The Prayers of Childhood: T. S. Eliot's Manuscripts on Kant Author(s): M. A. R. Habib Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol.

51, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1990), pp. 93-114 Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709748 . Accessed: 07/09/2011 04:18
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The T.

Prayers

of

Childhood: Kant

S.

Eliot's

Manuscripts on

M. A. R. Habib

In March 1926 T. S. Eliot threw out this apparently casual reference to Immanuel Kant: The role played by interpretation often been neglectedin the theory of has knowledge.Even Kant, devotinga lifetimeto the pursuitof categories,fixed and overonly those which he believed,rightlyor wrongly,to be permanent, lookedor neglectedthe fact that theseare only the morestableof a vast system of categories perpetual in change.1 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-Christianmetaphysic 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.
' Introd., Savonarola:A Dramatic Poem, Charlotte Eliot (London, 1926), x.

93
Copyright 1990 by JOURNALOF THE HISTORYOF IDEAS, INC.

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Assessing the impact of Eliot's philosophizing on his later work entails two distinct procedures. The first is to understand the philosophical texts on their own terms. Eliot was once a philosopher, and his texts must be analyzed in their depth and complexity. Only then is the second aspect, the question of influence, even worth approaching. The impatience of literary critics to address this second question without undertaking the prior task has led to considerable confusion. Eliot, it would seem, is everything from an Aristotelian to a deconstructionist. Despite spirited and sometimes valuable attempts to relate Eliot's work to his philosophical background, this background itself remains obscure.2 Given the extreme difficulty and unpublished status of the Kant manuscripts, my purpose here is (with the kind permission of Mrs. Valerie Eliot) primarily to unfold the content of these papers as clearly and systematically as possible. I shall conclude with some suggestions as to the possible influence of the papers. But other critics will be the better placed to make their own assessment of this influence if the present paper can provide a reasonably accurate and detailed analysis of Eliot's arguments. In 1952, looking back on his earlier philosophical career, Eliot cited the "divorce of philosophy from theology" as the reason for his decision, some thirty-seven years earlier, to abandon that profession.3This may help us to place the Kant papers in an appropriate context. Kant had a twofold significance in the "divorce" of modern philosophy from theology, which, as Eliot recognized,4began with Descartes's insistence on reason rather than revelation as the avenue to truth. On the one hand Kant stood opposed to a line of thinkers, notably Locke and Hume, who had effectively produced secularized and skeptical systems of thought. They had impugned the Aristotelian-Thomist idea of substance as the primary reality on which all else was based; the only guarantor of truth, they held, was the deliverance of the senses. Kant's distinction between phenomena and noumena was in part an effort to protect the concept of God (by elevating this to the unknowable, noumenal world) from the rationalist and empiricist onslaught of the Enlightenment thinkers. Kant held that only the phenomenal world, grounded in sense experience, could be apprehended by the intellectual faculty of pure reason. The noumenal
2 In addition to the earlier work on this subject by critics such as Richard Wollheim, Anne Bolgan, Lewis Freed, and Piers Gray, interesting theses have more recently been advanced in Walter Benn Michaels's "Philosophy in Kinkanja: Eliot's Pragmatism," Glyph 8 (Baltimore and London, 1981), 170-202, and Richard Shusterman's T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism (London, 1988). 3 Joseph Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, tr. Alexander Dru (London, 1952), 1415. 4 Review [unsigned] of Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau, by Jacques Maritain, Times Literary Supplement (8 Nov 1928) 818.

T. S. Eliot on Kant

95

entities, viz., God, freedom, and immortality, were a function of the "practical" moral faculty, the will. Yet ironically, Kant's philosophy itself proved to be a secularizing influence. In Kant's work lay the possibility of Hegel's system, whose vast influence yielded a remarkable array of secularized world-views, including the bases of F. H. Bradley's metaphysics and ethics. Again, much Romantic thought was worked out in the light of Kantian notions. Both Romantic and non-Romantic thought contained a secularizing potential insofar as it broke down Kant's absolute distinction between phenomena and noumena: the noumenal world was brought back within the grasp of imagination and intellect. Finally, in Kant's thought, the notion of substance is subjectivized and reduced to one of twelve basic categories of human understanding. In the following pages, I hope to trace Eliot's own engagement with the philosophical context sketched above. In his first paper, "Report on the Kantian Categories," Eliot compares the categories of Plato's Sophist, Aristotle's Categories, and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, stating initially that: Thereare perhapsthreechief typesin the historyof the category,threedistinct and the uses of the term:1. the Platonic: metaphysical epistemological problems the are equal and inseparable.... 2. the Aristotelian: categoryas an adequate an accountof an external scepticism....5 reality.3. the Kantian: epistemological Eliot's view of Plato's Forms agrees broadly with Plato's own account in the Sophist. Here, as in the Parmenides, Plato severely criticizes his own earliertheory of Forms as expounded in the Phaedo and the Republic. In the Phaedo Plato had viewed the Forms alone as reality, the true object of knowledge.6 By the time he wrote the Sophist, Plato had a different view of reality: it is now defined as the power to affect or be affected. Against the theory of Forms, he argues that such power must operate in the world of becoming and change. This world, then, must be part of reality. "Knowing," says Plato, is to act upon something, and "to be known" is to be acted upon. So in designating "being" alone as real, the theory of Forms would exclude both the soul and intelligence from reality.7It is in the process of understandingreality (a) as combining being and becoming 'and (b) as including intelligence or thought that
manuscripts are contained in a single volume in the John Davey Hayward of Eliot manuscripts at King's College Library, Cambridge.Entitled ThreeEssays Bequest on Kant, the volume comprises: (1) "Report on the Kantian Categories," 27 March 1913; (2) "Report on the Relation of Kant's Criticism to Agnosticism," 24 April 1913, and (3) "Report on the Ethics of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason," 25 May 1913. 6Plato's Phaedo, ed. John Burnet (Oxford, 1977), 100d. 7 Sophistes, Platonis Opera, I (Oxford, 1973), 248b-49a. 5 These

