The Unity of Humanity
Wollstonecraft’s belief in the unity of humanity is the stepping-stone to understanding her social and political views. She thought that whatever the observable differences between human beings across time or diverse parts of the world, all shared the same God-given nature. Thus, writing of the character of the French nation in mid-February 1793, she explained that, regardless of her criticisms, her reader needed to “[r]emember that it is not the morals of a particular people that I would decry; for are we not all of the same stock?” She wrote of the French as of humanity at a particular stage in its history, in the history of civilization as whole, and in examining them, she meant “to throw some light on the history of man.”1 Any variations between humans could, and had to, be explained by historical as well as natural causes.
This was made clear in her aforementioned very favorable review in December 1788 of An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species. To which are added, Strictures on Lord Kames’s Discourse on the original Diversity of Mankind, by the Rev. Samuel Stanhope Smith, D.D., Vice President and Professor of Moral Philosophy in the College of New Jersey, now Princeton.2 Its author, an ordained Presbyterian minister, became his alma mater’s seventh president and devoted his life to demonstrating the compatibility of science and Christianity. His was a most important work, in Wollstonecraft’s opinion, because being based on observation as well as reason, it countered any dubious conjectures that might be deemed to cast a shadow on the harmoniousness of God’s creation.3
As explained in a note in the Analytical Review, the substance of Rev. Stanhope Smith’s essay had already been delivered before the Philosophical Society in Philadelphia on February 28, 1787. It had been printed both there and in Edinburgh in 1788, and challenged the views put forward in Lord Kames’s “Diversity of Men and of Languages,” the first sketch in Progress of Men, Book 1 of Sketches of the History of Man (1774). Kames knew he would encounter much opposition in claiming that it could be “ascertained beyond any rational doubt, that there are different races or kinds of men, and that these races or kinds are naturally fitted for different climates: whence we have reason to conclude, that originally each kind was placed in its proper climate, whatever change may have happened in later times by war or commerce.”4 He had sought to square this position with the biblical account of the creation of mankind, by turning to Scriptures’s account of the erection of the Tower of Babel and the subsequent fragmentation and dispersal of humanity. Although he had endeavored to account for the variation in the appearance and custom of human beings by appealing to climate, Kames contended that “were all men of one species, there never could have existed, without a miracle, different kinds, such as exist at present.”5 That the diversity between men could be explained by natural causes was precisely what Stanhope Smith sought to demonstrate. To say that God had created one single species that was highly adaptable to variation in geographical conditions, he believed, “surely places his benevolence in a more advantageous light” than to claim “the beneficent deity hath created the inhabitants of the earth of different colours.”6 Thus, whether humankind descended from a single pair (Adam and Eve) was a subject with significant theological and moral implications, and became an increasingly virulent debate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.7
Wollstonecraft’s review, while rich in quotations, opens with the expression of her own views on the matter, which was rather unusual compared to most of her other contributions to the Analytical Review. Human nature had always been an important and interesting subject, she began. Those who felt strong emotions were naturally curious about whether others felt as they did. To be sure, there were “innumerable modifications” between people, “yet there is a degree of uniformity in their variety which silently affirms that they proceed from the same source.” “The untutored savage and the cultivated sage,” she continued,
are found to be men of like passions with ourselves: different external circumstances, such as the situation of the country, forms of government, religious opinions, etc. have been traced by the ablest politicians as the main causes of national characters, the predominate feature was striking, it pointed out the parent, and proved that it was not of equivocal generation.—But observing the heart, we may be said to work under ground—though treating this subject we seldom express any doubt;—the jealousy or ambition that actuates our antipodes is not supposed to differ from the passions which agitate us,—nor can the fortitude of an Indian, who dies singing his death song, be distinguished from the pride or virtue which made many heroes endure grievous calamities and smile on the grim king of terrors.8
She followed this with a rhetorical question: given the similarity between minds the world over, could the physical differences be thought to prove that the earth was peopled by different species of men? Stanhope Smith, she contended, gave every reason to think that these differences were due to climate or other such causes, and to reject therefore “vague conjectures, which shake our confidence in the validity of the Mosaical account, and consequently lead to a distrust of revelation.”9 True to herself, she did not leave unmentioned what she saw as contradictions in Stanhope Smith’s work, but was happy to quote his “rational conclusion,” namely, that “[a] just philosophy will always be found to be coincident with true theology.”10 What she went on to cite approvingly was significant, as Stanhope Smith claimed that only those who were ignorant of nature or intent against religion would deny the unity of the species, and that to do so would render the science of morals meaningless, annihilate the law of nature and nations, and make any rule of principle in human affairs impossible. It would mean that whatever convention were developed from a study of our human nature would not be applicable elsewhere in the world. All science and piety would come to an end and skepticism and uncertainty would reign unchallenged. “The doctrine of one race,” the quote went on, “removes this uncertainty, renders human nature susceptible of system, illustrates the powers of physical causes, and opens a rich and extensive field for moral science.”11 This doctrine was as foundational for Wollstonecraft as it was for the author under review. That God had created one human race and that all men had to be treated with dignity for the sake of all were to be running themes in her works, and while her first published text was on the education of daughters, in her first novel about a woman, and her reader, The Female Reader, she came to the subject of inequity and inequality between the sexes from that between men, and indeed races.
Given her extensive use of the register of enslavement in speaking of the condition of women in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, referring to them as “convenient slaves,” “coquettish slaves,” or “abject slaves,” and writing of “their slavish dependence,” to cite but some examples, it is noteworthy, but perhaps unsurprising, that Wollstonecraft had cause to reflect on the subjects of race and slavery before she penned her most famous work.12 When in March 1789, she reviewed Rodolphe-Louis D’Erlach’s Code du Bonheur. A Code of Happiness: containing Maxims and Rules relative to the Duties of man towards-Himself, his Fellow-Creatures, and God (1788), she said little more than that his letters on the slave trade were “long, but interesting.”13 She was somewhat more forthcoming, however, the following month, in the May 1789 issue of the Analytical Review, when she reviewed The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, which her publisher, Joseph Johnson, had just printed. She opened by declaring that “it has been a favourite philosophic whim to degrade the numerous nations, on whom the sun-beams more directly dart, below the common level of humanity, and hastily to conclude that nature, by making them inferior to the rest of the human race, designed to stamp them with a mark of slavery.”14 In that piece, she did not consider it her task to provide an account of the reasons between differences in color, nor “to draw a parallal [sic] between the abilities of a negro and [a] European mechanic.” But she did think that while the two-volume narrative did not exhibit “extraordinary intellectual powers, sufficient to wipe off the stigma, yet the activity and ingenuity, which conspicuously appear in the character of Gustavus, place him on a par with the general mass of men, who fill the subordinate stations in a more civilized society than that which he was thrown into at his birth.”15 While this sentence might offend modern sensibilities, it would be a mistake to take this as an indication of “unconscious racism—common in abolitionist circles.”16 Though Wollstonecraft thought well of parts of the work, especially those in the first volume relating to “his being kidnapped with his sister, his journey to the sea coast, and terror when carried on shipboard [the accounts] relative to the treatment of male and female slaves on the voyage, and in the West Indies, which make the blood turn it course,” she was her usual critical self when assessing its style and the rest of its content. She was therefore unlikely to claim it showed the author to be highly educated or to possess a great mind. What is more, the terms of the debate about the comparative abilities of the different races were not hers. She flatly rejected the division of the human race on the basis of color. Notwithstanding differences between individuals discussed in the previous chapter, what divided mankind, as she was to make clear a few months later in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, was privilege, wealth, legal and political rights, and education.
