Search

Recent scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment has emphasized the increasing importance, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, of the concept of race. Yet race was a conceptual, moral, and taxonomic puzzle for Scots intellectuals such as Adam Ferguson (1723-1816). While the influence of Ferguson's published works has received wide scholarly attention, the content of his teaching has not. His surviving moral philosophy lecture notes offer us a window into the development of thought on race at the disciplinary intersections of moral philosophy and natural history, and the crossroads of Edinburgh's curricula and Britain's Empire.

In recent works on the Enlightenment and the origin of modern Western thought, there is often a dichotomy between Moderate versus Radical Enlightenment. This essay evaluates the early experiences of freedom of print in Sweden and Denmark against the backdrop of such assertions. Sweden and Denmark were widely diverging polities but they obtained officially recognized freedom of the press at almost the same time. The conclusion is that by the second half of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, whether "Radical" or "Moderate," had created a universal paradigm shift.

This article examines Volney right before and after 1789. Placed together in their intellectual historical context, his works in this period - Travels in Syria and Egypt (1787), Considerations (1788), and The Ruins (1791) - offer a valuable guide into the workings of the "Enlightenment narrative" of "European" and "Oriental" history at the critical juncture of the age of revolutions. The image of Volney as a progressive stadial historian and optimist revolutionary hereby cedes its place to that of Volney the worried republican indulged in the heroic attempt to find a way to build a free and stable polity.

Rosenblatt questions whether Pocock's Barbarism and Religion, though enormously learned and rich, in fact accomplishes Pocock's stated aims. In other words, does the context presented help to explain the intended meaning and significance of Gibbon's Decline and Fall? She asks whether Pocock's methodology, indebted to the Cambridge School, is consistent and serviceable and challenges his claim that Gibbon should be seen as a member of the "Protestant Enlightenment."

In this essay I wish to explore the relation in the German Early Enlightenment between philosophy and theosophical knowledge-more precisely, between rationalistic philosophy, "perennial philosophy"(philosophia perennis), and pristine knowledge (prisca sapientia). I will examine this relation through the prism of one of the German Enlightenment's most renowned and influential works-Christoph August Heumann's Acta Philosophorum, with emphasis on the chapters on the history of philosophy and on the philosophy of the ancient Hebrew patriarchs.Historically speaking, these two discourses-the history of philosophy and perennial philosophy-did not emerge in the German Enlightenment but were rather a direct continuation of previous centuries. Both of them, however, underwent considerable changes in the eighteenth century. The debate on the "perennial"corpus, which was regarded as containing true and authentic wisdom, a-historical in its essence, began in the fifteenth cen-tury with prominent figures such as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, and continued well into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with Johannes Reuchlin, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Agostino Steucho, and others.1 By "perennial knowledge"I refer here not only to Hebrew and Christian Kabbalah, which flourished in Europe in the seventeenth century and played a crucial role in discussions on the origins of knowledge in the eighteenth century, but also to other corpora whose knowledge had been regarded authentic: This includes the Corpus Hermeticum as well as eastern (Chaldean, Persian, Egyptian, Chinese) wisdoms gathered under the umbrella of prisca sapientia.2 These Corpora enjoyed an authoritative status since the fifteenth century despite several attempts to discredit their worth and value, as in the case of Casaubon's criticism of the Corpus Hermeticum.3 They contained knowledge regarded as "esoteric" and hidden behind the written word but which was actually accessible to all. Their authoritative status enabled a rather free oscillation between "ancient wisdom" and "philosophy," especially in seventeenthcentury models of the history of philosophy such as Thomas Stanley's History of Philosophy (1655-62), Georg Hornius's Historia Philosophica (1655), Ralph Cudworth's The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), and Thomas Burnet's Archaeologiae Philosophicae (1692).This integrative view began to change in the late seventeenth century, especially in Germany. The rise of Thomasius's eclectic school and "literal history" (historia literaria)4 brought forth attempts to differentiate between sorts of knowledge. An essential aspect of these endeavors addressed the distinction between the "perennial" corpus and philosophy in the Cartesian sense-that is, systematic thought based on reason and rationality, which makes use of methodical doubt to reach clear and distinct conclusions. The growing predominance of reason and its relation to the source and quality of knowledge necessitated a re-examination of models of knowledge transmission and transformation. After all, perennial knowledge receives its authority not only through its antiquity, which serves as proof of its authenticity, but also through the fact that its source is divine. All famous sources of Hebrew Kabbalah-the Zohar, Bahir, and Sefer Jetzirah (Book of Creation), to name three representative examples-were considered to have been written by prominent Hebrews through personal revelation. Christian Kabbalah felt it was able to affirm Christianity's basic principles through Hebrew Kabbalah because of the latter's divine source. The same goes for the Hermetic tradition. Perennial knowledge is thus theosophical and as such contains an a-priori true truth-value that cannot be scrutinized by reason. Conversely, philosophical thinking cannot accept such knowledge as relevant. Even if we regard the ability to exert reason in order to reach conclusions as a divine act of grace-a rather common view among Protestants in the beginning of the eighteenth century-the conclusions or "demonstrations" we draw are not transmitted through revelation. …

