Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: frontier instances
- 2 In Jonathan Edwards's room of the idea
- 3 Emerson's moving pictures
- 4 William James's feeling of if
- 5 Henry James's more than rational distortion
- 6 Wallace Stevens's radiant and productive atmosphere
- 7 Gertrude Stein, James's Melancthon/a
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - In Jonathan Edwards's room of the idea
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: frontier instances
- 2 In Jonathan Edwards's room of the idea
- 3 Emerson's moving pictures
- 4 William James's feeling of if
- 5 Henry James's more than rational distortion
- 6 Wallace Stevens's radiant and productive atmosphere
- 7 Gertrude Stein, James's Melancthon/a
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
External and internal sensations are the only passages that I can find of knowledge to the understanding. These alone, as far as I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this dark room. For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left … to let in external visible resemblances, or some ideas of things without; would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion it would very much resemble the understanding of a man.
John Locke, An Essay concerning Human UnderstandingTHE MIND FEELS WHEN IT THINKS
In 1948 Perry Miller published an essay entitled “Jonathan Edwards on ‘The Sense of the Heart’” around the text of one of Edwards's “Miscellanies,” no. 782, which bears the multiple title, “Ideas. Sense of the Heart. Spiritual Knowledge or Conviction. Faith.” In his essay, Miller stresses the importance of John Locke's concept of sensation for Edwards's development of his “sense of the heart,” and, indeed, as further scholarship has elaborated, Edwards's reading of Locke did provide one of the fundamental sets against which he would stage his thinking. Another set, equally significant but not yet sufficiently investigated in connection with the movement of Edwards's mind as it contemplated the origin and course of mind as itself one more, if not the greatest, of divine things, is his reading of Newton's Opticks and the impact of what he learned there about the nature and behavior of light.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Natural History of PragmatismThe Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein, pp. 24 - 61Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006