It is in its opening pages that we find one of the clearest expressions of Wollstonecraft’s condemnation of slavery. Burke’s critique of the revolutionary events that had taken place in France constantly appealed to precedent in support of the maintenance of the status quo, in her view, and such a spirit “settles slavery on an everlasting foundation,” to which she added:
Allowing his servile reverence for antiquity, and prudent attention to self-interest, to have the force which he insists on, the slave trade ought never to be abolished; and, because of our ignorant forefathers, not understanding the native dignity of man, sanctioned a traffic that outrages every suggestion or reason and religion, we are to submit to the inhuman custom, and term an atrocious insult to humanity the love of our country, and a proper submission to the laws by which our property is secured.17
Wollstonecraft went beyond merely borrowing the rhetoric of the anti-slavery campaign. She had read and written on the subject of race, asserted the unity of mankind, and decried slavery before she began defending the aims of the revolution in France or vindicating the rights of woman. What is more, she was not to pass over in silence women’s participation in the horrors of slavery: “Where is the dignity, the infallibility of sensibility, in the fair ladies, if the voice of rumour is to be credited, the captive negroes curse in all the agony of bodily pain, for the unheard of tortures they invent? It is probable that some of them, after the sight of a flagellation, compose their ruffled spirits and exercise their tender feelings by the perusal of the last imported novel.”18
She was, to be sure, not alone in denouncing slavery. Across the Channel, Olympe de Gouges shared the same sentiment. Several of Wollstonecraft’s acquaintances and friends were active in the anti-slavery movement. Becoming the chairman in 1823 of the Liverpool Anti-Slavery Society, William Roscoe, who commissioned the first portrait of her, headed an eponymous circle of like-minded people in Liverpool, and had written a number of pamphlets pleading the case by the time he met Wollstonecraft.19 Much of Imlay’s A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (1792) decried slavery, and argued for gradual emancipation and against segregation. Thomas Jefferson was singled out in the text as having a “mind is so warped by education and the habit of thinking, that he has attempted to make it appear that the African is a being between the human species and the oran-outang.”20 It is possible that the expression of such sentiments contributed to endearing him to Wollstonecraft. It certainly helped him gain an entry into the intellectual circles she frequented. Vile though one might have thought him for abandoning her and their baby, Fanny, extensive research by Imlay’s biographer, Wil Verhoeven, has revealed him to be more despicable still. A shameless hypocrite, Imlay had been very much involved in the slave trade himself, co-owning the slave carrier Industry: “[t]he truth is that before he left America for Europe and became involved with her, Imlay had been one of those barterers in human blood that Wollstonecraft so thoroughly despised.”21
As so much hung on subscribing to the view that humans belonged to one species and shared one human nature, what did Wollstonecraft think of it? She was brought to reflect on human nature from the very beginning of her intellectual career, through her involvement in and works on education. From her Original Stories, first published in 1788, republished in 1791 and 1796, and written shortly after her arrival in London in August 1787, we know that human beings, in contrast to animals,22 had the God-given power to “ennoble” human nature by the cultivation of the mind and enlargement of the heart. Man, by which we can presume she meant mankind, being capable of disinterested love, could “imitate Him.”23 She thought it contrary to all experience to insinuate “that it is the nature of man to degenerate rather than improve.”24 Reviewing New Travels into the interior Parts of Africa, by the Way of the Cape of Great Hope, in the Years 1783, 83 [sic], and 85, she applauded accounts that showed baseless prejudices for what they were:
The hottentots have been considered as the most disgusting and brutal of the “various tribes of the many peopled earth”; a real lover of mankind must then be highly gratified by the lively and artless pictures that occur in this narrative of the domestic virtues, and moral sensibility, of the untutored wanderers in those vast rocky deserts. […] The dirty customs attributed to them are evidently false, as well as the charge of tyrannizing over the weaker sex.25
Similarly, in a review of William Thomson’s Manmouth; or Human Nature displayed on a grand scale: in a Tour with the Tinkers into the inland Parts of Africa, Wollstonecraft commended him for not following Jonathan Swift in inducing “that painful sensation of disgust, and even distrust of Providence, which Gulliver’s Travels never fail to excite in a mind possessed of any sensibility.” Such works as Swift’s led one to detest the vicious, rather than feel compassionate toward them, and question “why they were created to contradict what appears in shining characters throughout the universe, that God is wise and good.”26 “In sketches of life,” she added,
a degree of dignity, which distinguishes man, should not be blotted out; nor the prevailing interest undermined by a satirical tone, which makes the reader forget an acknowledged truth, that in the most vicious, vestiges may be faintly discerned of a majestic ruin, and in the most virtuous, frailties which loudly proclaim, that like passions unite the two extremities of the social chain, and circulate through the whole body.27
Whether depicting individuals or the species, in quasi-factual or fictional works, Wollstonecraft thought human beings should not be presented as degraded beyond recognition. They should, instead, be presented in such a manner as to retain “a degree of dignity.”28 Human beings were not inherently evil, in her view, and just as she had argued for our creative potential, so she thought the realization of our moral potential should be encouraged. “It may be confidently asserted,” she wrote, “that no man chooses evil, because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.” Striving to rectify mistakes was “the noble ambition of an enlightened understanding, the impulse of feelings that Philosophy invigorates,” adding that “[t]o endeavour to make unhappy men resigned to their fate, is the tender endeavour of short-sighted benevolence, of transient yearnings of humanity; but to labour to increase human happiness by extirpating error, is a masculine godlike affection.”29
Her confidence in human perfectibility was apparent throughout her works. Writing about the French in An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe (1794), Wollstonecraft expressed the view that no matter how adulterated human beings had become in the most luxurious and unequal society under an absolute government and “domineering priesthood,” they could not be so debased as not to have retained “a gleam of the generous fire, an ethereal spark of the soul; and it is these glowing emotions, in the inmost recesses of the heart, which have continued to feel feelings, that on sudden occasions manifest themselves with all their pristine purity and vigour.”30 Despite the ferocity manifested during the French Revolution, she felt “confident of being able to prove, that people are essentially good, and that knowledge is rapidly advancing to that degree of perfectibility, when the proud distinctions of sophisticating fools will be eclipsed by the mild rays of philosophy, and man be considered as man—acting with the dignity of an intelligent being.”31 The notorious shadow the Revolution cast on itself could not be taken to reveal human nature. One had to wait for the anarchy to subside, Wollstonecraft claimed, before its true qualities could emerge. This is not to suggest that she was confident that the Revolution would herald a new dawn for the French people or, indeed, humanity as a whole. Chapter 4 will consider her views on that subject. Despite her concerns about the future direction of the French and civilization more generally, it was Wollstonecraft’s fundamental belief that while mankind created the conditions under which evil occurred, it was not essentially or irretrievably so.
When writing about the theater in her first publication, she had maintained that its ability to edify was reduced to nought when the main characters were given either exalted qualities far above the common attributes of humanity or a depraved nature far below them. Crass divisions between good and evil were not only needless, but dangerous for individuals and society. The main purpose of dramatic performances, she claimed, should be “to teach us to discriminate characters,” adding “I cannot help thinking, that every human creature has some spark of goodness, which their long-suffering and benevolent Father gives them an opportunity of improving, though they may perversely smother it before they cease to breathe.”32 Just preceding “The Theatre” in the same work, she had devoted a piece to “Benevolence,” deeming it the “first, and most amiable virtue” and most evident in the young.33 Selfishness only grew through imitation, from the perception and experience of the selfishness of others and the ways of the world. As we saw in relation to the arts, so with regard to moral character, imitation was nefarious. Seeing the ways of the world was more likely than not to lead to its imitation rather than disavowal. She reiterated the point in 1793, writing that “[t]he desire […] of being useful to others, is continually damped by experience; and, if the exertions of humanity were not in some measure their own reward, who would endure misery, or struggle with care, to make some people ungrateful, and others idle?”34
Universal benevolence was the first duty, “and we should be careful not to let any passion so engross our thoughts, as to prevent our practising it.”35 Natural benevolence had to be protected and nurtured. Until such time as the world metamorphosed into a fair and equitable environment in which selfishness ceased to be a model and ingratitude no longer prevailed, it was vital that parents and educators help sustain and develop the innate benevolence of children. The means she proposed in her early pedagogical texts was to encourage young people to practice charity, by giving them an allowance or pocket money with which to do so.
