Criteria of Certainty: Truth and Judgment in the English Enlightenment by Kevin L. Cope (review)

254Rocky Mountain Review KEVIN L. COPE. Criteria of Certainty: Truth and Judgment in the English Enlightenment. Lexington: University Press ofKentucky, 1990. 224 p. Kevin L. Cope's book might well have as its epigraph Alexander Pope's famous tag, "A mighty maze! but not without a plan." He shares with his illustrious predecessor a desire to systematize knowledge and to lead readers to a better understanding of the plan—in Cope's case, the plan of explanatory discourse in seven English writers ofthe Restoration and eighteenth century. The writers are a diverse lot, and include the Earl of Rochester, the Marquis of Halifax, John Dryden, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Adam Smith. To chapters on each of these major figures, Cope adds a prologue and an epilogue, both of which situate his book squarely in the conduct of scholarly discourse in the late twentieth century. Though primarily what he calls a "history of explanation" (195), Cope's book joins the theoretical battle of contemporary critical wars without being mean-spirited or denigrating to others on the front lines. His temperance is to be admired and, if possible, emulated by others. His learning is almost astonishingly broad, and his knowledge encyclopedic. He is also quite current, citing numerous works, historical, critical, and philosophical, from the late 1980s and even several conference papers which have not appeared in print (216n.25, for instance). Among the major aims of this very ambitious book is to validate the study of philosophy in what has become, in our excessively schematized world, too often the study of belles lettres. By including writers who are not usually considered part of the literary canon, such as Halifax, Locke, and Smith, Cope insists on what probably would not have been questioned in the period under study: that writers carefully considered the philosophical implications of what they wrote, and that as later readers we must also consider these implications. If that project sounds a little old fashioned, so be it, as this book, though taking issue with many modern schools ofcriticism and with particular critics too numerous to mention, is determined not to be trendy. I believe that it will last the longer for that rare characteristic. Cope's style is lively and sprinkled with wit, but not always easy, as the ideas which he is trying to systematize (one ofhis favorite words) are not simple. (I perversely noted in one ten-page section, 152-161, that system, in one form or another, appeared an average of 4.5 times per page, not counting running titles.) He even makes his list of acknowledgements (essentially a long list offriends, including this reviewer though I had not seen any ofthe book prior to publication) lively and interesting. It may be the only scholarly book which includes a successful basketball coach, Dale Brown of LSU, in its acknowledgements. As a "history of explanation," the book succeeds very well, and in the process manages to undertake a major revision ofour thinking about Jonathan Swift, insisting "that Swift's major writings constitute a ratification of Locke's thinking rather than a satire on it" (115). It is not a good idea to read the chapters on each author as separate essays, as they are parts of a complex whole, though the chapter on Halifax is, quite simply, the best work that has been written on "the Trimmer." Cope's overall argument is that "late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers treated explanatory systems as a Book Reviews255 kind of master genre, that they regarded explaining and systematizing as a literary mode with a vitality and a methodology of its own" (2-3). The book has been well produced by the University Press of Kentucky, which balances its publication list between regional and wider interests. I have been able to find only three typos. Though the notes are voluminous and detailed, there is no bibliography, which I would have appreciated, but there is an index. The major criticism which I have ofthe book concerns part of its title, "the English Enlightenment." This seems to promise an argument on what this problematic term means, but Cope seems content to use it merely as an equivalent to...