Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgments
- List of Charts
- Introduction: Prometheus Unbound
- 1 ‘Things without him’: Locke and the Logic of Metallism
- 2 Shaftesbury and Scottish Moral Sense Commercial Humanism: Inclinations Implanted in the Subject
- 3 American Money and Political Economy, 1780–1828
- 4 Banking and Money in Boston
- 5 Likeness to God
- 6 The Luxury of Pity
- 7 The Political Economy of Beauty and the Imagination
- Conclusion: Sense Subordinated to the Mind
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Appendix: Tables for Charts 1–9
- Index
5 - Likeness to God
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgments
- List of Charts
- Introduction: Prometheus Unbound
- 1 ‘Things without him’: Locke and the Logic of Metallism
- 2 Shaftesbury and Scottish Moral Sense Commercial Humanism: Inclinations Implanted in the Subject
- 3 American Money and Political Economy, 1780–1828
- 4 Banking and Money in Boston
- 5 Likeness to God
- 6 The Luxury of Pity
- 7 The Political Economy of Beauty and the Imagination
- Conclusion: Sense Subordinated to the Mind
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Appendix: Tables for Charts 1–9
- Index
Summary
Take, for example, the delight that we find in the vast scenes of nature, in prospects which spread around us without limits, in the immensity of the heavens and the ocean, and especially in the rush and roar of the mighty winds, waves and torrents when, amidst our deep awe, a power within seems to respond to the omnipotence around us. The same principle is seen in the delight ministered to us by works of fiction or of imaginative art, in which our own nature is set before us in more than human beauty and power. In truth, the soul is always bursting its limits. It thirsts continually for wider knowledge. It rushes forward to untried happiness. It has deep wants, which nothing limited can appease. Its true element and end is an unbounded good. Thus God's infinity has its image in the soul; and through the soul, much more than through the universe, we arrive at this conception of the Deity.
William Ellery Channing, ‘Likeness to God’, Discourse at the Oration of the Rev. F. A. Farley, Providence, Rhode Island (1828).Changes in political economy and the nature of economic value encouraged and reflected an increased subjectivity or interiority. Economic value, once resident in silver, increasingly derived from the imagination, trust and confidence; it was an abstract and subjective evaluation. Furthermore, human actions, feelings and desires unselfconsciously and spontaneously constructed a self-regulating and beneficent economic order.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Political Economy of SentimentPaper Credit and the Scottish Enlightenment in Early Republic Boston, 1780–1820, pp. 91 - 110Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014