“Faith, hope and charity,” Wollstonecraft believed, “ought to attend us in our passage through this world.” Of the three virtues, only charity could remain in our souls eternally. “We ought not to suffer,” she contended, “the heavenly spark to be quenched by selfishness; if we do, how can we expect to revive, when the soul is disentangled from the body, and should be prepared for the realms of love?” While she would write to Imlay from her travels in northern Europe that he knew how she had always been “an enemy to what is termed charity,” this was within the particular context of an unjust and hypocritical society in which charity was intended to cover inequities or be valued as a way of inducing servility among those in receipt of it.36 To be sure, A Vindication of the Rights of Men decried the age in which [c]ivility was then called condescension, and ostentatious almsgiving humanity.”37 Charity, she argued in that text, “is not a condescending distribution of alms, but an intercourse of good offices and mutual benefits, founded on respect for justice and humanity.” This again has to be seen in the context in which it is written, one in which it is the ostentatiousness as well as the need for alms that are deplored, not the act of charity itself. In the same work she also pointed to the desire to perpetuate property within families as narrowing benevolence to the confines of a very narrow circle.38 A few pages later, she stated that the desire of three out of four people to appear to be richer than they are destroys “benevolence, friendship, generosity, and all those endearing charities which bind human hearts together.” “[T]he iron hand of property” thereby also stopped “all the pursuits which raise the mind to higher contemplations.”39
If the more tangible part of benevolence—charity—was necessitated by iniquitous poverty, it was for that very reason to be exercised and fostered. Its benefit also extended far beyond the immediate impact on its recipients. Writing on education in her first publication, she had declared that every act of benevolence improved its performer and described it as an active duty that fitted us for “the society of more exalted beings.” Philanthropy, she continued, was said to be proof of human capability of loving God:
Indeed this divine love, or charity, appears to me the principal trait that remains of the illustrious image of the Deity, which was originally stampt on the soul, and which is to be renewed. Exalted views will raise the mind above trifling cares, and the many little weaknesses, which make us a torment to ourselves and others. Our temper will gradually improve, and vanity, which “the creature is made subject to,” has not an entire dominion.40
Wollstonecraft was to reiterate such sentiments toward the end of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, when writing about the place of religion in national education. “What would life be,” she asked, “without that peace which the love of God, when built on humanity, alone can impart?” Continuing, she declared: “Every earthly affection turns back, at intervals, to prey upon the heart that feeds it; and the purest effusions of benevolence, often rudely damped by man, must mount as a free-will offering to Him who gave them birth, whose bright image they faintly reflect.”41 Benevolence and its exercise through charity was the last divine mark left in human beings, and despite all she had to say against alms-giving when speaking of the social reality of her time, it was the principal medium she recommended to express humanity, for through it, natural benevolence could be sustained in children. Economizing in order to be able to “gratify benevolent wishes” was part of the farewell advice Mrs. Mason, Mary and Caroline’s sometime teacher in Original Stories, gave the fourteen- and twelve-year-old in her charge.42 In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft further recommended that children be schooled together as being in the sole company of adults made them grow up too quickly and had a distorting effect on their bodily and mental faculties. Being with other children enabled them to learn to think for themselves and “open the heart to friendship and confidence, gradually leading to more expansive benevolence.”43
She also suggested from her earliest works that they be made to empathize with animals, by raising awareness of them and extending our sensibility about them through stories.44 The subject of the first three chapters of Original Stories was “The Treatment of Animals”: “Do you know the meaning of the word Goodness? ‘It is first, to avoid hurting any thing; and then, to contrive to give as much pleasure as you can.’ ”45 Wollstonecraft was to insist on the importance of teaching children to be kind to animals again in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, arguing that “[h]humanity to animals should be particularly inculcated as a part of national education.” She thought that cruelty to animals led to tyranny over other human beings in adulthood: “justice, or even benevolence, will not be a powerful spring of action unless it extend to the whole creation; nay, I believe that it may be delivered as an axiom, that those who can see pain, unmoved, will soon learn to inflict it.”46
Interestingly, she thought the progress of civilization had made human beings less caring of animals. “For civilization,” she explained, “prevents that intercourse which creates affection in the rude hut, or mud hovel.” While in that passage of the Vindication she singled out the poor as exacting their revenge on animals for the humiliation they suffered at the hands of the rich, her Original Stories provided a vivid example of the mutual devotion between a destitute man and his dog, and the heartlessness of the rich toward both.47 If the relationship between men and animals was corrupted by social injustice, it assumed a different perversion in women. They cared too much about their pets at the cost of caring for humanity or even their own children.48 As we will discuss in subsequent chapters, Wollstonecraft was not alone in thinking that women’s feelings were confined to a very limited number of living creatures, but she was one of the few to make it her business to challenge the circumstances that prevented the objects of their emotions from being enlarged. To be sure as we have seen already, she was well aware that feelings could be feigned; “[a]n affectation of humanity,” she wrote in The French Revolution (1794), “is the affectation of the day; and men almost always affect to possess the virtue, or quality, that is rising into estimation.”49 In this as in other subjects, the question was how to improve and educate without the risk of generating artifice and falseness.
In sum, while human beings had the potential to be compassionate and could, through acts of kindness, reveal their divine nature and small, but crucial, resemblance to their Creator, this capacity had to be developed. Moreover, while they were perfectible, human beings were by the same token corruptible and were mostly so in a society that distorted human relations through social and economic inequality and false values. All creatures had to be treated well and humans had to learn to do so from the earliest age. In addition to the need to recognize the unity of the species, Wollstonecraft believed in the supreme importance of treating all sentient beings well. Natural benevolence not only had to be nurtured; it had to be extended beyond the confines in which it found itself most easily exercised. This called for a particular education to which the imagination was handmaiden, serving it as no other faculty of the mind could.
If benevolence was the first of the virtues for Wollstonecraft, the imagination was the most formidable of the faculties. Reason and understanding could not but be important for an eighteenth-century intellectual such as Wollstonecraft, and she presented herself to her readers as the embodiment of rationality, especially when fighting male adversaries such as Burke or Rousseau. Nonetheless, the importance of imagination, which we have already noted in the creation of great art, was as central to her account of human moral development as it was for the moral philosophers she engaged with.50 This is not to suggest that she thought men and women should be governed by the imagination. Which faculty ought to prevail at any one time very much depended on circumstances, the individual concerned, and their state of mind. It also depended on age, as she wrote in her Vindication of the Rights of Men: “though it is allowed that one man has by nature more fancy than another, in each individual there is a spring-tide when fancy should govern and amalgamate materials for the understanding; and a grave period, when those materials should be employed by the judgement.”51 Crucially, she did not think of reason and the imagination as being in opposition with each other. What mattered was a balanced mind. This was no mean feat as every period of civilization presented its own obstacles. To achieve the right balance might require adjustment and entail the prevalence of one or the other faculties at any one stage of an individual’s life or at different stages in the development of society. What she thought the imagination was, what it actually did, how it operated, she did not say, although it does seem that she thought it was responsive to and possibly shaped by the emotions, on which it also had an impact.
Prefacing her anthology, The Female Reader, Wollstonecraft explained that “[in] this selection many tales and tables will be found, as it seems to be following the simple order of nature, to permit young people to peruse works addressed to the imagination, which tend to awaken the affections and fix good habits more firmly in the mind than cold arguments and mere declamation.”52 The imagination thus played a determinative role in the early stages of the growth of moral personality, and this had to be taken into account by parents and teachers. In an ideal childhood, education would be directed to nurturing the imagination, rather than reason, to ensure effective moral development. Unfortunately, this might not always be possible. In Original Stories, which Blake illustrated as already mentioned, she explained that the nature of the conversations and tales it contained had to be adapted to accommodate the present state of society, which obliged her to seek methods for correcting character defects and ignorance through reason. Teaching by “precepts of reason” was far from ideal. “Good habits, imperceptibly fixed” were far preferable.53 No less than other forms of instruction, works of fancy, music and drawing, for instance, refined the mind by entertaining it, Mrs. Mason told her pupils, adding that they
sharpen the ingenuity, and form insensibly the dawning of judgement. As the judgement gains strength, so do the passions also; we have actions to weigh, and need that taste in conduct, that delicate sense of propriety, which gives grace to virtue.54
For Wollstonecraft, therefore, while the imagination had, or at least should have, a very active role in human development, and particularly so in childhood, it was best seen as one part of her conception of the human mind, one in which each faculty reinforces and enriches the others. Thus, under the heading “Reading” in Education of Daughters, she claimed that “[r]eason strikes most forcibly when illustrated by the brilliancy of fancy.”55 A well-balanced mind was one in which the faculties aided rather than opposed or subordinated one another, a view that can be taken to reflect the influence, long noted by Sarah Hutton and Barbara Taylor, that Platonists or Neo-Platonists had on her.56 Such an harmonious balance depended on a proper education to be sure, but also on specific social conditions, as is made clear in passages in which her reflections on the balance between the faculties led her to think about their development historically. Human beings were more imaginative in the unlimited freedom enjoyed in the state of nature, but the demands of society, economic reality, and the exertions of specific civilizing forces, good or bad, made for the prevalence or atrophy of different parts of the intellect.
