ABSTRACT
The early Enlightenment attributed it, by default, with a god-like capacity for total, unmediated perception: mind was presumed absolute, a priori and beyond all question. As thinking emerged from seventeenth-century rationalism, and shifted via materialist scepticism and negation towards nineteenth-century idealism, the Enlightenment realized its moment of truth. In this logical moment relations between subjects and objects, concepts and reality, intentions and behaviour, reason and feeling, humanity and nature, were all in flux. The Anglo/Scottish-French Enlightenment had been suspicious of poetry because it found its language unreasonable. When the British philosophers applied their psychology of perception to the artistic experience, their conception of mind as an empty vessel became suddenly filled, not with objective determinants but with subjective feelings. The seeds of nineteenth-century idealism were germinating around the middle of the eighteenth century in the writings of British aestheticians from Shaftesbury, through Hutcheson and Burke, to Wordsworth and Coleridge.