This article argues that Kant's essay on enlightenment responds to Moses Mendelssohn's defense of the freedom of conscience in Jerusalem. While Mendelssohn holds that the freedom of conscience as an inalienable right, Kant argues that the use of one's reason may be constrained by oaths. Kant calls such a constrained use of reason the private use of reason. While he also defends the unconditional freedom of the public use of reason, Kant believes that one makes oneself a part of the machinery of the church or state by swearing an oath to and assuming a position within those institutions.

David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).Jeffrey D. Burson, The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).Ulrich Lehner, Enlightened Monks: The German Benedictines 1740-1803 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).Thomas Ahnert, Religion and the Origins of the German Enlightenment: Faith and the Reform of Learning in the Thought of Christian Thomasius (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006).In the decade since 2003, when a special issue of the American Historical Review heralded the return of religion to Enlightenment studies,1 the steady stream of books and articles restoring religion to the Enlightenment- alongside a parallel stream of review articles, conferences, and conference panels-has continued unabated.2A definitive history of this historiography's recent rise to prominence has yet to be written, but from the lofty perspective suggested by the general enterprise's very terms-"restoring religion to the Enlightenment"- the multiplicity of its many authors' individual arguments and purposes resolves into some basic shapes and trends that suggest a now familiar story. The Enlightenment, this story goes, has long been regarded as a moment in which the Western world took significant steps toward modernity, steps that involved the diminution of something commonly identified as religion. These steps include the rise of theoretical defenses of religious toleration and separation of church and state as a means of limiting the state's power to enforce religious observance, the rise of atheism and the diminishment of respect for revealed religion under the onslaught of biblical criticism and philosophical skepticism, and the emergence of powerful critiques of the spiritual and political prerogatives of the clergy, to take but a few examples. This type of modernization narrative is old but resilient. One of its best-known exponents, Peter Gay, retains his canonical aura and remains a point of departure for critics and admirers alike,3 and newer exponents of similar narratives abound. The Enlightenment has been described in recent years as witness to the liberation of humanity from divine-command theories of moral obligation4; the demise of the Christian church's cultural authority and of theology's long-lived dominion over the other sciences5; and the emergence of modernity within an intellectual underground inhabited by atheists, radicals, freethinkers, Spinozists, and other opponents of the established churches.6Over the past several decades, explicit or implicit attempts to push back against narratives like these have taken a variety of approaches. One has been to point out the various ways in which religion remained important through the eighteenth century and beyond.7 It continued to function as a principle of social cohesion and political legitimation with a major role to play in politics, culture, and people's everyday lives,8 and the Bible in particular retained its authority even as withering denials that it contained the word of God prompted German Protestant theologians to refashion it into a pillar of Western culture.9Another approach has been to stipulate the term enlightened religion or religious Enlightenment, largely in conformity with older histories of eighteenth-century Christian theology, to refer to theologians and theologies characterized by, among other things, respect for natural science; antipathy toward creeds; alertness to the dangers of fanaticism and superstition; promotion of religious toleration; and confidence that revealed truths, to the extent that they are not superfluous, do not contradict truths discoverable by human reason examining the natural world.10 This approach resonates with the religious connotations of Aufklarung''s eighteenth-century usage. …