Although she was not entirely consistent on this topic, Wollstonecraft was concerned with the more general evolution of the human mind as well as the minds of individual men and women. In the very first Letter from her Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, she wrote that approaching a rather desolate area near Gothenburg, she was surprised that her presence did not elicit some curiosity among the few inhabitants: no one stared out of the windows or came outdoors to see them.57 This lack of curiosity she attributed on this occasion to their being “so near brute creation.” Explaining that those who could barely sustain themselves “have little or no imagination to call forth the curiosity necessary to fructify the faint glimmerings of mind which entitles them to rank as lords of creation,”58 she contrasted these apathetic coastal Swedes to the Parisians she had recently observed whilst living in France under the Terror, saying
recollecting the extreme fondness which the Parisians ever testify for novelty, their very curiosity appeared to me a proof of the progress they had made in refinement. Yes; in the art of living—in the art of escaping from the cares which embarrass the first steps towards the attainment of the pleasures of social life.59
If, in light of what we saw in chapter 1 of her views of the poetic nature of humanity in its infancy, Wollstonecraft’s estimation of the unimaginativeness of these isolated Swedes comes as a surprise, it must be stressed that she was here contrasting men and women fighting for subsistence to those, as she conceived the French, in an advanced stage of civilization.60
It would be wrong, however, to infer from this that the imagination only worked for the betterment of individuals and humanity within an advanced society or independently of particular circumstances in which communities or individuals found themselves. Far from this being the case, in a text to which we have already referred when discussing natural benevolence and which often casts a subversive light on one’s assumptions about her views, Letter on the Character of the French Nation, the events she witnessed under the Terror led Wollstonecraft to think very ill of the imagination:
The wants of reason are very few, and, were we to consider dispassionately the real value of most things, we should probably rest satisfied with simple gratification of our physical necessities, and be content with negative goodness; for tis frequently, only that wanton, the Imagination, with her artful coquetry, who lures us forward, and makes us run over a rough road, pushing aside every obstacle merely to catch a disappointment.61
Negative goodness is an interesting, if somewhat perplexing, concept. Contentment with the here and now and the satisfaction of having one’s basic needs met are sentiments perhaps not readily associated with Wollstonecraft, as we will have further occasion to observe. To be sure, this pronouncement must be taken in the awful context in which she expressed it. Nevertheless, deploring the human propensity to risk forfeiting the certain happiness of the present for almost no less certain regrets was not a new departure for her caused by witnessing the Terror. Such sentiments had already found expression in A Vindication of the Rights of Men three years earlier. There the imagination enlarged objects which the passions pursued, deluded and rejecting the evidence of the senses.62 In her diatribe against Burke, Wollstonecraft presented him as possessed of an easily inflammable imagination.63 By contrast, as we will see again below, she personified reason, calm in the act of reflection, dispassionate in its assessment of principle.
In that work, the imagination is presented as unpredictable and unruly. The language is palpably and intentionally gendered. Her depictions anticipate the wantonness she was to ascribe to it three years later in A Letter on the Character of the French Nation. Wollstonecraft spoke of it in rather extraordinary terms as, when referring to the opportunity presented by the early stages of the Revolution, she wrote that “the glorious chance that is now given to human nature of attaining more virtue and happiness than has hitherto blessed the globe, might have been sacrificed to a meteor of the imagination, a bubble of passion.”64 “A lively imagination,” she wrote some pages later, “is ever in danger of being betrayed into error by favourite opinions, which it almost personifies, the more effectually to intoxicate the understanding.”65
Yet, at the same time as she upbraided the unbridled imagination for the revolutionary excess she witnessed in France, she wrote to Imlay:
Believe me, sage sir, you have not sufficient respect for the Imagination.—I could prove to you in a trice that it is the mother of sentiment, the great distinction of our nature, the only purifier of the passions.—Animals have a portion of Reason, and equal, if not more exquisite, senses, but no trace of Imagination, or her offspring Taste, appears in any of their actions. The impulse of the senses—passions if you will—and the conclusions of Reason, draw men together but the Imagination is the true fire, stolen from heaven, to animate this cold creature of clay—producing all those fine sympathies that lead to rapture, rendering men more social by expanding their hearts, instead of leaving them leisure to calculate how many comforts society affords.66
Wollstonecraft might have been more consistent with her own views, mentioned earlier, about the importance of imagination to morality, if she had aligned herself with that faculty and identified Burke with a steadfast, unswerving, and uncreative reason. It was, after all, she and like-minded sympathizers with the Revolution who could be viewed as innovative and able to conceive of a better future. Burke, it could be thought, lacked the capacity to do so. Instead, she chose otherwise and, one might add, had to do so given the nature and extent of her attack of him in which she projected herself as his opposite. Under her pen and that of others who criticized his Reflections, he was the fickle, inconsistent, and irrational person, who supported the American cause against the Crown and Parliament in their call for representation and fair treatment as Englishmen, but not that of the French people in what could be construed as a comparable quest. Burke was emotionally erratic, inflamed, and self-contradictory. She presented herself as solidly anchored. She appropriated manly qualities and cast him in the frivolity of femininity, never hesitating to use gender and gendered language in waging her battles.
Even so, despite her sharp rhetoric and accusations that Burke lacked self-control, Wollstonecraft was unswerving in at least one respect, namely, in thinking that there was an appropriate strength of each of the faculties relative to each other at any given stage of life. “There are times and seasons for all things,” she wrote in the midst of her ad hominem critique of Burke, “and moralists appear to me to err, when they would confound the gaiety of youth with the seriousness of age; for the virtues of age look not only more imposing, but more natural, when they appear rigid.” Referring to Burke, she continued: “[h]e who has not exercised his judgement to curb his imagination during the meridian of life, becomes, in its decline, too often the prey of childish feelings.”67 Burke’s mind was unbalanced, not just like a woman, more like a child. Nor was he alone. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was described as a man “whose imagination had been allowed to run wild,” for his account of what allegedly made men attractive to women (“if strength of body be, with some shew of reason, the boast of men, why are women so infatuated as to be proud of a defect”).68 “His imagination constantly prepared inflammable fewel,” she declared, “for his inflammable senses.”69 “Why was Rousseau’s life divided between ecstasy and misery?,” she asked. To which she answered:
Can any other answer be given than this, that the effervescence of his imagination produced both; but had his fancy been allowed to cool, it is possible that he might have acquired more strength of mind. Still, if the purpose of life be to educate the intellectual part of man, all with respect to him was right; yet, had not death led to a nobler scene of action, it is probable that he would have enjoyed happiness on earth, and have felt the calm sensations of the man of nature instead of being prepared for another stage of existence by nourishing passions which agitate the civilized man.70
In her diagnosis of Rousseau’s condition, Wollstonecraft turned more Rousseauian than he. Her verdict on his life was that he had fallen prey to the very distorting psychological effects of modern civilization that he had so well described in both his Discourses. Had he reached old age, she thought, he might have had a chance to live to be true to his own natural self and his theory.71
Wollstonecraft could speak harshly of the imagination not only of particular men whose opinions she rejected, but more generally, as when she referred to the faculty as “debauch[ing]” or as “that lying, yet constantly trusted guide, the imagination.”72 Yet, even in so writing, she tended not to leave such comments unqualified: “[t]he imagination should not be allowed to debauch the understanding before it gained strength.”73 Nor did she herself forgo flights of fancy. She spoke of her own imagination darting forward in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and even in that non-fictional work, she invited her reader to join her in imagining in some detail “a woman of tolerable understanding,” her marriage, widowhood, and motherhood up to her approaching death, indeed even “rising from the grave, may say—Behold, thou gavest me a talent—and here are five talents.”74 What is more, she thought of her most celebrated work as a magisterial creation of the imagination, writing in an effort to reassure her readers lest they think she wished to turn the world upside down: “But fair and softly, gentle reader, male or female, do not alarm thyself […] I only created an imagination, fatigued by contemplating the vices and follies […] by supposing that society will some time or other be so constituted, that man must necessarily fulfil the duties of a citizen, and […] his wife, also an active citizen, should be equally intent to manage her family, educate her children, and assist her neighbours.”75
While potentially wayward if subjected to “superfluous nourishment” or “heated,” the imagination when it operated within a right frame of mind was clearly essential to moral education and a moralist such as she.76 It needed to be active in youth and develop in conjunction with the senses. Comparing the human body to a tree that “does not strengthen its fibres till it has reached its full growth,” she added that the same was true of the mind:
The senses and the imagination give form to the character, during childhood and youth; and the understanding, as life advances, gives firmness to the first fair purposes of sensibility—till virtue, arising rather from the clear conviction of reason than the impulse of the heart, morality is made to rest on a rock against which the storms of passions vainly beat.77
The work of the imagination did not end with the coming of age, however. It continued, not least in helping the mind accede where reason could not take her; “I may be thought fanciful,” she wrote in the notes that were intended for an anticipated second volume to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, “but it has continually occurred to me, that, though I allow, reason in this world is the mother of wisdom—yet some flights of the imagination seem to reach what wisdom cannot teach—and while they delude us here, afford glorious hope, if not a foretaste, of what we may expect hereafter.”78
Such imaginary flights were not in everyone’s gift, however; “[t]he generality of people cannot see or feel poetically, they want fancy.” Here again we see that she did not think human beings to be of equal, in the sense of identical, nature or ability. Most people depended on those endowed with the capacity to bring their imagination to the process of acquiring and associating ideas: “[t]hose are the glowing minds that concentrate pictures for their fellow–creatures.”79 As we just noted, that is exactly what she sought to do in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her mind could do what most could not and she saw it as her task, or perhaps her duty, to imagine a better world for them.
