Chapter 3 - Lightning in the Mind

Summary

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.