Perception and the Medium: The Vindication of Art

Abstract

In 1838 and 1840 J. S. Mill suggested that Bentham and Coleridge demonstrated the urgent centrality of the question of logical method for all disciplines. Yet Bentham and Coleridge were also seen as having established the sterile sectarianism of the philosophical debate, because of what later writers interpreted as the intractability of their positions. Increasingly, a later generation followed Coleridge’s precedent, and looked to other disciplines for answers to the problems of how human perception best operated in the search for truth, how reality could be characterised, and what was the optimum genre for articulating perception and describing the world. The dialogue between empiricism and literary romanticism preoccupied Mill, Carlyle, Lewes and Ruskin as they attempted to define the ideal form of perception, and their definition of that perception was often associated with a recast view of the outer world. They exalted a mode of perception which fused logical methods; their view of reality incorporated reference to the intangible dimensions of actuality, and was far removed from deterministic materialism.

an issue which the novel raises more sharply than any other literary form — the problem of the correspondence between the literary work and the reality which it imitates. This is essentially an epistemological problem, and it … seems likely that the nature of the novel’s realism … can best be clarified by the help of … the philosophers.