Like the imagination, memory could modify ideas and enhance past experiences.80 Indeed, Wollstonecraft could write of it as being inventive: “In modern poetry, the understanding and memory often fabricate the pretended effusions of the heart, and romance destroys all simplicity.”81 Memory could also be distorting, contributing through its biases to a false construction of the self. Thus, it could be so highly selective as to choose to “treasure up” those past deeds that reflected well on the individuals themselves, thereby affording an unmerited good opinion of themselves.82 Though she wrote relatively little of it, it seems that optimally, memory worked mechanically, collecting experiences and ideas, waiting for it to be called upon for use.83
As things stood, the loading of memory “with unintelligible words” was taken for education, whereas the “cultivation of mind, […] teaches young people how to begin to think.”84 Wollstonecraft was highly critical of education by rote, not least as it was often forced upon children by the selfishness of their parents. It was nothing short of “cruel” to cram the minds of the young with ideas incomprehensible to them. “Parents,” she wrote, “are often led astray by the selfish desire of having a wonderful child exhibit; but these monsters very seldom make sensible men or women: the wheels are impaired by being set in motion before the time pointed out by nature, and both mind and body are ever after feeble.”85 If poems were to be remembered, they should not be repeated in public by children as such performances rendered them vain and affected as well as puppet-like. If memory needed to be exercised, Wollstonecraft recommended it be done in such a way as so avoid tedious repetition; judgment had to be formed in the process of committing something to memory.86 Children were not to be treated as parrots. As we saw in relation to the arts, she disapproved of mindless imitation by children, not only on aesthetic grounds, but on psychological and moral ones.
Wollstonecraft’s unease about the potentially distortive capacity of memory or of its perverted development given contemporary pedagogical and parental practices and aspirations found a match in her discussion of the acquisition of knowledge through sensory experience. Although it was the principal source of knowledge, the ideas it produced required some scrutiny. She did not discuss the process of the association of ideas from the acquisition of singular sense impressions to the formation of abstract notions at great length, but she alluded to it on a number of occasions; indeed, she titled chapter 6 of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman “The Effect Which an Early Association of Ideas has Upon The Character.” It contains her most explicit account of the operation of the mind in the acquisition of ideas, and distinguished two forms of associations of ideas: habitual, through repeated exposure to certain conjunctions of ideas, and instantaneous, that is, the immediate connection of ideas on their first occurrence. There was little possibility of controlling the latter. Much depended on the character of individual minds and their native composition. Spontaneity in the association of ideas was in some the source of creativity and exceptional insight. “The essence of genius” consisted in producing “in the most eminent degree the happy energy of associating thoughts that surprise, delight, and instruct.”87 As noted in relation to the imagination, those able to do so made the rest of the population feel and see what they would otherwise overlook.
This left habitual associations of ideas, which admitted a large degree of control and did not rest on being exceptionally gifted. It was the business of educators, be they parents or teachers of a sort, to ensure that they were correctly formed. Authors, such as Wollstonecraft, needed to enlighten their readers on the import of early associations of ideas and the processes involved in the acquisition of knowledge more generally. Understanding how the mind as a whole came to be formed and operated was essential, not least because the senses did not acquire ideas without the active involvement of the faculties; in other words, the mind was not passive in the process of perception. Reviewing a novel, she noted:
On the contrary, the simplicity of truth is so happily united with that glow of imagination, which constitutes the grand charm of fiction, we do not find it difficult to credit the author’s assertion, that he has closely adhered to his resolution not to repeat any hear-say accounts of opinions or customs; but only to note down, as facts, what he saw with his own eyes, and heard with his own ears.88
As with everything else, consideration had to be given to the development of the mind in its various stages:
for the mind does not correct the mistakes of the senses till we have made the first step in science; and general ideas should be forcibly imprinted on the mind before particular modifications, much less abstract ideas, are mentioned.89
The mind had to be prepared for different kinds of knowledge from different sources. In addition, Wollstonecraft thought it essential to be aware ourselves of the context in which we acquired our impressions. An example of what she had in mind is provided by her opening remarks in an Introductory to a Series of Letters on the Present Character of the French Nation, written in Paris in mid-February 1793, thus in the midst of the Terror. There Wollstonecraft explained that “[i]t is necessary perhaps for an observer of mankind, to guard as carefully the remembrance of the first impression made by a nation, as by a countenance; because we imperceptibly lose sight of the national character, when we become more intimate with individuals.”90 Far from being wary of first impressions, they had to be preserved, though this is not to say that they did not need to be subject to scrutiny and revision.
In itself the acquisition of simple ideas neither constituted knowledge nor was exclusive to human beings. What differentiated the latter from animals was what Wollstonecraft termed “the power of generalizing ideas”; that was the power “of drawing conclusions from individual observations”:
Merely to observe, without endeavouring to account for any thing, may (in a very incomplete manner) serve as the common sense of life; but where is the store laid up that is to clothe the soul when it leaves the body?91
According to some, this power had been denied women: “writers have insisted that it is inconsistent, with a few exceptions, with their sexual character,” but Wollstonecraft believed it was up to these men to justify their assertions. She was only willing to concede one point, namely,
That the power of generalizing ideas, to any great extent, is not very common amongst men or women. But this exercise is the true cultivation of the understanding; and every thing conspires to render the cultivation of the understanding more difficult in the female than in the male world.92
This was the subject of the fourth chapter of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and one might add the principal object of the work as whole. Women could generalize ideas, acquire knowledge, and develop their understanding or reason as well as men. Why neither sex was able to do so as fully as they were capable, and women not only condemned not to, but perceived to be incapable of so doing, was what she fought to challenge.
“Reason” and cognate terms, such as “the understanding,” compete with “virtue” and “women” as some of Wollstonecraft’s most frequently used words. She used the concept extensively and often normatively. Wollstonecraft feminized it as she did the imagination. This did not stop her from playing, as we have already seen, with stereotypical assumptions about masculine rationality and feminine want of it. She gave reason status, endowing it with suzerainty. She spoke of the “sovereignty of reason” and “the regal stamp of reason” in the first Vindication.93 At the onset of the work, she invited Burke to reason with her in an unashamedly patronizing manner.94 In both her Vindications, she presented herself as rational, deploying reason, where he, Rousseau, and others didn’t, wouldn’t, or couldn’t, overtaken as they were by unruly passions, fancifulness, vanity, or slavish adulation. She was the man! The master of herself, passions included!
Reason was God-given solely to human beings, though Wollstonecraft remarked in a Platonic note that animals might be granted reason in the next stage of life: if they are to mount in the scale of life, like men, by the medium of death, reason’s development was “an arduous task.”95 Its more extensive cultivation, she claimed, would undeniably promote virtue.96 She spoke of the cultivation of understanding in a comparable manner and, although she may have used the terms interchangeably, it is probably best to think of understanding as being the ultimate product of reason, though as has been stressed in relation to the imagination, it was not an activity undertaken independently of other parts of the mind. This said, Wollstonecraft’s works do not offer, or attempt to offer, a systematic account of the nature of reason and its workings.
