The Prayers of Childhood

What is surprising about this statement is its Romantic temperament: it could easily have come from Schelling, from the criticisms of Aristotle in Coleridge's Logic, or indeed from any of the Romantic thinkers influenced by Kant. It is almost identical with critiques of Kant's categories made by Hegel, who, while no Romantic himself, was indebted to Romantic figures such as Goethe. Eliot's statement implies a dynamic view of the world in which human nature has no intrinsic stability and human perceptual categories are imprisoned in change. Such a view directly conflicts with the Classical-Christian metaphysic deriving from Aristotle and Aquinas, centered on the concept of substance or essence. Yet Eliot made this statement just seven months before his request to be confirmed as an Anglo-Catholic. This typical collision of Classical and Romantic notions in Eliot's views continues to bemuse the most ingenious of critics. Still more remarkable is the fact that, some thirteen years before making the statement above, Eliot had undertaken a detailed study of Kant, which has somehow escaped the notice of literary critics. For over seventy years now a collection of manuscripts entitled Three Essays on Kant, written by Eliot as a graduate student at Harvard, has received not even a passing mention. Written on Kant's metaphysics, ethics, and conception of God, these papers seem to be the only systematic record we have at present of Eliot's thinking on a major philosopher, apart from his studies of Aristotle and Leibniz

Art · Literature · Theology · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Philosophy

• Fallible Infallibility? Gladstone's Anti-Vatican Pamphlets in the Light of Mill's on Liberty

  Open Access•Geoffrey Scarre•Victorian Literature and Culture•2016

  Add to list