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M A. R. Habib

Plato evinces five categories:change, changelessness, sameness, difference, and existence. Eliot states that these categories are both a "metaphysical reality and an epistemological tool," meaning presumably that the categories express the inclusion of thought within reality. He elaborates:
The problem for Plato ... consists ... in his attempt to answer the question: for Plato had not arisen.... The same problem (the identity of the flux and

how is it that the idea and the flux are the same thing?We must, in orderto of and this understand ... set asideour questions consciousness its object,which monism... idea and flux are ... relative the idea) arises... for any immanence to each other,but are relativealso to our point of view....8 These insights are crucial to Eliot's subsequent philosophical development. The Sophist left some impression on Eliot, who quoted Plato's definition of reality some three years later and adhered in his dissertation to the inseparability of Forms and particulars.9In the Kant paper Eliot maintains that in contrast to the view of Plato, who posited no separation between consciousness and its object, the "modem inquiry" of Locke and Hume "springs from the assertion of the exteriority of the matter of our experience to ourself...."', Both Locke and Hume base their view of "experience" on a distinction between consciousness and external object. But this entails a contradiction: an idea is itself the object of knowledge, yet it also refers to an unknown reality beyond experience. Eliot says that this initial distinction "moves of itself to a second distinction ... between this sort of externality and another reality more external." In other words an idea is already external to consciousness, but what it refers to must be even "more" external. Eliot also indicts the "double externality" of realism in his thesis." In the Kant paper he emphasizes that for Plato "the distinction between the idea and the flux is not the internality-externality distinction of the concept-percept relation.... Hence Hume's problem is not here applicable....'12 We need

to recall here that in effect Locke and Hume had reduced "experience" to "perception," which delivered particular ideas and impressions. They viewed thought or "conception" as universal and extraneous to experience. This distinction had generated Hume's "problem": his inability to connect "relations of ideas" and "matters of fact."13 Eliot points out that for Plato "pure perception" is merely "an hypothetical abstract
"Report on the Kantian Categories," 2-3 (Hereafter cited as RKC). 9 Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (London, 1964), 104 (Hereafter cited as KE). 10 RKC, 2. "IKE, 106-7.
12 13

RKC, 2-3.

David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford, 1979), 25.

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97

limit...." In the Sophist Plato had said an object appears to the mind c as a "blend of perception and judgment" (oirviLtt; aci-6oC-ECxo;Ka
86?;).
14

Eliot goes further than Plato and identifies "idea" and "flux": "each
is the other," he says, because "idea and flux are ... relative to each

other, but ... also to our point of view; from which there are inevitably degrees of reality, leading up to the Idea of the Good, which is, however, identical with all the other degrees, being at once a goal and an immanent concrete universal."15 "Degrees of truth and reality" is the doctrine that one truth or reality can somehow be more extensive and inclusive than another. Eliot scholars have come to associate the doctrine with Bradley, but it was also held by Plato who expressed it, for example, in his Philebus.16In another unpublished manuscript, Degrees of Reality, Eliot which suggests an organic had again associated this doctrine with Plato,17 connection between his views of Plato and Bradley. Plato himself had not viewed the combination of being and becoming as an identity: his categories, after all, had contextualized their irreducible opposition. The view of them as identical derives from Hegel's Logic18and is reiterated in Edward Caird's The Philosophyof Kant, the only secondary work on which Eliot draws in this paper. It was actually Caird's suggestion (which perhaps inspired Eliot's comparison of the three thinkers) that Kant, in his deduction of the categories, was asking the same essential question as Plato and Aristotle: "how does the One relate to the Many?"19 Eliot agrees, then, with Plato's own critique of the theory of Forms. He sees a unity between intellect and sense, denies that the Forms are substantial, and admits "change" into the definition of reality. But like Hegel and Caird, Eliot disputes the premise of Plato's critique, viz., that each category is independent and irreducible. On the contrary, he views the realms of being and becoming as identical and the degree of such identity as mediated by point of view. What is striking here is that these views are prevalent in much Romantic thought and are retained in Eliot's doctoral thesis.20Despite Eliot's espousal of Classicism, this sustained coherence between his interpretations of Plato and Bradley has the same metaphysical underpinning as the Romantic aesthetic that Eliot inherited from figures such as Remy de Gourmont.
14 Sophistes, 264a-b. 15 3.
16

RKC, Philebus, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (New Jersey, 1978), 1137-38; 1140-47. 17 Degrees of Reality, Ms., Hayward Bequest, 9. 18 Hegel's Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), tr. W. Wallace (Oxford, 1982), 139-40. 19 Edward Caird, A CriticalAccount of the Philosophyof Kant (Glasgow, 1877), 385, 593-94. 20 See, for example, KE, 104.

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M A. R. Habib

In Eliot's eyes the categories of Plato and Kant determine the structure of the world: they are our means of apprehending the world. But Aristotle's categories "are merely forms descriptive of objects in the world as it is given."2' In his Metaphysics Aristotle had equated "being" with "substance," the primary reality on which all else was based. He defined substance as the "ultimate subject which cannot be predicated of something else" and which has "an individual and separate existence."22This of course is Aristotle's famous distinction between substance and accident. For him the categories (such as space, time, relation, and quantity) signified the various senses of "being," all of which were modifications of substance. Substance itself was the primary sense of "being," the principle underlying the categories.23Hence Eliot's further remark that these categories are "a list of the ways of thinking reality.... ,24 Aristotle views substance both as independent and as expressed in part by each of the categories. This is perhaps why, as Eliot was later to remark in an article on Leibniz, Aristotle never "resolved the problem of substance."25In the Kant paper Eliot is aware of the apparentparadox. He says on the one hand that the relation of Aristotle's categories to "real predicates" (i.e., reality) is one of straightforwardcorrespondence.26 This seems to be grounded in Aristotle's own view that "there are just as many divisions of philosophy as there are kinds of substance...." 27 On the other hand Eliot agrees with Kant's criticism that Aristotle's categories do not relate to objects a priori,28 a point acknowledged by Aristotle.29 So what is it that governs the "correspondence" between thought and reality? Eliot suggests that this is only a problem for modern philosophy, which posits an initial distinction between mind and reality: "The idea of an external world independent (in the most realistic sense) of cognition ... was as foreign to Aristotle as it was to Plato; his external world was what we should call the world of our ideas; the externality was purely the practical one. "30 These statements show quite clearly that Eliot did not view Aristotle as a realist and indeed saw the question of realism as remote from both Plato and Aristotle. Eliot's position here is actually somewhat akin to that of Hegel, who had said that "the principle
21 RKC, 5. The Metaphysics I-IX, tr. H. Tredennick (London, 1947), 241 (hereafter cited as Met). 23Met, 310-13. 24 RKC, 4. 25KE, 183. 26 RKC, 4. 27 MetaphysicsI-IX, 159. 28 RKC, 7. 29 Aristotle, The Categories:On Interpretation:Prior Analytics, tr. H. P. Cooke and H. Tredennick (London, 1973), 57. 30 RKC, 4.
22