This is, in part, because she used “reason” as a battle axe against her opponents. This was especially true in her diatribes against Burke, whom she took, or pretended to take, as denying the importance of reason as the foundation of all knowledge—this view being based, as she presented it, on his criticisms of the French revolutionaries and their followers in Britain for attempting to reconstruct society and government based on reason. Care must therefore be taken when considering her pronouncements about reason, rationality, and kindred concepts in the Vindication of the Rights of Men and also the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she likewise used the positive connotation of “reason” as ammunition. Wrapping herself in it, whilst divesting her opponents of it, be they Burke or Rousseau, made reason appear the privileged faculty in both her Vindications, but this is not the case when we consider her thought in the main.
Thus, while she believed in natural benevolence, she asserted in the first Vindication that “I know not of any common nature or common relation amongst men but what results from reason.” “The common affections and passions,” she continued, “equally bind brutes together; and it is only the continuity of those relations that entitles us to the denomination of rational creatures; and this continuity arises from reflection—from the operations of that reason which you [Burke] contemn [sic] with flippant disrespect.”97 Here, we can presume her to be thinking of society and government rather than more personal relations. It was measured reflection on our social and political relations that made for their continuity, in her view, a continuity absent among animals. From this, Wollstonecraft went on to claim that since reason improved as it was being exercised, so those who used it most could be called upon in times of crisis to exercise command over others; these were “the persons pointed out by Nature to direct the society of which they make a part, on any extraordinary emergency.”98 This offers us another instance of Wollstonecraft’s belief in a natural elite, one called forth to leadership in times of crises.
In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she contended that children should be taught to submit to reason, by which she meant reality, as early as possible. This did not reverse her position on the importance of the imagination in early education, but rather it asserted the need to comprehend the nature of things and of God.99 They had to learn to understand the world as it was. For this, reason needed to be exercised and fortified. It required strength and independence of mind to be exerted, something of which Wollstonecraft herself claimed to have been capable, enabling her to “view, with indignation, the mistaken notions that enslave my sex.”100 But if reason required independence, its right use alone made for independence from everything, “excepting unclouded Reason—‘whose service is perfect freedom.’ ”101 Thus, Wollstonecraft thought of God as perfect reason. “The stamen of immortality, if I may be allowed the phrase, is the perfectibility of human reason,” she wrote in a surprising choice of botanical word, “[f]or, were man created perfect, or did a flood of knowledge break in upon him, when he arrived at maturity, that precluded error, I should doubt whether his existence would be continued after the dissolution of the body.”102
Somewhat inexplicably, she continued by revealing that every unresolved difficulty in moral philosophy, everything that “baffles the investigation of profound thing, and the lightning glance of genius,” contributed to her belief in the immortality of the soul.103 This aside, she went on to define reason as “the simple power of improvement; or, more properly speaking, of discerning truth.” Reiterating and qualifying in one stroke her view of the unity of mankind, she wrote:
Every individual is in this respect a world in itself. More or less may be conspicuous in one being than another; but the nature of reason must be the same in all, if it be an emanation of divinity, the tie that connects the creature with the Creator; for, can that soul be stamped the heavenly image, that is not perfected by the exercise of its own reason.104
Thus, while reason was a faculty present in all human beings, every individual perfected it in a particular manner, depending on circumstances and experiences.
While she often wrote of the faculty as linking mankind to the divine, reason does not always emerge as particularly attractive from her work. Wollstonecraft spoke of it casting “her sober light.”105 Its arguments are said to be “cold” in contrast to the powers of the imagination.106 “Modesty, temperance, and self-denial” are her “sober offspring,” though later, in a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the parentage of modesty includes sensibility tempered by reflection.107 Reason labors to tame the passions, even Wollstonecraft’s own.108 It “destroys sublimity.”109 Associated with discipline and restraint, these depictions of reason need to be understood in the discursive contexts in which they occur. For a polemist like Wollstonecraft, the positive connotation “reason” had in many eighteenth-century debates made it a weapon of choice in her arsenal. As she well knew, it acquired added power for being yielded by a woman.
This said, the views Wollstonecraft expressed on reason are straightforwardly consistent. Allowing for the different circumstances in which she was writing, her objectives can be taken to demonstrate the need as well as the difficulties of acquiring a well-adjusted mind. She believed this required the development of reason, its power to generalize from individual sense experiences, and, of great importance, its operation with and alongside the other intellectual faculties, in a cooperative and balanced manner. In a perfected mind, reason would not act in isolation. Indeed, such a perfection also made demands of the body.
Under “Benevolence” in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), Wollstonecraft wrote of a time “when the soul is disentangled from the body, and should be prepared for the realms of love.”110 She used “mind” and “soul” interchangeably and appears never to have departed from a dualist position; she believed in the existence of two substances, a physical and an immaterial one. And while she spoke repeatedly of the soul departing from the body, she thought of the two substances in unison. Just as she talked of the different faculties, so she thought that the mind and the body should make for a harmonious whole in life; both had to be developed, that is, strengthened.
It was, however, essential that individuals not allow themselves to be entrapped by artifice and all those vain earthly matters that hindered intellectual development and a spiritual life: “Have ye not heard that we cannot serve two masters?” Mary Wollstonecraft exclaimed in A Vindication of the Rights of Men; “an immoderate desire to please,” she continued, “contracts the faculties and immerges [sic], to borrow the idea of a great philosopher, the soul in matter, till it becomes unable to mount on the wing of contemplation.”111
That she believed the body should mirror the mind is evidenced in Original Stories when Mrs. Mason, the educator, tells one of her charges, Caroline,
good features, and a fine complexion, I term bodily beauty. The soul of beauty, my dear children, consists in the body gracefully exhibiting the emotions and variations of the informing mind. If truth, humanity and knowledge inhabit the breast, the eyes will beam with a mild lustre, modesty will suffuse the cheeks, and smiles of innocent joy play over all the features. At first sight, regularity and colour will attract, and have the advantage, because the hidden springs are not directly set in motion; but when internal goodness is reflected, every other kind of beauty, the shadow of it, wither away before it, as the sun obscures a lamp.
You are certainly handsome, Caroline; I mean, have good features; but you must improve your mind to give them a pleasing expression, or they will only serve to lead your understanding astray.112
If the mind needed to be reflected in the body, and its beauty transmitted to the body, its own strength rested on that of the body.113 The body had to be exercised from youth, and Wollstonecraft deplored the fact that girls were not only not encouraged to exercise, but positively discouraged from doing so, owing to false conceptions of their nature and of beauty. In her view, weakened bodies presaged weakened minds and dependency.114 It was her experience, Wollstonecraft wrote, that those women who had shown “any vigour of intellect, have accidentally been allowed to run wild,” in other words, they were what is still often called “Tom boys.”115 She asked that girls “by being allowed to take the same exercise as boys, not only during infancy, but in youth, arrive at perfection of body, that we may know how far the natural superiority of man extends.”116 We might recall how much Wollstonecraft herself enjoyed exercise, particularly walking in the countryside. There is no doubt that she thought a strong mind required a strong body, and that the well-being of the one was intrinsically connected to that of the other. If she had needed to be persuaded to write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the passage (which she quoted in A Vindication of the Rights of Men) in Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) in which he described women “labour[ing] to be pretty, by counterfeiting weakness” would have been sufficient for her to set pen to paper. She would not suffer to see beauty and power so disassociated and was eager that women as well as men be rendered strong in body as well as mind from infancy. That ought to be the aim of education, and that was the education that she consistently proposed.
Here again Wollstonecraft thought on this historically. Reflecting on Grecian statues, and quite apart from her admiration of them as transcending a “servile copy of even beautiful nature,” it bears repeating that she revealed that: “I believe that the human form must have been far more beautiful than it is at present, because extreme indolence, barbarous ligatures, and many causes, which forcibly act on it, in our luxurious state of society, did not retard its expansion, or render it deformed.” The body, like the mind, also admitted of a historical perspective, according to Wollstonecraft.
The physical could however not be divorced from the rest of the person, even when considering beauty:
Exercise and cleanliness appear to be not only the surest causes only considered; yet, this is not sufficient, moral ones must concur, or beauty will be merely of that rustic kind which blooms on the innocent, wholesome, countenances of some country people, whose minds have not been exercised. To render the person perfect, physical and moral beauty ought to be attained at the same time; each lending and receiving force by combination.117
That individuals had to be thought of as a totality of mind and body, not even just two parts working harmoniously, was one of the refrains in her writings, and of the greatest importance to her views on educational practice.
