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ROBERT E. NORTON. The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1995. Pp. xi + 314. $35.
For Scriblerians, Mr. Norton offers a lucid, beautifully written account of the development of the concept of moral beauty in Britain through the philosophers, bypassing the poets. After Hume, he crosses the channel, headed for Germany, and never looks back. Once on the continent, philosophers and poets pair up (Wieland and Rousseau, Kant and Schiller, Goethe and Hegel). The result is a text where the philosophical highpoints are very clear, the English terrain uncluttered with artistic underbrush, and thus open to easy development by literary critics. Among the great strengths of Mr. Norton's discussion is its awareness of contemporary questions about morality. Rorty and Foucault appear only in the Preface, but the difficulties they and their readers face in thinking through the grounds of morality underlie his analyses of earlier thinkers' grapplings with the same topic.
Mr. Norton argues that modern ethics emerged in Britain as a response to Hobbes and the ugly soul, controllable only by externally imposed force, proposed in Leviathan. The Cambridge platonists riposted that human beings have an innate capacity for morality, underwritten by God, just as they have a capacity for mathematics. Algebra is true, even if certain individuals fail to learn its principles, and so is morality. Given Hobbes's persistent attempts to square the circle, Cudworth could certainly have found comfort for his argument on innate capacities in Hobbes's mathematics. Becoming a philosopher when conversation stalled, Locke...