A Tritical Essay Upon the Faculties of the Mind

Summary

Headnote

Published 1711; copy text 1735 (see Textual Account).

When this piece was first published in 1711, its composition was dated to 6 August 1707 (see Textual Account). Ehrenpreis, noting that ‘A Tritical Essay’ is ‘addressed to “a lover of antiquities”’, suggests that the dedicatee was Swift's friend and partner in punning Sir Andrew Fountaine. Echoes of Swift's hostile engagement at this time with the deist Matthew Tindal's The Rights of the Christian Church Asserted, of which he owned the third edition (1707), both reinforce this dating and indicate the kind of target that Swift has in his sights. Swift's critique of the style and substance of Tindal's book was damning:

It is true indeed, the whole Discourse seemeth to be a motly, inconsistent Composition, made up of various Shreds of equal Fineness, although of different Colours. It is a Bundle of incoherent Maxims and Assertions, that frequently destroy one another. But, still there is the same Flatness of Thought and Style; the same weak Advances towards Wit and Raillery; the same Petulancy and Pertness of Spirit; the same … superficial Reading; the same … thread-bare Quotations.

‘Tritical’ is Swift's blend of ‘trite’ and ‘critical’, a satirical synthesis of modern intellectual pretensions: cf., in the Apology to the Tale, the commendation of what is ‘altogether new, the World having been already too long nauseated with endless Repetitions upon every Subject’. This rehashing of familiar quotations and aphorisms such as were copied by schoolboys into their common-place books, or retrieved from printed compilations, is mistaken by its supposed author for productive innovation. Swift thus aligns modernity with the febrile over-productivity of a degenerate humanist tradition.6 Cf. Orrery's perception that the ‘wooden engine’ for ‘writing a treatise in any science’ in GT is ‘aimed at those authors, who, instead of receiving materials from their own thoughts and observations, collect from dictionaries and common place-books, an irregular variety, without order, use or design’. The professor shows Gulliver how his ‘young Students’ crank its handles to recombine words so that even ‘the most ignorant Person …may write Books … without the least Assistance from Genius or Study’; but all he can show of his projected ‘compleat Body of all Arts and Sciences’ is ‘several Volumes in large Folio … of broken Sentences’.