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Poetry and Truth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

The vitalizing effect, spoken of somewhere by Graham Wallas, which one University “subject” may have upon another if the traditional division of compartments can be broken down, has nowhere been better illustrated of late years than by the life brought into the English school at Cambridge through the teaching of Dr. I. A. Richards, who came out of the school of Mental and Moral Science. Not only his students, but contemporaries and elders as remote as myself, are grateful for the stimulus he has given; and not least grateful for the necessity imposed upon them of making clearer to their own minds the grounds upon which at various points they find themselves in disagreement with him, and the positive suggestions which they would wish to substitute for his. Their final task must be to try to make those suggestions in some language which both sides may agree to use; barring out, therefore, a good many terms which Dr. Richards regards as standing for “evident fictions”—“fictions such as universals, essences, concepts, causes.”

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1933

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References

page 446 Note 1 Richards, I. A., Mencius on the Mind, 1932, p. 62.Google Scholar The author’s chief earlier books are Principles of Literary Criticism, 1924; Science and Poetry, 1926; and Practical Criticism, 1929.

page 447 Note 1 It is Meinong’s Scheingefühl, and related to ordinary feeling as sense-imagery is related to sense-perception.

page 449 Note 1 Crowther, J. G. on the “Positive Electron,” New Statesman, February 25, 1933.Google Scholar

page 451 Note 1 The instance comes from MrMurry’s, Middleton essay in The Symposium (10 1930).Google Scholar

page 452 Note 1 Cf. T. S. Eliot’s Essay on Hamlet.

page 452 Note 2 From conversation with Dr. Richards, I understand that he agrees with this. I am still troubled by certain expressions in his writings which seem inconsistent with it. E.g., Mencius, pp. 82–83: “Cognition, the concept of knowledge, is the category that ‘response’ psychology has made most shaky.”

page 452 Note 3 Mencius, p. 114.

page 453 Note 1 Op. cit., p. 8.

page 453 Note 2 An instance taken from Practical Criticism.