Abstract
The meaning of character and its bearing on individual and social life preoccupied many people in the nineteenth century as it did in the eighteenth, creating both continuities and ruptures between the two periods. In this chapter, I want to consider this mix of persistence and change by concentrating first on some theoretical issues that bridged discussions about character in the two centuries and then on some historical and cultural shifts that separated them.
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Notes
See Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).
The best study is G. Felicitas Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character: The “Critical” Link of Morality, Anthropology and Reflective Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
See Carol Blum, Diderot: The Virtue of a Philosopher (New York: Viking, 1974), and my discussion of Diderot in The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chap. 6.
Alexander Bain, On the Study of Character: Including an Estimate of Phrenology (London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1861), 12, 285–87.
See David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd ed., ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, rev. ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 85–86: 8.1.11; and “The Sceptic,” in Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987), 171.
Joel Kupperman, Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 16–17.
Stefan Collini, “The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought,” TRHS, 5th series, 35 (1985): 34.
Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 262–67.
Mason, Making of Victorian Sexuality, and his companion volume, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Helen Taylor’s letter is quoted by Alice S. Rossi in her introduction to John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, Essays on Sex Equality (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 50.
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1852), 541, 545–46.
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 83.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Currin V. Shields (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1975), 60 for the reference to “passive susceptibilities,” 57 for Humboldt.
George Eliot, Adam Bede (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 469, 359.
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Seigel, J. (2011). Necessity, Freedom, and Character Formation from the Eighteenth Century to the Nineteenth. In: Ahnert, T., Manning, S. (eds) Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119956_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119956_13
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