ABSTRACT

Aristotle stated that to speak the truth is 'to say of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not.' The assumption that some form of analogy existed between the visible world and an invisible one prevailed in Western philosophy until the time of the Enlightenment. The worldly and imperfect particulars had correspondingly perfect divine forms. The fundamental scepticism that developed towards it was not a product of the challenge to ecclesiastical authority in the Reformation, or the Reformers' appeal to the ultimate authority of Scripture; it was the product of a quasi-divine perspective with which the Reformation has so often been implicated: the subjective turn of universality. A useful way of identifying how this revolutionary universality was adopted into the credos of Romantic poetics is to trace the effects of this change in cosmological thinking.