In this paper I address the question of why the everyday experience of seeing verticals converge remained taboo in Western visual culture until the late nineteenth century and in painting until the 1920s. I argue that perspective theory was fused to a pre-Copernican, architectural model of space and a static model of vision based on Enlightenment optics rather than physiology. The dynamism of modernity and technologies of embodied vision such as the stereoscope exposed the covert assumptions of perspective orthodoxy. Efforts to rescue three-point perspective by invoking the station-point for viewing risked exposing perspective painting as just another peepshow art.

Whoever ventures to write about Ernst Cassirer in the English-speaking world easily slips into a defensive tone and posture. That is not due to psychological reasons of some kind but rather springs from factors in the history of ideas. After all, the German-Jewish philosopher who died in exile in New York in 1945 is not someone who prima facie was centrally involved in the great "turns" of the past century, either directly or as a result of the reception of his thought. For that reason, it is only consistent in a sense if Cassirer in our time seems generally only to surface in footnotes within the annals of the history of science, pragmatism, the philosophy of language, and debates on epistemology and metaphysics. In view of this state of his eclipse, as it were, to remind scholars that Cassirer indeed played a decisive role in the areas mentioned, as well as in many further developments and differentiations in the philosophy of the twentieth century, may seem more like a justificatory plea for dealing with his work rather a well-founded thesis.At the same time, an assessment of Cassirer has taken hold that constructs him as a thinker who wrote a kind of "broadband" history of ideas: through his prism, almost all protagonists were purportedly reduced to predecessors of Kant; in very generally conceived papers by Cassirer, they then became transcendental philosophers. And that is only the most minor of criticisms: in the course of changing methods and the accompanying debates, Cassirer has disappeared from the radar. The work of Michel Foucault, J. G. A. Pocock, and Quentin Skinner, and numerous approaches of analytical authors, consider arguments as bound up with time and context and their structures. In marked contrast, Cassirer is not even regarded as "old-fashioned," but rather he has simply slipped from perception.Moreover, this assessment does not seem to be altered one iota by the fact that Cassirer has a good name as a historian of the "problem of knowledge and episteme," the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, most especially in this journal, with which he was closely associated virtually from its inception. On the contrary: we find that as a rule, praise for his work in the history of ideas is counterposed by the judgment that Cassirer was not clear enough in articulating his basic systematic concern, because ostensibly he repeatedly lost his way wandering in reflections on various positions in the history of philosophy. We see here a clear structure that, perhaps with the exception of his Italian reception, needs to be looked at more carefully. This is because Cassirer's firm insistence on the necessity of a critical confrontation with the philosophical tradition and mathematical/naturalscientific knowledge since the Renaissance forms the core of his systematic thought. At the same time, manifest in this confrontation with the tradition was his affiliation with a culture of thinking that today seems to us to smack all too easily of the milieu of the educated bourgeoisie, and too little of originality or independence. But only if we take these two characteristics of Cassirer's work seriously can we form an adequate approach to his philosophy, one that does not operate defensively right from the start.Now we have a number of more recent significant publications that enable us to see the independence of his style of thought and his philosophical statements for what they really are, namely one of the important achievements in the philosophy of the twentieth century. With the completion of the 26-volume Hamburg edition edited by Birgit Recki, which contains the studies prepared for publication during Cassirer's lifetime, it has become possible for the first time to have a clear picture of the breadth and precision of Cassirer's work. We owe this monumental feat of scholarship to Recki's editorial team, as well as the Hamburg publishing house Felix Meiner and the Zeit Foundation. The Felix Meiner Verlag has also brought out an important edition of Cassirer's scientific correspondence, an edition John Michael Krois was able to complete before his death in 2010. …

