‘My purpose was humbler, but also higher’: Thomas De Quincey at the Final Frontier

Abstract

Adam Smith’s essay on ‘The Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of Astronomy’ was composed in the 1750s, but not published until the posthumous Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1795), edited by James Hutton and Joseph Black. In it, Smith, drawing on technical descriptions of ‘the sublime’ within the genre of eighteenth-century British philosophical aesthetics, traces the interest in astronomy amongst primitive peoples to the ‘wonder, surprise, and astonishment’ occasioned by the night sky.² ‘For Smith then, astronomy, at least in its beginnings, is an enquiry into the ‘natural sublime’. As we have seen, in her seminal study of the surge of interest in the ‘natural sublime’ in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain, Nicolson, who curiously does not mention Smith’s essay, attributes that interest, at least in part, to technological advancements in optical instrumentation. It was the development of more powerful telescopes, Nicolson argues, which revealed to late Renaissance Europe the existence of a physical universe which was far larger than previously thought. Gradually, Nicolson suggests, the affective responses which had previously been occasioned by reflection on the idea of the divine came to be transferred to this new universe, and eventually to all natural phenomena which seemed to partake of, or were capable of evoking, the idea of the infinite.³

Of all the phaenomena of nature, the celestial appearances are, by their grandeur and beauty, the most universal object of the curiosity of mankind.

— Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects¹