Author: GERARD (Alexander):
Title: An Essay on Genius.
Description: London: Printed for W. Strahan; T. Cadell...; and W. Creech..., 1774. FIRST EDITION. 8vo (222 x 140 mms.), pp. vii [viii adverts], 434 [435 Errata, 436 blank], contemporary calf, red morocco label; newly rebound in period-style quarter calf, gilt spine, red morocco label, marbled boards; fore-margin of title-page very slightly frayed, some water-staining in margins of last two leaves, and short, closed tear in pp. 433 - 434, but a good copy. Although Gerard's more famous Essay on Taste, first published in 1759 was reprinted and expanded several times in the 18th century, his two books on genius were never reprinted until the 20th century. Gerard's work consolidates and anticipates: James Engell has said of him that he "broke the mold of run-of-the-mill British associationists" and that his two books "move associationism and the theory of imagination onto a higher and richer plane." For Gerard, genius is "the leading faculty of the mind, the grand instrument of all investigation"; it is the mind's capacity for invention that makes genius the mind's pre-eminent quality. (Homer is, not surprisingly, cited as the perfect model of genius.) Genius derives from imagination, but the two are not identical: "Genius implies regularity, as well as comprehensiveness of imagination. Regularity arises in a great measure from such a turn of imagination as enables the associating principles, not only to introduce proper ideas, but also to connect the design of the whole with every idea that is introduced." Gerard's introduction of the idea of regularity' into his argument may seem to impose restrictions upon genius, but the discipline of organization and arrangement is necessary to bring to fruition the buds of genius.

Keywords: aesthetics philosophy Scottish Enlightenment


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