Lockean "Intuition" and Johnson's Characterization of Aesthetic Response

STUDENTS OF SAMUEL JOHNSON'S criticism have seldom identified his exclusively aesthetic concerns. At extremes, commentators on Johnson's criticism have often denied his aesthetic interests and assimilated his critical judgments to statements of moral belief or approvals of naive empirical realism.' Even in his major, book-length study, Jean Hagstrum speculates on reasons for Johnson's neglect of aesthetics and suggests that the very catholicity of his taste may have prevented him from evolving a clear-cut and precise definition of pleasure peculiar to literary art.2 Johnson frequently may have chosen to overlook his own distinctions, or under pressure of a deadline given them only elliptical expression, but there seems ample evidence in his writing that he did identify a properly aesthetic response to literature and gave it a significant place in his critical theory. There also appears to be good reason to base Johnson's aesthetico convictions on philosophy of a thinker who has also been thought to neglect aesthetics, John Locke. Although Johnson is not a dialectical thinker, his thoughts often focus on pairs of carefully distinguished concepts. In his critical prac

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