T. S. Eliot on Kant
of the Aristotelian philosophy ... is ...

99
the idea as actuality."31 Eliot's

reading of Caird may well have disposed him toward this view.32Eliot sees that the lack of necessary connection between Aristotle's categories and objects rests on the unassailable individuality of "substance" which
does admit of degrees: "the question of grades of reality ... did not There was only one grade." As a result, present itself to Aristotle....

says Eliot, these categories present "a piecemeal effect" and cannot claim metaphysical validity.33Again, in philosophical terms, Eliot's views here yield the basis of a Romantic rather than Classical aesthetic. We will see that Eliot leans towards Aristotle's ethics which indeed influenced his later work. But he is clearly somewhat apprehensive about Aristotle's metaphysics and sometimes appears to prefer, as did many Romantics, Plato's metaphysical framework. Nevertheless, Eliot assimilates the categories of Plato and Aristotle, inasmuch as they express both thought and reality, with no mediation of "ideas" between any particular mind and an "external" reality. Locke and Hume, having rejected "substance" as the substratum of reality, replaced its stabilizing function by the indissolubility of the particular ideas associated by fixed laws in the mind. Eliot has intimated that this procedure effected a separation between thought and reality as well as between concept and percept. It is broadly on this historical situation that Kant's Transcendental Deduction supervened, as Eliot observes: the historicalpositionof Kant made it necessaryfor him to start out from a account of "immediateexperience"[than Plato or much more sophisticated Aristotle].... is Theinitialpeculiarity Kant'sdeduction the categories ... the situation of of the of the problemas handedon to him; a situationwhich determines critical The world was dividedfor him into conceptand percept;ideas and approach.
matter of fact.34

A preliminary sketch of the issues involved in Kant's Deduction may help to clarify Eliot's complex argument. Kant had viewed knowledge as dependent on (a) sensibility, through which an object is given in intuition, and (b) the concepts of the understanding, by means of which the object is "thought." Kant's aim in the Deduction is to show how the concepts or categories of the understanding can apply a priori to the appearances received by the sensibility. This means showing, in opposition to Locke and Hume, how the subjective conditions of thought can have "objectivevalidity, that is, can furnish conditions of the possibility of all knowledge of objects."35
31

Logic, 202. 32Caird, 11 ff.

33RKC, 4-5. 34Ibid., [1], 5.

35

Critique, 124.

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Kant argues that there are two ways in which knowledge and intelligible (i.e., ordered) experience presuppose the categories of the understanding. In the first place the mass of sensation, conditioned by space and time and given to us in intuition, must be united into a definite content. This, says Kant, is achieved by a threefold synthesis: "the apprehension of in representations... their reproduction imagination, and their recognition in a concept."36 Kant says that it is the "faculty of judgement" which unites various concepts as well as various sensible representations of an object in intuition. General Logic, dealing with the unity of concepts, is merely a formal "canon of judgment" without content. Transcendental Logic concerns the unity of representations in intuition; Kant calls this a "logic of truth," since it spans the content of a judgment.37 The second way in which knowledge presupposes mental categories is given in Kant's definition of "knowledge" and "objective reality" as "relation to an object."38Since the elements of the threefold synthesis are the three subjective "sources" of knowledge, it is through this synthesis that the mind achieves "relation to an object." Kant argues basically that each of the three stages of synthesis determines any representation of an object within the mind in an a priori fashion. Each stage demands the bifurcation of our understanding of "object" into noumenon and phenomenon. We must postulate the thing in itself as unknowable for a necessary and a priori connection to obtain between the categories and the phenomena they determine. We must also postulate what Kant calls the "transcendental unity of apperception": without this transcendentalego, which is above and beyond the "I" which experiences, we would not be aware of our own identity and our experiences could not be ordered.39 In general, Eliot impugns the view of "experience" presupposed by Kant's Deduction. He insists, as he did throughout his life, that "any definition of'experience' must be more or less arbitrary.... . According to Eliot, Kant's "starting point" was three distinctions bequeathed by empiricism: firstly, a "distinction of subject and object in knowing, founded upon experience ...," i.e., the basic distinction which the Deduction strives to overcome. Eliot says that "from Kant's point of view, you must first set up the Thing [in itself] and criticise it afterwards." This is the characteristic procedure of "critical philosophy," which Russell defined as the assumption that we can have knowledge followed by an inquiry into how this is possible.41Secondly, Eliot sees in Kant a "sharp distinction between concept and percept," which refers back to
36Ibid., 130-31.

37Ibid., 100, 108, 111. 38Ibid., 130, 137. 39Ibid., 134. 40 RKC, 6. 41 Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford, 1964), 82 ff.

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Kant's separation of the functions of understanding and sensibility. The third distinction is between the "a priori and a posteriori elements" of experience. Eliot adds that Kant makes a further problematic distinction "between pure general logic and transcendental logic."42 The first term of each of these distinctions pertains to form while their second terms refer to content. It is this general division of form, and content that Eliot
takes exception to: "Distinction between form and content ... cannot

from any point of view be made complete without being made arbitrary; and whether it is possible to think of particulars and universals without a content is open to question."43 Eliot advocates a view of organic unity here, which of course extends to his views of poetry. In the present context the notion derives from the Hegelian and Bradleyan view of the "concrete universal," in which the universal is constituted by its particulars. Again, Eliot seems to have taken over this criticism of Kant from Caird.44Eliot also insists that the distinction between the a priori form and a posteriori content of experience is "quite provisional," and this leads him to doubt that "pure" conception, i.e., the pure form of a concept free of empirical content, is possible. By the same token Eliot argues that "pure" perception also is impossible. Kant held that judgments are differentiated according to the particular concepts or categories they use: the forms of judgment presuppose the categories. But Eliot disagrees: "any part of perception can be taken up only when these judgments are already possible. ..."45 This model of the mind that Eliot insists on, in which conception and perception are intrinsically united, underlies not only the arguments of his dissertation but also many of his literary appraisals, such as the commendation of the unity of thought, feeling and sensation in Metaphysical poetry. Eliot now describes how the Deduction abolishes the most basic of Kant's initial three distinctions, that "between subjectivity and objectivity ": from a naif Human subjectivism. the relationof One starts provisionally As internaland externalworld becomesmore clearly defined,the importance of the distinction recedes... as the organisation the perceiving of becomes subjects moreclearlyarticulated, subject the moreandmore,partof an objective becomes, order,and.... It becomessimplya matterof emphasiswhetherthe categories are "appliedto" objectsor "receivedby" the subjects.46 Eliot sees that Kant's procedure further blurs the line between conception and perception because it obliges us to attribute the relating of perceptions
RKC, 5-6. Ibid., 6. 44 Caird, 298-300. 45 RKC, 7. 46Ibid., 8-9.
43 42