INTRODUCTIONDavid Hume, one of the most controversial and provocative philosophers of his time, especially for his views on religious matters, neither hesitated nor held back in his attacks on priesthood and false religion.2 In particular, the essay "Of Superstition and Enthusiasm" develops the typological analysis of two false religions, and his unsparingly critical descriptions of priesthood in a footnote of the essay "Of National Characters" provoked much contemporary debate.3 Even those who had a generally favorable opinion of Hume thought that he carried his enthusiasm to extremes. Montesquieu in a letter to Hume, for example, commented that in his description of clergy "you maltreat the ecclesiastical order a little."4 Hume continued to cause controversy on this point in the History of England: his depiction of Puritans as enthusiasts in the first volume of the History on the Stuart monarchs provoked strong criticism from some of his pious contemporaries.5However, his view on religious institutions deserves a much deeper investigation, since it has also been widely acknowledged by scholars that Hume advocated a religious establishment in the History. He allegedly acknowledged the merits of a state subsidy to the clergy. The relationship between this stance and his notorious anticlericalism, therefore, has been an issue of concern. Duncan Forbes, in criticizing the allegation that Hume became more conservative as he got older, has insisted that "[t]he spotting and listing of attitudes that look like 'Tory' attitudes, for example, Hume's approval of the established Church of England . . . does not add up to a discovery of the historical Hume."6 J. G. A. Pocock, by contrast, has argued that Hume shifted his attitude toward superstition and began to acknowledge its stabilizing effect by satisfying the senses of the vulgar through the splendor of various ceremonies.7 The seeming ambivalence in Hume's attitude toward clergy and religious establishments between his essays and the History were also discerned by his contemporaries. As early as the 179Os, one critic, who pointed out Hume's support for the ceremonies of the Church of England, his preference of Episcopacy to Presbyterianism, and his lenient treatment of Laud, concluded that "[h]ad Mr. Hume been serious in his opinion, he might have deserved an answer. But on turning over his Essays, we are surprised by the most stupendous and unblushing contradiction. . . . What are we to think of a professed infidel defending the barbarous insolence of the priesthood?"8One of the aims of this paper is to offer a more coherent understanding of Hume's criticism of priesthood and his advocacy of religious establishment. There is no doubt that Hume's support of an established church was motivated not by religion, but by a purely civil desire for peace and order. Although this might not detract from his image as a Tory historian, it is nevertheless worth examining how his life-long anticlericalism can be reconciled with his support for a religious establishment and his occasional complementary comments about the Church of England in the History. In order to solve this seeming discrepancy, we need to place Hume's anticlericalism in a much broader context. The criticisms that Enlightenment thinkers, including Hume, made of priesthood and false religions were not merely directed against religious institutions; rather, they were fundamentally rooted in their denials of divine providence and reward and punishment in the afterlife. As some recent studies have shown, various forms of Epicureanism (especially those of Lucretius and Horace) and Spinozism (through the Traite des Trois Imposteurs^ for example) exerted a strong influence over early eighteenth-century European radicals and libertines who attacked established systems of religion.9 Hume also owed much of the content of his arguments on religious and moral issues to predecessors such as Pierre Bayle and Bernard Mandeville. …

