Locke’s skeptical semiotics suggested that language could never grasp reality, but Reidian Common Sense philosophers insisted we could know the world directly and intuitively. Dickinson’s poems engage Common Sense theories which seem to discount the role of language in forming our perceptions. In her poetry, she works through and plays with Common Sense ideas about language, perception, and knowing, testing them against skeptical associationist ideas she found congenial to her work as a poet. In fact, Dickinson’s Upham textbook struggles to fend off the skeptical consequences of Brown’s Humean associationism as it undoes the Reidian realism in the perceptual process. In the course of reading several poems, I show that Dickinson’s poems work out the idea that language presents to us the only world we can know. Dickinson’s epistemological thinking works out a poetics content with “terms” and uncertainty, since the mediations of language produce and nurture human community.

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.