This chapter highlights the newly significant role of embodiment in the discourses of realist aesthetics and theory of mind across the 1860s. Developing conterminously (though not in lockstep), the discourses of aesthetic realism and psychology at this time endowed material reality – including the mind – with new relevance, insisting on the interdependence of body and mind and on the fundamental sameness of scientific and psychological inquiry, whose shared pursuit was advancing the “science of human nature.” More particularly, this chapter moves beyond a familiar emphasis on the role of visual aesthetics to feature other emergent or developing discourses important to realism, including theories of sound, psychology and perception, and motion, and even ital atomic theory and what E.S. Dallas, in The Gay Science (1866), described as “the science of the laws of pleasure.”

Dickinson wants to affect her readers, but not to overwhelm them. Is language’s power literal, its causation direct? Even if it might be, language’s material, sensational aspects must be converted to meanings. The question for Dickinson is to what extent that conversion is automatic, irresistible. Dickinson uses the frameworks of Common Sense and Humean philosophies to think about the nature of power in causation. The more naïve or Common Sense realist version of “electric sympathy” literalizes words’ causative power, while Dickinson’s associationist rhetoric of sympathy observes a skeptical gap between persons. Campbell’s Humean rhetoric insists that cause is attributive and interpretive. Bain’s neuroscience suggests that electricity is integral, not inimical, to the perceptual process. Consistently, Dickinson employs a figurative, ambiguous style which maps onto the recipient’s processes of inference down to the neurological, that is, electrical, level, inducing a lightning in the mind which is the reader’s own power.

It was in the nineteenth century that a philosophical enterprise begun in the eighteenth century was first identified as ‘Scottish philosophy’, and arguably, philosophical discussion and debate were more intense and more culturally prominent in nineteenth-century Scotland than it had ever been before. Yet, while philosophy in the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment is now studied to the point of being a major academic industry, Scottish philosophy in the nineteenth century is virtually unknown. Hutcheson, Hume, Reid and Smith are names familiar to almost all philosophers, Brown, Hamilton, Ferrier and Bain to hardly any. This chapter aims to explain why one period of Scottish philosophy should remain perennially interesting and intensively studied and the period that followed it should fall so nearly into oblivion. It elaborates an answer couched in terms of the story of Scottish philosophy itself and argues that the nineteenth century saw the unravelling of the great philosophical project that had animated the eighteenth.