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• W1963501904 abstract "Even a cursory review of the scholarship concerned with Samuel Johnson's astute perceptions into human nature reveals a particular interest in his understanding of the permanent and inescapable relationship between the imagination and melancholy.1 For example, in an early study titled Johnson's Distrust of the Imagination, Raymond D. Havens isolates six senses in which Johnson uses imagination in his writing.2 Havens argues that Johnson's view of the imagination is essentially negative; it ranges from a power that distorts the real world to one that produces nonexistent things for the mind to dwell on, to believe real, and that results inevitably in a state of melancholy. Yet there is a divergence between Havens's endeavor to accentuate the negative effects of the imagination, one of which is the production of morbid melancholy, and the prevailing endeavor of Samuel Johnson himself to foster a more balanced—at times even sympathetic—attitude regarding the interrelationship between the imagination and melancholy. In perhaps the most insightful study written on Johnson's understanding of human nature, Walter Jackson Bate presents a more balanced [End Page 47] view of Johnson's observations on the imagination: The 'hunger of the imagination' . . . and the 'stability of truth' . . . form the twin poles between which Johnson's practical insights into human life and destiny move back and forth.3 Bate's analysis, however, tends to emphasize the theoretical aspects of the imagination's relationship with melancholy in Johnson's writings; the Sermons, on the other hand, consistently demonstrate Johnson's commitment to explore the empirical and pragmatic dimensions of the imagination as it operates in a dual and paradoxical manner, both positively and negatively, on melancholy. More recently, in Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Thought, Nicholas Hudson rightly argues that Johnson's accounts of the imagination and melancholy stress precisely what the orthodox religious tradition, as represented in the sermons of prominent eighteenth-century divines, attempted to extinguish—the apparent dreadful spontaneity of the imagination and debilitating mental paralysis of spiritual melancholy.4 Indeed, whatever the tension between the self-delusive powers of the imagination and the demands of moral behavior, Johnson's Sermons indicate that we not eschew the imagination but engage it as the responsible way of modulating the propensity of human nature for morbid melancholy. On first reading, the Sermons might suggest that Johnson maintains a solely negative view of the imagination's inseparable link with melancholy. To be sure, he often describes the imagination as the dangerously creative and delusive faculty that invents objects or goals, real or unreal, for the mind to fix upon. If unregulated, it can be the principal cause of melancholy, extending human desires far beyond our ability to obtain them, always promising happiness but always disappointing the fulfillment: Men are very seldom disappointed, except when their desires are immoderate, or when they suffer their imaginations to overpower their reason, and dwell upon delightful scenes of future honours, power, or riches, till they mistake probabilities for certainties, or wild wishes for rational expectations.5 [End Page 48] Yet Johnson acknowledges the positive contributions the imagination makes to our capacity for empathizing with others as they and we wrestle with the despondency of melancholy. He believes the imagination is capable of benefiting human nature by acting creatively rather than destructively: Since the mind is always of itself shrinking from disagreeable images, it is sometimes necessary to recall them.6 It is a faculty to be regulated rather than extinguished7 because of its positive powers in helping to modulate melancholy. Some difficulty arises, however, in attempting to define melancholy because Johnson uses the term in several different and not always interrelated senses—showing, to begin with, the complexity of the concept and to some extent, perhaps, the imprecision of identifying similar processes with one name. Johnson's Dictionary definitions of melancholy demonstrate not only his classical understanding of the..." @default.
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• W1963501904 date "2005-01-01" @default.
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• W1963501904 title "Morbid Melancholy, the Imagination, and Samuel Johnson's Sermons" @default.
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• W1963501904 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/log.2005.0037" @default.
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