If by a free will, one understands (as is no doubt unlikely) a will unaffected by understanding, then Wollstonecraft did not believe the will was free. What little she wrote on the topic, which can be found principally in a small part of her review of Catharine Macaulay’s Letters on Education: with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (1790), left no doubt as to her impatience with the debate between those she called “Free-Willers” and “necessitarians.” Education was the key to moral conduct.118 Neither philosophical position could deny, in her view, the need to cultivate the mind and instill good habits, for neither could deny that education was necessary to discern good from evil, nor that familial and social environments were morally formative. Thus, she quoted Macaulay approvingly in her contention that “By the explanation of those different circumstances in the course of human life, which give rise to the two opposite necessities of doing good, or doing evil, it will appear, that bad governors, bad tutors, and bad company, are the primary authors of all the evil volitions of the species; and that ignorance is a foil in which no uniform virtue can take root and flourish.”119 Both women were insistent that neither philosophical school of thought could conceivably refute this in theory, let alone in practice.
Brief though her discussion of the will may be, it ranks as one of her most fundamental tenets of her belief that habituation is key to character formation.120 Human beings were what they were taught to be either explicitly by those educating them or through the imitation of the models, good or bad, before them. The will was shaped primarily by early training or indeed by lack of it, and to some degree by subsequent experience. A judicious education that made for the development of the faculties at appropriate times in the growth of the mind and body prepared human beings to act as they should in adult life. The lack of it made for individuals who could not control themselves. Wollstonecraft did not deny the will a place in an account of human action, but she did not underscore its presence. It was not a separate function of the self-command she so valued. The world, as she saw it, was divided between those who possessed self-control and those who did not. It was essential therefore that selves be such as to control themselves, that is, that they be formed to be able to do what they ought. Rightful habituation in early life did not, in her view, imply a subsequent life of perpetual imitation or preclude originality or genius. Quite the contrary, it allowed for the possibility of the making of character and individuality as foundations are to an architectural structure. This does not resolve the difficulties attending the philosophical problem of freedom of the will, but Wollstonecraft did go some way toward developing a theory of the mind and associated pedagogical theory that would help eradicate slavish adherence to unexamined beliefs and false needs and desires.
Wollstonecraft made frequent mention of passions and appetites, often as if they were so closely tied as to blur distinction. When she did separate them, the passions rose and the appetites sank, and in at least one instance collapsed into one: [p]assions are spurs to action, and open the mind; but they sink into mere appetites, become personal and momentary gratification, when the object is gained, and the satisfied mind rests in enjoyment.”121 On this view, love was a passion, lust (along with hunger and thirst) an appetite, and the one could descend into the other. Yet, whether emotional or biological, here again what mattered was their being fashioned in the morally appropriate form:
Children are born ignorant, consequently innocent; the passions, are neither good nor evil dispositions, till they receive a direction, and either bound over the feeble barrier raised by a faint glimmering of unexercised reason, called conscience, or strengthen her wavering dictates till sound principles are deeply rooted, and able to cope with the headstrong passions that often assume her awful form. What moral purpose can be answered by extolling good dispositions, as they are called, when these good dispositions are described as instincts: for instinct moves in a direct line to its ultimate end, and asks not for guide or support. But if virtue is to be acquired by experience, or taught by example, reason, perfected by reflection, must be the director of the whole host of passions, which produce a fructifying heat, but no light, that you would exalt into her place.—She must hold the rudder, or, let the wind blow which way it list, the vessel will never advance smoothly to its destined port; for the time lost in tracking about would dreadfully impede its progress.122
Though this passage from the first Vindication, and, as discussed already, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as a whole, portrays Wollstonecraft as wanting reason to dominate over the passions and indeed human beings in their entirety, it would be wrong to think these were her unqualified views and, by implication, that she desired the passions and appetites to be silenced. In considering her view of poetry, we saw she thought of it as the language of the passions working with the imagination and furthermore that “reason has no right to rein-in the imagination,” adding, “if the passion is real, the head will not be ransacked for false tropes and cold rodomande.”123
Speaking more particularly of the emotion of love, she insisted even in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that those “who complain of the delusions of passion, do not recollect that they are exclaiming against a strong proof of the immortality of the soul.” If feelings combined with the imagination to make heavenly love, the imagination “can then depict love with celestial charms, and dote on the grand ideal object—it can imagine a degree of mutual affection that shall refine the soul, and not expire when it has served as a ‘scale to heavenly’; and, like devotion, make it absorb every meaner affection and desire.”124
While there is no question that Wollstonecraft thought the passions and the appetites were morally hazardous in the absence of a sound education and the acquisition of good habits, she underscored their absolute necessity and reminded her readers to think of them in relation to different stages of human life. The intensity and kind of passions appropriate to the young were not so to those advanced in age. Passions were the spring to action, without them nothing would be achieved: “The youth should act; for had he the experience of a grey head he would be fitter for death than life, though his virtues, rather residing in his head than his heart, could produce nothing great, and his understanding, prepared for this world, would not, by its noble flights, prove that it had a title to a better.”125 Quite apart from revealing that A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was far from having been written solely with women in mind, the section from which this passage comes demonstrates once again that Wollstonecraft thought of moral life as writers from Aristotle onward had, namely, as best conceived in its entirety and consisting of periods in which different emotions, experiences, and behavior were appropriate.126 “Besides,” she continued, “it is not possible to give a young person a just view of life; he must have struggled with his own passions before he can estimate the force of the temptation which betrayed his brother into vice.” Adding: “Those who are entering life, and those who are departing, see the world from such very different points of view, that they can seldom think alike, unless the unfledged reason of the former never attempted a solitary flight.”127
That Wollstonecraft’s pronouncements on the mind and morality must be seen as relative to the stage of life of the individuals concerned together with the historical stage of their society is important in many respects, but particularly so in relation to her views on the condition of women, whom she saw as preserved in childhood, and a false one at that, throughout their lives. By contrast, she thought the education of men as it was being advocated by Rousseau’s immensely feted Émile (1762) made the young old before their years. She expressed this most clearly in a review in August 1789 of the Rev. David Williams’s Lectures on Education. Read to a Society for promoting reasonable and humane Improvements in the Discipline and Instruction of Youth (1789), which she thought took the best from Rousseau, leaving the paradoxes in his work on education behind:
Blinded by his prevailing idea, Rousseau, forgetting that he was a warm advocate for the immortality of the soul, endeavours to crowd into the spring-tide of youth, (when vivacity quickly throws off uneasy impressions) the important employment of riper years, the whole business of matured reason; he wished to make his pupil as perfect at the moment he launched into life, as men ought to be when they have finished their task, and nobly employed their faculties. He carefully, and arbitrarily, fixes the divisions of time, during the years dedicated to education, and overlooks the natural divisions of life into seasons, which may be reckoned distinct, though they smoothly unite without the storm he so poetically describes.128
Those were not Wollstonecraft’s only objections to Rousseau’s pedagogy. Her Vindication of the Rights of Woman contributed to making his views of the education of girls notorious. It is important to see that, while she generally approved of his philosophy of education for boys and would have wanted him not to exclude girls from it, she homed in on his inability, as she contentiously perceived it, to recognize that there was a time for everything, when it came to human development male as well as female, that is, a stage in the life of children and adults for the nurturing and flourishing of particular aspects of the mind and character.