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to precisely the faculty which relates conceptions. Eliot observes that this relating is done "by the intermediary of the Imagination-which, as Caird declares, puts in its appearance abruptly."47Caird had said that the Imagination functions for Kant as a deus ex machina48mediating between thought and the senses, a criticism whose source is Hegel.49Eliot seems to think that since the functions of Understanding and Imagination overlap. Imagination is best regarded as an aspect of Understanding, the aspect which synthesizes the manifold of sense in intuition. This view had been argued explicitly some three years earlier by H. A. Prichard50 who influenced Eliot's views of Kant in his doctoral thesis. Unlike most of the Romantics, Eliot never accorded any privileged role to the Imagination either in his philosophy or his aesthetics. However, we can see later that significant parallels occur between Eliot's and Coleridge's ideas on the nature of poetic language. Eliot continues: "the thing in itself is a necessary postulation. But as soon as we pass, by way of synthesis in apperception, imagination and recognition, to the objective unity of selfconsciousness, we lose the thing in itself; the distinction of concept and percept ... is ultimately transcended...."51 Eliot affirms that both the transcendentalego and the noumenon are merely "pragmatic postulates." Once again he is reacting against any attempt to standardize or fix the content of "experience." Kant's overall difficulty, he says, "lies simply in the paradox of the inevitable circularity of metaphysical think52Eliot may here be generalizing Caird's objection that Kant's ing...." Deduction comprises "a circle of elements which reciprocally presuppose each other...." Caird, echoing Hegel,53had said that Kant's transcendental ego is, like the Cartesian ego, abstract and unable to transcend the opposition between itself as subject and the object of knowledge.54 Eliot remarks that with Kant's transcendental ego we "revert to the Cartesian ego, the 'I think'.... Only the recession proceeds much further than with Descartes." Eliot's reasoning is that if we accept the categories "as valid in experience, we must accept them as applicable not only to objects ... but to 'conceptions' too. We are here in the face of an infinite regress...." Eliot concludes that the categories have "methodological" validity but that "the ultimate reality of the transcendental unity of apperception and of the thing in itself lies outside of our universe. ... "55
47Ibid., 9.

Caird, 417 ff. 49Logic, 70 ff. 5 Kant's Theory of Knowledge (Oxford, 1909), 167-77.
51

48

RKC, 9-10.

52Ibid., 10. 53 Logic, 68. 54 Caird, 399-401. 55RKC, 13-14.

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What is significant here is that Eliot first articulated his skepticism toward philosophy in relation to Kant rather than to Bradley. In his second paper, "Report on the Relation of Kant's Criticism to Agnosticism," Eliot extends his discussion of Kant to issues which retained his own permanent interest. Using Kant as an historical focal point, he assesses various notions of God. He also uses Kant to attack Herbert Spencer's agnosticism and positivism. Eliot distinguishes at the outset three basic attitudes toward religion, apart from what he calls
"dogmatism": "the sceptical (Hume, Bradley, Joachim, Balfour). . ., the Eliot's [and] the critical (Kant)...." agnostic (Spencer, Huxley)...,

purpose is to show that the agnostic and skeptical approaches are "not latent in the criticism [i.e., the critical philosophy] of Kant.... 56 Kant had safeguarded the concept of God by placing it in the noumenal realm. But the success of this depended on Kant's Deduction exhibiting a necessary and not merely contingent connection between the knowability of phenomena and the unknowability of noumena. Eliot seems to suggest that philosophies which merely imply the distinction of phenomena and noumena (without articulating their necessary connection) must be skeptical, agnostic, or dogmatic as regards the concept of God. He proceeds to give his view of the secularization of modern thought which resulted in Bradley's metaphysics: of The philosophies Lockeand Berkeley... werehalf sceptical,half dogmatic; followeda completerscepticismin Hume.After Hegel, Bradley... the [there] is alwaysby the soil of system.... As the system germof scepticism quickened and and the doubtspushthrough; the decayis so general fructifying decomposes, and that we are no longersure of anythingto drawthe line betweenknowledge For Bradleythe only recourseis an Absolutewhich ... represents ignorance. in fact only the patheticprimitivehuman Credoin ... ultimaterealitywhich haunts us like the prayersof childhood.This absolute is mystical, because Ultimatetruth remainsinaccessible.... 57 desperate. Bradley's absolute, incidentally, was also termed "mystical" by Eliot's Harvard mentor Josiah Royce.58For Eliot, it is mystical in its transcendence of Kant's phenomena-noumenadistinction, "the line between knowledge and ignorance," such that God is merely posited as an abstract entity, an aspect of the absolute. But Eliot also views this secularization or "general" decay as encompassing positivism, realism, and agnosticism, none of which can articulate at all the implied "noumenal" status of
"Report on the Relation of Kant's Criticism to Agnosticism" (hereafter cited as KCA). 57KCA, 4. 58 Royce, The Worldand the Individual: First Series: The Four Historical Conceptions of Being (New York, 1959), 549.
56

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"60 cism.

