ABSTRACT

We have already come across some examples of critics' failure to identify Richards' purposes. Failure to recognise Richards' abiding concern with heightening his readers' awareness led to such absurd consequences as Max Black's interpretation of the Canon of Actuality in neurological terms. It also allowed the faulty idea that Richards wanted a science of criticism to occur, as Mr. Blackmur for one believed.1 Connected with this is the failure to recognise what I can only call the experimental pragmatism of Richards' approach. In a sense all his books were exercises for the purposes of alerting his readers, making their minds grow. Therefore I think it is not true to say of Mencius on the Mind, for example, as Mr. Blackmur does, that its "real point ... is the impossibility of understanding, short of a lifetime's analysis and compensation [sic] the mechanism of meaning in even a small body of work".2