In the present paper I will discuss the ways in which eighteenth-century European writers treated the biblical account of the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites and the extermination of its inhabitants. I will survey the attacks by anti-clerical philosophers on the morality of Moses' extermination decree, then focus on attempts made by conservative adherents of the Bible to affirm its legitimacy. I will demonstrate how rationalist theologians and Bible scholars, especially of the German historical-critical school, were forced to devise novel legal and theoretical tools in order to justify the conquest of the land by modern reasoning."The right of the Israelites to Palestine has been a Gordian knot, whose loosening was often held as the most accurate touchstone for scholars' acumen," wrote the Bible scholar Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1753-1827).Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the legitimacy of Canaanite extermination was one of the most controversial historical-theological questions in the Enlightenment's Republic of Letters. Almost no central thinker of the period could afford to ignore the subject, with Hugo Grotius and John Locke addressing it even as early as the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century saw an animated scholarly polemic concerning the extermination of the Canaanite peoples; launched by English Deists, it was carried on by Voltaire and other anti-clerical writers. AU of them protested against the infringement of the Canaanites' rights, as well as the immoral aspects of their expropriation.These protests were in turn answered by conservative churchmen such as John Leland in England and Augustin Calmet in France. In particular, all the major German Bible scholars of the era - among them Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Jerusalem, Johann David Michaelis, Johann Ernst Faber and Johann Gottfried Herder - aligned themselves with the Hebrew conquerors: almost each and every treatise published by these scholars on ancient Jewish or Hebrew history contained an elaboration of the topic.2Scholars in German universities - the center of Bible research in Europe during the second half of the eighteenth century - went out of their way to dispel Deist and Freidenker claims, while simultaneously warring with each other concerning the appropriate actual justification for the conquest. However, this extremely rich polemic - and the manifold questions it raises - has not received the scholarly attention it deserved.3In his book Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism,] an Assmann describes the emergence of the symbolic antagonism in modern European thought between two biblical peoples - the Israelites and the Egyptians.4 He shows how radical Enlightenment thinkers sought the rehabilitation of the ancient Egyptians, one of the most disgraced peoples in the biblical tradition. In the eighteenth century, he maintains, two opposing intellectual parties evolved that subscribed to the antagonistic concepts of "Israel" and "Egypt." This conflict became an ideological battleground, with the memory of the Egyptian enslavement and the Exodus constantly revised and rewritten.The war of the Israelites against the peoples of Canaan, which is at the center of the present paper, plays a role no less important in the biblical narrative. The Israelite/Canaanite binary, like the Israelite/Egyptian one, serves within European memory for the representation of a war between revealed religion and idolatry; but, unlike it, its actual description in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua reveals that it is constructed out of different elements, and raises quite distinctly different questions. The war against the Canaanites is the flipside of the Exodus - not a "leaving of" but rather an "invasion into"; rather than the story of a slave people's revolt and liberation, it is the description of a battle between two peoples vying for the same territory.While the Exodus narrative is an epic of enslavement and liberation, the story of the conquest of Canaan is a chronicle of occupation and extermination. …