God.59 Hence Eliot's comment that "the situation of the noumenon cannot be exactly that attributed to it by idealism, realism, or agnosti-

Eliot urges that in "scepticism, agnosticism, and criticism, the common character is limitation" (i.e., each imposes limits on our possible knowledge), and he goes on to explore how Kant's critical limitation differs from the boundaries envisaged by skepticism and agnosticism. He quotes, in German, Kant's statement that the "division of objects into phenomena and noumena, and the world into a world of the senses and a world of the understanding ... is quite inadmissible in the positive sense... 61For Kant, the noumenon in a "positive" sense designates a purely intelligible object, one which would be given to the understanding if this could operate without sensibility. But Kant rejects this, saying that the noumenon is merely a "limiting concept."62 Eliot agrees, affirming that the "distinction ... is not between different types of objects,
but . . . different types of relations," and that the "phenomenal is real, for us."63

But Eliot sees a contradiction in Kant's division of "experience" into form and matter:are the categories to be viewed as "laws overexperience" or "laws in experience (a part of experience)?" In Eliot's view experience always presents an internal and an external aspect: "we mean either the (hypothetical) total complex of our world (imagined as from without)," or we can view experience as including "certain subsistents (categories, theories, assumptions)... ."64 For Eliot the categories cannot ultimately transcend the experience of which they are part: we must posit something as totally external (noumena) for the categories to be instruments of knowledge at all. In order to know at all, Eliot says, we must begin with "faith," which he calls "the conception of an external relation" to a reality "outside of ourselves."65This, going back to Kant's definition of "objective reality" as "relation to an object," anticipates the similar arguments about "faith" in Eliot's dissertation: in a strikingly modern fashion, he affirmed that a leap of faith was an essential moment in the construction of any philosophy. Eliot raises another problem with Kant's reasoning. If God is a noumenal object, doesn't this imply noumenality in the "positive" sense?
Eliot insists that "the noumenon ... in itself ... could be neither true

nor false. It would however be true-in relation to appearance." He asks why God, any more than other objects, should be only noumenal:
59KE, 106-7. 60 KCA, 9. 61 Ibid., 6; Critique, 272. 62 Critique, 268, 272-74.
63

Ibid., 7. 65Ibid., 9-10.

64

KCA, 8, 10.

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What absolutedistinctiondo we find betweenGod and a table, as objectsof in (as experience?... [B]othare hypotheses, themselves noumena)neithertrue nor false, but for us true or false in direct relationto their proximityto our In action in the particular complexof our social experience. this way the difwouldbe by an indefinite and number ferencebetweenempirical transcendental of degrees.66 We can hear the voices of Plato, Hegel, and Bradley in the Eliotesque harmony of this passage: the complete consort dancing together. Eliot has argued that the mutual relativity of knowledge and ignorance is an equal relativity of each to phenomena and God. Interestingly, Eliot seems anxious to concretize Kant's God, an abstractly posited entity, into something which can be experienced. Indeed, in Eliot's view, assumptions as to the ultimate reality of God, a table, or whatever, can be legitimized only in the degree to which they extend coherently through social experience and not by any abstract conception of the human mind as operating via fixed categories: "if... experience is so inherently evasive and protean, what right can we claim to categorise. . .? From the individual experience ... we should have neither right nor need. It is only in a social life that we do become conscious of a body of experience ... in which are found persistence and order."67This view of "experience" as presupposing the social recognition of its immediately given elements Taken over by Bradas universal derives from Hegel's Phenomenology.68 ley,69it enters Eliot's doctoral thesis as the insistence that "pure" immediate experience would be unrecognizable as such: ultimately, this means that theory and practice always pervade each other,70a necessity ignored by those who insist that Eliot's view of reality was "practical." Eliot's statements here anticipate some of Jacques Derrida's views, a fact which, notwithstanding the surprised "discovery" of some recent critics, is predictable, given that Derrida's key notions (as he himself admits) move directly under Hegel's shadow. We also have here a philosophical counterpart to Eliot's view of "tradition," in which a literary work's very existence is diffused through the historical, social and, above all, experiential consensus denoted by tradition. Having represented Kant's distinction as comprising a necessary relation between knowability and unknowability, Eliot now attacks Herbert Spencer's agnosticism, which fails to comprehend that necessity. Ironically, Eliot condemns Spencer's viewpoint as dogmatic: agnosticism,in the nineteenthcentury,has been consequent,not upon metaphysicaldogmaso much as upon scientificdogma.Both Spencerand Huxley
66Ibid., 11-12. 67 Ibid., 8. 68 Hegel's Phenomenologyof Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1979), 58-66. 69 The Principles of Logic (London, 1950), 21-27. 70KE, 16.

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... ... remained scientists. of Agnosticism containsa residuum scientificdogma ... agnosticism in makesdefiniteassertions regardto our ignorance knowland is edge. In other words,agnosticism itself a dogma;for in orderto make these positiveassertions,we must place absolutecredencein a certainlimitedbody of truth and "matterof fact."71 Spencer's First Principles (which Eliot appears to have used here) expounds what he calls the "Unknowable," the "reality underlying appearances," a power which acts on us. Spencer holds that both religion and science have progressed through an increasing recognition of the unknowability of this power inasmuch as they have posited increasingly abstract causes of phenomena.72Spencer claims that since philosophy vainly strives to grasp ultimate reality, we are left with science, which "concerns itself with the co-existences and sequences among phenomena....73

Eliot affirms that "the confusion between practical truth-value and fixed realistic truth-relations betrays Spencer into the assignment of greater inclusiveness to his symbols than they actually denote."74 This becomes clearer in the light of Spencer's remark that the "interpretation of all phenomena in terms of Matter, Motion, and Force, is nothing more than the reduction of our complex symbols of thought, to the simplest symbols...."75 Eliot's point seems to be that excluding philosophy and reducing explanation of all objects to material elements, makes it impossible to articulate the externality of the "unknown reality," which therefore has no necessary connection with these elements. Hence that superfluous externality falls away, leaving a direct equation of truth as coherence (practical) and as correspondence(realist). This effective abandoning of the "Unknowable" (Spencer's correlate for Kantian noumena) means that phenomenal knowledge must be viewed as ultimately real. So Spencer's position is a "naif realism" which "tacitly asserts and implicitly denies" a correspondence theory of truth. Eliot concludes that Kant's position is equally hostile to skepticism and agnosticism. Each of these "clings to the illusions of knowledge," whereas Kant's work "goes to prove that there is no such thing as knowledge at all, in this sense." All in all, Eliot considers Spencer's procedure "very different from that of Kant, and very much less profound."76We can see that Eliot's antipathy to the Victorians existed on a philosophical plane before it extended to figures such as Arnold and Tennyson.
71

72First Principles (London, 1870), 25ff; 47ff; 98-105.

KCA, [1]-2.

73Spencer, 131. 74KCA, 3.

75 Spencer, 557-58.
76

KCA, 7-8.

