3 - Association Theorists

Summary

In this final chapter of Part I, we consider the third eighteenth-century school of aesthetics in the shape of “associationism,” identified primarily with Henry Home (Lord Kames), Alexander Gerard, Archibald Alison, and Dugald Stewart. Like internal sense and imagination theorists, they too owe much to the empiricism of Locke, and to Hume of the Treatise, although they generally balk at the skeptical conclusions he drew there. These writers were all active in the second half of the century and therefore reap the benefits of being able to draw on the extensive body of work already completed; even Kames, who often writes as if in an intellectual vacuum, cannot help but, inadvertently or otherwise, draw on what his contemporaries and predecessors had achieved. More than the other contributors discussed so far, then, associationists knit together an eclectic array of elements to fabricate the most complex and systematic theories the tradition has produced, certainly in the eighteenth century and possibly in its long three-hundred-year history as well.

One element looming especially large for these thinkers is the imagination, which figures in their views as a compound and derivative faculty, and the seat of various principles that underlie association, the main explanans upon which Kames and others hit to account for the by-now-familiar desiderata of eighteenth-century aesthetics. There is also a notable emphasis on the same observation made by Reid (Essays I.575.5–8) that “beauty” and “sublimity” are predicated of objects with little or nothing in common, a feature of language that has sent many an unsuspecting philosopher scurrying into the alleys and byways of human nature or objective reality in search of some property or feature common to all phenomena of which the terms are predicated. Writing at century’s end, Stewart, in particular, develops this point, finding in it a lens through which to cast a critical glance back to the likes of Hogarth and Burke with their “line of beauty” and “smooth and soft.”