ABSTRACT
Literary critics in the nineteenth century became interested in establishing the view that science was a legitimate source of the ethos of criticism. Writers of the eighteenth century would have been perplexed by this formulation, since 'criticism' then designated an operation of taste and appreciation rather than the pursuit of empirical knowledge. Between the Augustan age and the twentieth-century formation of modern literary studies, however, there was an influential strain of scientific thought mixed in with mainstream literary theory and criticism. Coleridge's thought has two important legacies for post-Romantic scientific literary criticism. The first of these is the notion of organicism; the second is the language of mental association, which many mid-Victorian writers, both critical and literary, continued to use freely. Herbert Spencer, among others, also recognized the appeal of an empirical approach to literary texture. Spencer's entire intellectual system was shaped by evolutionary theory, though 'The Philosophy of Style' is not especially inflected by those concerns.