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In his final paper, "Report on the Ethics of Kant's Critiqueof Practical Reason," Eliot looks at the ethical implications of Kant's phenomenanoumena distinction. His basic argument is that the validity of Kant's ethics rests on "the possibility of an absolute distinction between practical and speculative reason," a possibility that Eliot rejects.77According to Eliot, if it could be shown that this distinction were "relative, then the material and mechanical system [the phenomenal world] would no longer maintain its speculative priority..., [and] the noumena of pure reason would have to be considered as objects of pure faith, and the objects of practical reason as to some degree already speculatively existent."78To establish this relativity, Eliot attacks each of the dualisms in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, which contribute to the absoluteness of distinction between pure (speculative) and practical reason. Kant had argued that speculative reason is concerned exclusively with objects of the understanding, which are given in sensible intuition and are therefore empirically conditioned. Practical reason, says Kant, "has to do with a subject ... with the grounds of determination of the will" and is therefore not bound by empirical conditions of objectivity, these "grounds" being purely rational.79In other words practical reason, the moral faculty, makes its decisions on the basis of reason, not contingent empirical circumstances. The fundamental law of practical reason is a categorical imperative which, unlike an hypothetical imperative, determines the will irrespective of empirical effects. The ultimate object of the will is the highest good which is a synthesis of virtue and happiness. To achieve this, practical reason must postulate three things: immortality, the freedom of a being qua noumenon, and God. These must be assumed if the will is to obey the moral law.80Overall, speculative reason is the sphere of understanding, phenomena, sense, objectivity, and causality. Practical reason embraces the will, noumena, purely intelligible (as opposed to sensible) entities, subjectivity, and freedom. Eliot rejects each of these distinctions, beginning with that between objects of sense perception and objects of thought: "there is, in fact, an infinite gradation of objects...." He suggests that the law of gravity can be viewed as "directly perceived" or "indirectly inferred": "the apple which falls is likewise perception or hypothesis." Since we cannot separate sense experience from the operations of the intellect, all that we know is "hypothesis [theory] and perception in relation." So the existence of any object (not just noumena) presupposes practical postulates.81Eliot
77 "Report on the Ethics of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason," 1 (hereafter cited as EKC). 78 EKC, 1. 79 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, tr. L. W. Beck (Indianapolis, 1978), 15-18 (hereafter cited as CPR). 80CPR, 117, 123, 137 ff. 81 EKC, 3.

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envisages three ways in which we can view the connection between the "moral" (noumenal) and "mechanical" (phenomenal) worlds: "Both naturalism and idealism must assert that the one or other order is absolute: which is, I think, a greater error than to assert with Kant that both are absolute."82But Eliot's own view is that if the two worlds are "relative
to each other ... we can construct a philosophy which will perhaps be

more possible to live by than the foregoing." He continues to insist that noumena and phenomena are meaningful only in relation: "Granted that the practical reason must think of itself as being in relation with a noumenal God, does not the speculative reason make virtually the same assumption in regard to its objects? It assumes that a noumenal object is 'there,' and is any greater claim put forward on behalf of God or
freedom [?]. "83

Eliot agrees with Kant's ethics on two counts: the moral law is a necessary assumption for human activity, and "Kant is right in affirming that the existence of God is necessary for moral explanation." But Eliot refuses to accept (a view he mistakenly imputes to Kant)84 that the
phenomenal world can "claim logical precedence over ... the belief in

God or in freedom or in immortality....85 Eliot seems unhappy with Kant's reduction of God's "existence" to complete dependence on morality: for Kant, we must simply assume God's existence in order to act morally. Eliot holds that God, even in His aspect as a ground of "moral explanation," must partake of the phenomenal realm: "God and freedom, so far as we 'know' them, are phenomena; so far as they are hypotheses, or explanations of what we know, they are noumenal.... Accordingly God is quite as real as anything else! Not this or that God-but at any moment some God."86 Kant's phenomena-noumena distinction placed an insuperable chasm between Man and God. Eliot's attempt to harmonize the two sides of the distinction might be viewed as anticipating his belief in the Incarnation in which the human and Divine pervade each other. Indeed, Eliot criticizes the abstractness of Kant's God, who is reduced to "a mere term."87 This does less than justice to Kant's own account88but is identical with Hegel's critique.89 Eliot also questions the validity of the categorical imperative, saying that there is more than one categorical imperative involved in any particular action, a criticism also made by Bradley.90 further objects that He
Ibid., 4-5. Ibid., 4, 7. 84 See CPR, 126. 85 EKC, 9. 86 Ibid., 7-8. 87 Ibid., 7. 88CPR, 135, 142-46. 89Logic, 58, 95-96. 90Ethical Studies (Oxford, 1962), 157 (hereafter cited as ES).
83 82

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the categorical imperative is abstract and unable to "explain any system of values that is ever actually found in human history." His point is that ethics should "give a clue to what I should do, and what I should not...."91 This was precisely Hegel's objection92and was repeated by Bradley.93Eliot himself holds that what should determine correct action
is Aristotelian "common sense": "only in uErTptcor,;q (ro Kacptov, To rrpCrrov!) is there meaning. And LECTptcor-;q has no meaning for me

unless it is an unstable equilibrium, unless there is always a possibility of excess, demanding the check of good sense."94The Greek terms can be rendered respectively as "moderation," "timely circumstance," and "propriety." Aristotle had defined virtue as "the observance of the mean
... between two vices, one of excess and one of defect."95 In virtue of

the formality of Kant's law, Eliot says it "is a long way to Aristotle iber Kant." Eliot finds a contradiction in Kant's view of the highest good: "if humanity is the end (absolutely) the idea of the Summum Bonum is only a means. And unless the Summum Bonum is the end humanity is meaningless." This is the same dilemma that Eliot will later find in positivism and humanism generally. Eliot adds that "it is not only inexact
but dangerous ... to regard humanity ... as more than a provisionally

postulated end."96 Eliot concludes that the attempt to reduce ethics to

a "logical science ... must end in partial failure" because it involves

"the creation of absolute distinctions where distinctions are purely relative...." For Eliot, questions about ethics, God, and freedom "depend ultimately on a vague entity" describable as "faith" or "common
sense.9

Common sense, that elusive entity so often appealed to by Eliot scholars, impels the question: are the traces of Eliot's journey through Kant's philosophy discernible in his later work? These manuscripts shed an interesting light on a dilemma which has long haunted critics of Eliot: why are his prose writings so fraught with apparent self-contradiction? He seems to regard human nature both as essential and as socially constructed: a poet must express truths impersonally, yet truth is "private"; religion entails submission to an external authority, yet we rightfully demand intellectual satisfaction from it. How can we make sense of such glaring discrepancies?A favorite "solution" is to say that Eliot was incapable of systematic thought, that he rejected "theory," relying instead on "common sense" and a "practical" piecemeal view of reality.
91EKC, 11, 13. 92Hegel's Philosophy of Right, tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1967), 90.
93ES, 154, 155n. 94EKC, 10-11.
95

Nicomachean Ethics, tr. H. Rackham (London, 1934), 95

96EKC, 12. 97Ibid., 11-13.

