Hugh Sykes Davies and George Watson - The English Mind: Studies in the English Moralists Presented to Basil Willey

The English Mind - Davies, Hugh Sykes (edt)/ Wat...

This 1964 text is not a random collection of essays, but a book on a single theme. Written by separate hands, mainly by literary critics at Cambridge, it was planned as a whole and executed with a common purpose: to produce the first literary study of the English moralists of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth.The authors share two convictions: they believe that the study of literature demands an understanding of whatever moral philosophy is embodied in it; and they believe that philosophical writings are capable of being tested by the techniques of literary criticism. In this book, such works as Bacon's Advancement of Learning, Hobbes's Leviathan, and Hume's Enquiries are viewed as whole works, not as repositories of philosophical propositions, nor as episodes in the history of English thought.In its range The English Mind is comprehensive enough to be read as a general survey of English moral thought: yet each chapter has that liveliness and lucidity that is only achie