A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era
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Book Overview
This highly original contribution to Canadian intellectual history examines the course of critical inquiry and its relationship to the assertion of moral authority in English-Canadian thought during the Victorian era. Concentrating on the thought of Canada's major scientists, philosophers, and clerics -- men such as William Dawson and Daniel Wilson, John Watson and W.D. LeSeur, G.M. Grant and Salem Bland -- A Disciplined Intelligence begins by reconstructing the central strands of intellectual and moral orthodoxy prevalent in Anglo-Canadian colleges on the eve of the Darwinian revolution. These include Scottish common sense philosophy and the natural theology of William Paley. The destructive impact of evolutionary ideas on that orthodoxy and the major exponents of the new forms of social evolution -- Spencerian and Hegelian alike -- are examined in detail.
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:0773503439
ISBN13:9780773503434
Release Date:January 1979
Publisher:McGill-Queen's University Press
Length:299 Pages
Customer Reviews
1 rating
EXCELLENT INTRODUCTION TO 19TH CENTURY COMMON SENSE REALISM
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 16 years ago
McKillop's book was recommended to me years ago when I was working on a biography of a well-known 19th century Presbyterian historian. It turned out to be a wonderful resource for background on the impact and evolution of the Scottish Common-Sense Realist Evangelical tradition, not just for Canada but for North America and the English speeking world as well. I marked up a borrowed copy, and finally bought my own, as this is just a great book. I highly recommend it to anybody who is studying the intellectual background of North American higher education in the 19th century. Without a knowledge of Common Sense Realism, much if not most of 19th century intellectual history is really not intelligible. This is not a bad book to start with in that area.
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