pleasure now in looking back to a period when the prevailing intelligence refused to believe that man was importantly motivated by an imagery both obscure and sinister. Actually, of course, the philosophers of the Enlightenment told a great deal about matters relevant to modern symbolic systems. This is especially true of the English philosophers. To turn over these stones of rationalism is to find the modern age. Mr. James is not interested in turning over such stones. Vet surely the decaying sense of Hobbes, the associationism of Locke, and the positivism of Bolingbroke are...