Making Sense of Sincerity in The Prelude

Abstract

The idea of ‘sense’ undergoes a radical transformation in significance and normative power during the Romantic period. Fundamental to this transformation is a pronounced linguistic turn in eighteenth-century thought. David Hume, John Horne Tooke, Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham realised that the meaning of a word cannot be explicated purely in terms of ideas or sensations: reference, in other words, is underdetermined by ‘sense’. This crisis in the referential economy of empiricism in turn provokes a range of responses: scepticism about language (Hume); a shift from ideas to words as the primary units of cognition (Tooke); the identification of language as a site of aesthetic indeterminacy figured in the sublime (Burke); and a change in the basic units of meaning from words to statements, clarified by pragmatic contextual definition, or ‘paraphrasis’ (Bentham). I will return to the difference between the Burkean and Benthamite strategies later. The general upshot of this linguistic turn was the perceived inadequacy of the ‘language of sense’, a perception that feeds Wordsworth’s vacillation between the veridical immediacy of sense-experience and the numinous aura of imagination — between a natural ‘sense’ and a supernatural ‘sense of’.