Public Lives, Private Virtues by Christopher Harris

Author:Christopher Harris [Harris, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138984226
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

Psychological Theories of Example

Warnings about the detrimental effects of the force of examples had little impact on the creation of images of the Revolutionary heroes, even among schoolbook authors whose audience was believed to be most susceptible to harm. The power of example to elicit virtue was declared again and again by American writers and editors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the decades following the Revolution, accounts of the extraordinary actions and admirable virtues of the war’s heroes were offered to the public by men who had adopted from British thinkers, especially philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, psychological theories of how reading about virtuous behavior could engender virtue in the reader. In contrast to Bolingbroke, who argued that the analytical study of history improved virtue by improving the mind and ridding it of prejudice, these men—Joseph Addison, David Hume, Lord Kames, Alexander Gerard, Hugh Blair, and John Ogilvie—put forth treatises developing the idea that sensation apart from rational thought engendered virtue.136

Addison was one of the earliest to develop a psychological explanation of how images stimulate virtue. He declared his admiration for the writer who describes virtuous action “in so lively a manner” that his presentation of action becomes a vivid “picture” which the reader experiences as a “kind of spectator.” Addison encouraged a lively style because it enabled the reader to feel “in himself all the variety of passion, which are correspondent” to the action described.137

Addison put his theory to work in Cato, the most popular play in America of the late eighteenth century. The play, which reflects the age’s admiration of heroic death, dramatized the Roman hero’s suicide in the face of bondage to Caesar. “How beautiful is death,” Cato exclaims, “when earn’d by virtue! / Who would not be that youth [who died]? What pity is it / That we can die but once to serve our country.” This sentiment greatly appealed to American patriots, and the play was often performed during the war. A death like Cato’s was the ultimate sacrifice the patriot could make, for it demonstrated absolute allegiance to liberty. In death, as in no other circumstance, heroic virtue displayed itself. Cato was an example for all patriots. Like Juba, the Numidian prince who “forms himself to glory, / And breaks the fierceness of his native temper,” they too could “copy out” Cato’s “bright example.” As Alexander Pope declared in the Prologue, the play offered Americans an opportunity to “Live o’er each scene, and be what they behold.”138

During the eighteenth century other British thinkers whose work was well known in America developed theories of how readers and theater-goers could “Live o’er each scene, and be what they behold.” The essential ingredient was sympathetic feeling evoked through vivid language. David Hume devoted a portion of his Treatise of Human Nature (1738–40) in an attempt to discover how the affections of others, virtuous or otherwise, influence us. We are so influenced, he concluded, if we “sympathize with others . . . receive by

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.