I find it difficult to respond to S. Adam Seagrave's paper, but I will make some attempt to do so. My problem is not that I find my critic's arguments persuasive. It is rather that the views he attacks are not my own. He first attributes to me a "stated purpose" that I never had and then chides me for failing to fulfill the purpose adequately. His paper has two main divisions. He first criticizes my supposed position directly and then presents a novel interpretation of Locke's theory of property as an extension of the critique. I will consider each part in turn.Seagrave has a talent for selective quotation and he applies it first to my work and then to Locke's. He plucks out two words, "aberration" and "innovation" from two separate articles, and out of them conjures up his (mis)understanding of my work.Tierney's purpose is clear: he will argue that modern rights discourse is not the result either of "innovation" upon or "aberration" from medieval rights discourse, i.e., that modern rights are neither new nor different from their medieval predecessors, (emphasis Seagrave's)1A little further on he attributes to me the view that "the idea of natural rights has remained essentially the same from . . . the early medieval period to the present."2 But these are not my ideas at all. I have never argued that there is nothing new or different in modern rights discourse. Of course there is. I cannot imagine a medieval canonist defending the rights of homosexuals. As for the words "aberration" and "innovation," the sources from which Seagrave derives my "stated purpose," when considered in their original context they have no such meaning as he assigns to them. I used the word "aberration" in referring to a view of Hobbes, who held that individuals have rights but no duty to respect the rights of others. Modern codes of human rights, on the other hand, enumerate rights that others are bound to respect. I made the obvious point that Hobbes's aberration could not have led to this modern concept of rights.Seagrave's play on the word "innovation" is more important. This is where he found the "purpose" that he will spend the rest of the paper attacking.Tierney initially characterizes his purpose in "Dominion of Self and Natural Rights Before Locke and After" as an attempt to "see modern doctrines of rights, not as innovations . . . but as the final product of a developing tradition of thought. . . ."3And so, he continues, I must mean that the modern doctrines are neither new nor different. But his ellipses leave out some words that make my meaning clear. What I actually wrote was,[W]e might learn to see modern doctrines of rights, not as innovations of the seventeenth century or the age of Enlightenment, but as the final product of a developing tradition of thought from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries onward.4Taken in context the passage obviously means, not that there were no innovations, but that the innovations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries do not provide an adequate starting point if we seek to understand the whole tradition of natural rights thinking.My real purpose was to emphasize both persistence and change. In his rendering of my text, Seagrave chose to add emphasis to the words "innovation" and "final product." If I were writing it again I might be inclined to emphasize "developing." Obviously, in a long tradition of thought, shaped by a series of changing contexts, the final outcome is not likely to be identical with what we find at the starting point. A stagnant tradition is dead; but, as I wrote, a living tradition is characterized by growth and change.I can best respond further to Seagrave's criticism by first giving a few quotations of my own that illustrate my real position. In my book, The Idea of Natural Rights, I presented (as usual) a continuity thesis, arguing that much that had been considered radically novel in the work of William of Ockham was really derived from earlier juristic sources. …

INTRODUCTIONShadworth H. Hodgson's (1832-1912) contributions to Victorian intellectual discourse have faded from prominence over the past century. However, despite his current anonymity, Hodgson's case is important to an understanding of the historical split between philosophy and science in late nineteenth-century Britain. In particular, his example illuminates the specific role played by developing concepts of the mind in a period of deep transition in the British intellectual community. His virtual disappearance from the record, I contend, is indicative also of the disappearance of his form of philosophy as a vital social project. His ideas, rather than being rejected, were instead largely neglected - they became lost as philosophical discussion moved elsewhere, both conceptually and institutionally. However, in the inaugural volume of Mind in 1876, Hodgson's ideas initially found a prominent place in a central dialogue over the position of philosophy with respect to science. There, and throughout his career, Hodgson engaged in the defense of an intellectual tradition he regarded as under threat from psychological science. Both his particular formulation of an ongoing role for philosophy and his own uneasy position in the intellectual environment of late Victorian Britain shed significant light on an under-examined issue of the period: the fraught relationship between philosophy and science as competing enterprises engaged in the study of the human mind."Philosophy" and "science" are easily construed as partnered intellectual complexes in modern Western society. However, closer scrutiny of the historical record shows that the two terms - whether as theoretical referents or actors' categories - have often reflected divergent priorities and that transitions from "philosophical" to "scientific" terms have been contentious. In examining the birth of natural science out of natural philosophy during the Enlightenment, the historian Andrew Cunningham has emphasized how the reordering of intellectual fields created new conflictive relationships between philosophy, science, and religion.1 He reminds us that the process of scientific secularization was but one of a set of constitutive shifts among these human activities, and that the earlier natural philosophy thus played by fundamentally different rules than its successor. A similar story can be told about the late nineteenth -century transition I am considering: in a nutshell, to borrow a phrase from Cunningham, men did not start doing mental science until they stopped doing moral philosophy. However, this time, philosophy already stood in competition with existing scientific institutions, sparking a more severe contest for authority. As mental science began to develop along the lines of the natural disciplines, Hodgson and others feared little would remain as a distinctive domain for philosophy as such, moral or otherwise. His efforts on the part of philosophy thus represent one front in an intellectual "turf war" - what recent scholars have called "boundary work," shoring up the institutional positions of different intellectual enterprises competing for authority in the world.2 Gieryn's formative analysis of boundary work was based on the contemporaneous example of John Tyndall's campaign to promote scientific over religious authority in Victorian Britain, but this was much more than a two-way struggle. The early career of Mind bears witness to a closely related, but less discussed, battle for influence between philosophy and science, in which the journal itself served as a critical "boundary object," a medium for enforcement of the distinctions between these two intellectual fields.3Thomas Dixon has recently surveyed the origins of this shift. Like Cunningham, Dixon emphasizes the constitutive differences in scope and orientation of the two intellectual enterprises, salient among them the secularization of the new human sciences.4 This process - begun tentatively by Thomas Brown and brought to fruition by Bain, Spencer, and Darwin - involved wholesale shifts in the scholarly linguistic complex, from a set of several mental categories rooted in Christian philosophical categories - affections, passions, sentiments, etc. …