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But this impoverished approach ignores the fact that Eliot retained a serious interest in "theory" and reviewed philosophical works till the end of his life. And despite his own modest disclaimers, to imagine that Eliot, whose philosophical reading and ability vastly exceeded that of any of his critics, somehow lacked the capacity for so-called "abstract" thought is clearly absurd. Nor can we explain the contradictions by dividing Eliot's work into "earlier" skepticism and "later" religiosity, for the contradictions persist through the entire canon of Eliot's prose. In fact the Kant papers yield a significance in Eliot's view of "common sense" beyond that invested in it by such cynical critics. Eliot evidently sees an ambivalence in the way Aristotle's categories relate to reality, and he views neither Plato nor Aristotle as "realist." So how do we interpret Eliot's sustained praise of Aristotelian "common sense"? In an article on Leibniz, Eliot cites Aristotle's notion of "common sense" as referring to the combined operation of the senses, which collectively constitute the mind itself. Eliot observes the "cautious empiricism of Aristotle's theory" but insists that "Aristotle is too keen a metaphysician to start from a naive view of matter or from a one-sided spiritualism."98 So Eliot accepts Aristotle as an empiricist but not as a realist. For Aristotle " common sense" implies a given harmony between the elements of feeling and of intellect. In 1927 Eliot extends this to suggest that such a harmony must be achieved: "Common sense does not mean ... either the opinion of the majority or ... of the moment; it is not a thing to be got at without maturity and study and thought."99 Eliot's "common sense," then, is hardly a brazen anti-intellectualism. It seems rather to represent a philosophical eclecticism, as suggested by his essay of 1927 on Bradley. Eliot maintains here that Bradley's "is fundamentally a philosophy of common sense" and brings "British philosophy closer to the Greek tradition."', Eliot sees both Hegelian and empiricist strains in Bradley and is here referring to the empiricist component. We could read this assimilation of Plato, Aristotle, and Bradley as an attempt on Eliot's part to maintain a coherence between his philosophical allegiances. It is this coherence, augmented in his later work by the influences of Augustine and Aquinas, which sustains Eliot's Classicist mentality. But given this type of rapprochement, why the contradictions in his work, which also exhibits attitudes characteristic of Romanticism? The Kant papers furnish a second clue: they bring into clearer focus two conflicting positions in Eliot's doctoral thesis which may have helped to generate these long-term contradictions. In his philosophical writings Eliot's Aristotelian "Classical" outlook, with its claims of reason, pluralism, external authority, and the transcendent status of God as well as
98KE, 188, 194-95. 99For Lancelot Andrewes (London, 1970), 67.
0

Selected Essays (London,

1976), 455.

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the stability of both human nature and external reality, is opposed by essentially Romantic traits deriving from Bradley, Royce, Edward Caird, and, indirectly, Hegel. These philosophers were not of course Romantics. But Bradley's philosophy, for example, holds certain Romantic tenets: it asserts the authority of experience over intellect (the relational form of thought); it is monistic; it expresses what both Eliot and Royce called a "mystical" relation between infinite and finite, between the absolute reality and its appearances; and it views subject and object as mutually dependent processes. The contradiction in Eliot's work between Romantic and Classical attitudes cannot be resolved by chronology: Eliot was studying and praising Aristotle at the same time as he embraced the positions in Bradley's philosophy noted above. Yet it is worth remembering that Eliot had serious reservations about the notion of "substance"-the basis of Aristotle's entire metaphysics-as well as about Aristotle's concept of God. So it is not altogether surprising that, although Eliot repeatedly affirms the importance of Aristotle's Poetics as an ideal, his own actual aesthetics derive not from Aristotle but from "Romantic" convictions derived from Bradley and figures such as Baudelaire and Remy de Gourmont. The point here is that both positions, Romantic and Classical, were articulated essentially with reference to Kant's distinction between phenomena and noumena. In his doctoral thesis Eliot had reached the Romantic position that experience, since it subsumes the relation of subject and object (the terms of relational thought), is inadequately expressible by thought and language. This, incidentally, is almost identical with an argument in Coleridge'sLogic.10 Eliot was led to this conclusion by his argument, deriving ultimately from Hegel, that there is only a provisional distinction between
"real" and "ideal."
102 This

position is anticipated in his Kant papers,

both in his reading of Plato's Forms and his rejection of Kant's distinction between the form and content of experience. These ideas, together with his rejection of Bradley's absolute, carried Eliot to skepticism as regards the nature of ultimate reality. It is at this point that Eliot's struggle with skepticism diverges into Classical and Romantic "solutions." On the Romantic side, Eliot accepts Bradley's doctrines of "degrees of truth and reality" and the internality of relations. Eliot interprets these as meaning that something is real to the extent that it enters into social and historical relations and is a coherent part of lived experience. "Experience" cannot be defined in terms of any individual; it is in its very nature social. Hence reality is a convention. And poetry expresses a deeper reality underlying this conventional one. These views are based on a Romantic continuity between
The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, XIII, Logic, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson (London, 1981), 288-89.
102 101

KE, 32.

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finite(appearance) infinite(reality);they also embodythe Romantic and that realityis changeable, to politicalimplication according its definition varioussocial groups.This path would have led Eliot to the philoby sophical terrainof Derrida, Foucault, and some Marxistcritics. Eliot was indeedled to assertthat theorywas an infinitelyregressive circle of elementsand that theory and practicewere inexmutuallypresupposed tricable. However, Eliot's "solution" to skepticismis also underlainby a Classical impulseto go beyondthe notionof realityas socialandhistorical to reality as somethingultimateand unchanging. But as we saw, Eliot thinks that such an ultimaterealitycan be apprehended only by a leap of faith. In his eyes this leap from skepticism,or a recognitionof the merely provisionaland social validity of any belief system, to the acceptanceof an absoluteexternalauthorityis somethingwhich characterizes all philosophy. It also, of course, characterizesEliot's own Yet the biography. the contradiction persists: Classicalcontentof Eliot's in religionand literarycriticismis all too often subvertedby positions their Romantic form. Eliot accepts the external authority of AngloCatholicism, takes the troubleto arguethat Catholicismis the best yet intellectualexplanationof the world. Eliot often suggeststhat there is an organic, internal connectionbetween art, philosophy,and religion these domains),103 (whereasa Classicistlike Hulmetook careto separate that religioncould be arrivedat throughart and philosophy: implying "we aim ... to terminate enjoyment the arts in a philosophy,and our of
our philosophy in a religion....

organisation of many poetic elements.... "105

found betweenKant's speculativeand moral worlds. Even Eliot's definitions of Classicismbear the traces of the Romantic legacy he was historicallyforced to confront:Classicismis "an individualand new Eliot admitsthat Classicism no longerattainable: modernlack is the

"04 This reflects the continuity Eliot

the last century"is "partlythe result of conditionsof society and historicalorigins,beyondour control..., [but] nevertheless, mustmainwe tain the classic ideal...."o06 Hence we find Eliot's literary criticism beliefsaboutthe natureof poetry: inevitably by pervaded Romantic poetry is autonomous, "realistic,"concernsemotionratherthan truth, and not expresseswhat in "ordinary"languageis ineffable.Some of these views

of a common style, and indeed the "riot of individual styles ... during

Herbert Read (London, 1960), 3-5. 04Bookman, 70 (1930), 599. 105 Introd., Le Serpent Par Paul Valkry,tr. M. Wardle (London, 1924), 11. 106 On Poetry and Poets (London, 1957), 59, 182, 187 (hereafter cited as OPAP). 107 The Complete Poetry and Selected Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Allen Tate (London, 1981), 182-86.

03 Speculations, ed.

T. S. Eliot on Kant

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and are expressed of course by figures such as Poe,107Baudelaire,108 But Gourmont.109 the closest parallels are with Coleridge, who took Kant as his starting point. In an appendix on Aristotle's categories in his Logic, Coleridge argues that both "being" and "acting," subject and predicate, are produced from an underlying unity expressed by the verb substantive ("am"). So for Coleridge "being" is originally a unity which is divided by the subjectpredicate structure of language, with the implication that this structure cannot express "being" as such.110Similarly, both Bradley and Eliot viewed the entire subject-predicate relation as a predicate of perceived reality which was the true subject, the unity underlying the linguistic differentiation of subject and predicate. Eliot had asserted that symbol and symbolized (signifier and signified) are mutually continuous, their linguistic division representing a merely conventional imposition upon an original unity. Hence language is constitutive of reality, each word representingan organization of "a set of experiences." What this amounts to is that, for both Eliot and Coleridge, conventional language can express only conventional reality. It is poetry which can break through this veil of convention, arriving at a deeper substratum of reality by disrupting and recreating language. This is expressed in Coleridge's view of the and "secondary" imagination, the vehicle of poetry,111 in Eliot's famous if necessary, language comment that the poet must "force ... dislocate For Bradley relational thinking in terms of subject into his meaning."112 and object was a "compromise": it could not adequately convey the content of experience. Eliot advanced beyond Bradley in locating this "compromise" not only in thought but in language itself. In 1918, shortly after his philosophical studies, Eliot repeated his affirmation of the ultimately metaphorical nature of all thought and language: "we are dependent upon metaphor for even the abstractest ... thinking. ... [Y]ou

can hardly say where the metaphorical and literal meet."13 In 1929 he urges that in literary criticism we need "a logical and dialectical study of the terms used.""114 As late as 1950 Eliot still adheres to these views, saying that circularity of definition is "a permanent condition of language
and of thought.""15

Again, Eliot's most fundamental aesthetic view, that "Permanent

108 Baudelaire as a Literary Critic:Selected Essays, tr. L. B. Hyslop and F. E. Hyslop Jr. (Pennsylvania, 1964), 40, 88, 127, 132. 109 Remy de Gourmont:Selected Writings,tr. G. S. Burne (New York, 1966), 20, 24, 31, 210.
o0

.
112
113

Logic, 288-89.

Biographia Literaria, ed. G. Watson (London, 1977), 167. Selected Essays, (London, 1976), 289. Egoist, V (1918), 113.
LXX (1929), 232.

114Bookman,
115

To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings(London, 1978), 67, 71.

114
literature is ... a presentation of thought, or ...

M. A. R. Habib
feeling by a statement

of events ... or objects in the external world,"116 presupposes a Romantic continuity between emotion and object, reflecting Eliot's views in the Kant papers. Even Eliot's "impersonality theory," based on a distinction between "human" and "artistic" emotion, is Romantic, the poet creating an autonomous world of "artistic" emotion. In 1940 Eliot defined "impersonality" as the creation of a general truth or symbol out of personal This is identical with one of the functions attributed by experience."17 For both Eliot and Coleridge to the poetic imagination."18 Coleridge universality is achieved through a process which starts from the subject, and in this they diverge equally from Aristotle. It is an impersonality based precisely on the continuity, not the separation, of the finite and infinite. And this basis of continuity was articulated by both men in their attempts to overcome Kant's distinction of the phenomenal and noumenal worlds. We cannot expect three papers written by Eliot as a graduate student to alter radically our vision of Eliot, but they may help to clarify it. Firstly, the papers confirm the independence and seriousness of Eliot's philosophical intellect. Eliot's early advocacy of Classicism, "order" and "tradition" has long been ascribed to the influences of Irving Babbitt and T. E. Hulme. But Eliot's own treatment of certain crucial issues, such as the "one-many" problem (which Babbitt had regarded as the fundamental problem of thought)"19 is far more sophisticated than the corresponding analyses offered by Babbitt and Hulme. Secondly, the manuscripts furnish a more comprehensive vista of the stages of Eliot's philosophical development, from his early reading of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant to the positions eventually reached in his doctoral thesis. Eliot's treatment of Kant, we now know, had a formative role in his interpretation of Bradley. It has been overlooked, moreover, that the main argument of Eliot's dissertation, in which he denies any unified "subject" for psychology and any stable "objects" for epistemology, is centered upon Kant's distinction of phenomena and noumena. And while certain views in the Kant papers anticipate those in the dissertation, it is in the treatment of Kant rather than Bradley that Eliot's arguments extend to subjects which retained his lifelong interest: religion and the concept of God, morality and science, as well as movements in positivism and humanism. I hope I have shown that Eliot's philosophizing does indeed haunt his literary endeavors, as did the prayers of his childhood. Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.
116 17

The Sacred Wood (London, 1976), 65.

OPAP, 255.

119

18 Biographia, 174. Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston and New York, 1957), xv.