In the April 1884 issue of Mind, William James published his influential account of emotion, which stressed the bodily and physiological constitution of various feeling-states.1 The article reflected new trends in physiological psychology, but came under attack by numerous respondents in the journal who argued that there was more to the emotions than physiology.2 As the evolutionary psychologist Hiram Stanley intoned, "emotions in the higher stages are filled out by knowledge and will."3 Many noted that the higher emotions - aesthetic sentiments, sympathy, pity, envy, love - were not marked by clear physiological changes. Charles Darwin had observed that love was not discernable by prominent facial expressions.4 There was also little agreement as to how to divide sentiments from appetites, affections, and passions. What came to be known as the James-Lange theory of emotion, then, was only one of a variety of theories of emotion circulating in Anglo-American intellectual culture of the late nineteenth century.5In debates about the nature of emotion, the higher emotions - particularly that of sympathy - played a crucial role. Sympathy was most often understood to be a kind of tenderheartedness linked to, but distinct from love. At the same time, sympathy was tethered to a variety of moral and epistemological ends - as a cornerstone in evolutionary ethics, an element in aesthetic appreciation, and even as a source for knowledge of other minds. Sympathy had had a prominent place in eighteenth-century theories of aesthetics, moral sentiments and taste, in the writings of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. In the late Victorian period, theories of sympathy drew on this lineage and increasingly became tinged with evolutionary and developmental features.Although sympathy in the Victorian period has gained the attention of literary scholars, historians of the mind sciences have not paid it much due, even though its psychological origins and moral correlates were of sustained interest in this period.6 Stefan Collini has argued that British intellectual culture was intrigued by the interplay of egoistic and altruistic tendencies, and the birth of a number of ethical societies in the final two decades of the century attests to the increased emphasis on the moral dimensions of sympathy.7 Anti-vivisection movements and societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals and children, often with appeals to sympathy, gained adherents in this period in Britain and America.8 In one study, psychologists distributed scientific questionnaires in order to assess the experiences of sympathy and pity of nearly four hundred subjects.9 There was no underestimating the importance of sympathy for Anglo-American intellectuals, who confidently claimed it was becoming more refined and more widely diffused in their era. Darwin believed that sympathy had been extended to those of the same nation, and prescriptively wrote that it should extend to all nations and races, as well as the imbecile and the maimed. Darwin was echoing here the broader enlightenment sentimentalist tradition that linked the feeling of sympathy to a conception of humanity.10In the pages of the British professional psychological and philosophical journal Mind, sympathy was under scrutiny by scholars in evolutionary and developmental psychology, ethics, and aesthetics. This journal, first published in 1876, and funded by Alexander Bain, examined new trends in physiological and scientific psychology and sought a broad philosophical framework for the understanding of mental life.11 It played a mediating role in the overlapping discussions of science and philosophy and published on a diverse array of topics. Although Mind saw itself as a specialized journal for psychology and philosophy, it was founded at an historical moment when discussions of the mind were not narrowly portioned out to the psychological sciences, as would increasingly be the case after 1900. Indeed, the experimental psychological laboratory emerged as a new scientific institution only in 1879 with Wilhelm Wundt's Leipzig laboratory, and then in 1897 at the Universities of London and Cambridge. …