A chapter on Wollstonecraft’s beliefs concerning human nature and the human mind should begin and end with God, the very last word of her Vindication of the Rights of Men. The preceding will have made apparent that neither He, nor spiritual life more generally, is ever far from any of Wollstonecraft’s pages. As Todd has remarked, “Wollstonecraft thought about religion all her life,” though she thought about some aspects of it more so in some periods than others.129 While she was no doubt mindful of her professedly Christian audience and never missed any opportunity to use the tenets of Christianity to support her arguments when she could do so, especially with what might be her more recalcitrant readers, she seemed to believe in a Providential order for much of her life and wrote within a Creationist framework.130 She often spoke of the mind and the soul interchangeably and, on occasion, of its existence in an afterlife. Her anti-clericalism, to which she gave expression in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, and her repeated criticisms of religion in her subsequent works, especially but not solely of Catholicism, did not appear to eradicate her faith in a benevolent God. Even in that first Vindication, she affirmed that religion was part of her “idea of morality.”131 Her letters to her sisters and friends attest to this as they do to her wrangling with the question of the existence of evil in a divinely created universe. She quoted William Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) to her sister, Eliza, in June 1787, writing that she particularly admired his short definition of virtue: “Virtue is the doing of good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness.”132 In the last years of her life, she continued to think of herself as part of divine creation, as when she wrote from Hamburg in September 1795 to Imlay that
[t]he tremendous power who formed this heart, must have foreseen that, in a world in which self-interest, in various shapes, is the principal mobile, I had little chance of escaping misery.—To the fiat of fate I submit. I am content to be wretched; but I will not be contemptible.133
And when she had cause to suffer again, this time from Godwin’s attention to other women, she wrote in a similar vein on July 4, 1797, thus just a few months before her death: “I am absurd to look for the affection which I have only found in my own tormented heart; and how can you blame me for taken [sic] refuge in the idea of a God, when I despair of finding sincerity on earth.”134
If she found consolation in faith, her writings did not exhort it in others. What they did from first to last was to underscore that life on earth, given the present condition of humanity, required strength of character and body. It demanded a harmonious operation of the faculties in a fit physique to be able to contend with the inevitable vicissitudes of life. What precisely made for such psychological harmony amongst the mind’s parts and what their individual nature and function specifically were is not to be found in Wollstonecraft. Whether it is in the works of any of her contemporaries or later philosophers is an open question. What is without a doubt, if only judging by the content of her Hints toward what would have been a sequel to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is that she was not only deeply interested in the makeup of the mind throughout her short life as an author, but believed that a philosophy of mind or at the very least some consideration of it was prerequisite to any pedagogical, social, and political program.
The following chapters will return to the subjects discussed in the present one, which sought to stress Wollstonecraft’s belief in the unity of mankind, its natural benevolence, and the importance of a balanced mind in which the faculties are educated to work with each other, differently at different periods of human individual development and at different stages of human history, but always in a robust body. In an ideal environment, education would ensure that boys and girls were habituated in the right manner, to recognize right from wrong, and be desirous of doing the one and not the other and treat all living creatures well. Such education would lead to the development of character and individuality, not hinder them. Youthful minds were pliable and “warm affections [were] easily wrought on.”135 A strong formation in the right milieu was essential: “[t]he most shining abilities, and the most amiable dispositions of the mind, require culture, and a proper situation, not only to ripen and improve them, but to guard them against the perversions of vice, and the contagious influence of bad examples.”136 Yet such was not the prevailing reality, especially not for girls. The young neither received the right education nor were they free of “bad examples.” On the contrary, their environment had a distorting effect at every turn and elevated corrupting models to be followed mindlessly. While Wollstonecraft may not have joined a chorus of contemporary authors calling for a strengthening of religious faith, she certainly did endeavor to expose false idols.137 In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a work that gave further expression to the anti-clericalism of her first Vindication, she strongly criticized the way in which religion was taught, especially at schools and colleges that retained “the relick of popery.”138 However, faith was a very different matter, and this is illustrated by her declaring: “That civilization, that the cultivation of the understanding, and refinement of the affections, naturally make a man religious, I am proud to acknowledge.”139 Something had clearly gone seriously amiss for society to be so far from the fair and equitable world that a benevolent humanity would be expected to have maintained.
1. Works, Vol. 6, p. 444.
2. See S. Juengel, “Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science,” English Literary History 68, no. 4 (2001): 897–927. Project MUSE, DOI:10.1353/elh.2001.0033; and Hudnut, “Samuel Stanhope Smith: Enlightened Conservative,” pp. 540–552. On the continued relevance of MW, see Maoulidi, “Mary Wollstonecraft: Challenges of Race and Class in Feminist Discourse.”
3. Works, Vol. 7, p. 55.
4. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man.
5. Ibid.
6. Works, Vol. 7, p. 50.
7. On this controversy, see, for instance, Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment.
8. Works, Vol. 7, p. 50.
9. Ibid., pp. 50–51.
10. Ibid., p. 54.
11. Ibid.
12. VW, pp. 69, 94, 76, 155. Wollstonecraft’s critique of slavery and the slave trade in particular is widely acknowledged, not least thanks to the seminal work of Moira Ferguson; see Ferguson, “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery,” and Colonialism and Gender; Howard, “Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on Slavery and Corruption.” See also Brace, “Wollstonecraft and the Properties of (Anti-) Slavery.”
13. Works, Vol. 7, p. 90.
14. Ibid., p. 100.
15. Ibid.
16. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, p. 240.
17. VM, p. 13.
18. Ibid., p. 46.
19. Sutton, “Roscoe circle.”
20. Verhoeven, “Gilbert Imlay and the Triangular Trade,” p. 832.
21. Ibid., p. 833.
22. VM, p. 31. See Botting’s “Mary Wollstonecraft, Children’s Human Rights, and Animal Ethics,”; Spencer, “ ‘The link which unites man with brutes’ ”; and Seeber, “Mary Wollstonecraft: ‘Systemiz[ing] Oppression.’ ”
23. Works, Vol. 4, p. 370.
24. Analytical Review, Vol. 25 (1797), Works, Vol. 7, p. 479.
25. Ibid., p. 480.
26. Ibid., Vol. 4 (1789), p. 104.
27. Ibid., p. 105.
28. Ibid.
29. VM, p. 56.
30. Works, Vol. 6, pp. 231–232.
31. Ibid., p. 46.
32. , Vol. 4, p. 46.
33. Ibid., p. 43.
34. Letter on the Character of the French Nation, Works, Vol. 6, p. 445.
35. Education of Daughters, Works, Vol. 4, p. 30.
36. The French Revolution, Works, Vol. 6, p. 46 and Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Works, p. 337.
37. VM, p. 11.
38. Ibid., p. 21. See Eileen Hunt Botting, Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), chapter 4.
39. VM, p. 23.
40. Education of Daughters, Works, Vol. 4, p. 24.
41. VW, p. 255.
42. Works, Vol. 6, p. 449.
43. VW, p. 251.
44. Works, Vol. 4, p. 44; see Botting, “Mary Wollstonecraft, Children’s Human Rights, and Animal Ethics.”
45. Works, Vol. 4, p. 368.
46. VW, p. 268.
47. Works, Vol. 4, pp. 371–379.
48. VW, p. 269.
49. Works, Vol. 6, p. 112.
50. As Barbara Taylor has rightly noted, Wollstonecraft tends to be presented as extolling reason to the exclusion of all other human capacities; following the publication of her Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, this is no longer justifiable. See her Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, especially pp. 58–94.
51. VM, p. 58.
52. Works, Vol. 4, p. 56.
53. Ibid., p. 359.
54. Ibid., p. 415.
55. Works, Vol. 4, pp. 20–21.
56. See Tomaselli, “ ‘Have Ye Not Heard That We Cannot Serve Two Masters?.’ ”
57. Works, Vol. 6, p. 245.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. This, however, is not to suggest that she was more immune to contradictions than anyone else.
61. Works, Vol. 6, p. 445.
62. VM, p. 33.
63. Ibid., p. 46.
64. Ibid., p. 50.
65. Ibid., p. 57.
66. Letter to Imlay, cited in Richard Holmes, Footsteps. Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (New York: Vintage, 1985), p. 127.
67. VM, p. 58.
68. VW, p. 111.
69. Ibid., p. 114. For more on Wollstonecraft and the imagination, see Schulman, “Gothic Piles and Endless Forests.” For the politics of sense and sensibility more generally, see Johnson, Equivocal Beings; see also Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination; Gunther-Canada, “The politics of sense and sensibility,” pp. 126–147.
70. VW, p. 172.
71. For more on the influence of Rousseau on Wollstonecraft’s writings, see Laura Kirkley, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”
72. VW, p. 257, p. 194.
73. Ibid., p. 257.
74. Ibid., p. 266; pp. 124–125.
75. Ibid., p. 236.
76. Hints, p. 296; VW, p. 210.
77. VW, p. 198.
78. Hints, p. 300.
79. VW, p. 201.
80. VM, p. 40.
81. Ibid., p. 29.
82. Ibid., p. 56; see Yousef, “Wollstonecraft, Rousseau and the Revision of Romantic Subjectivity.”
83. VW, pp. 201 and 200.
84. Ibid., p. 257; Education of Daughters, Works, Vol. 4, p. 12.
85. The Female Reader, Works, Vol. 4, p. 58. I am grateful to Eileen Hunt Botting for noting that this passage brings to mind Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein. See Botting, Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child.
86. The Female Reader, Works, Vol. 4, p. 59.
87. VW, p. 201.
88. Works, Vol. 7, pp. 479–480.
89. Analytical Review, Vol. 25 (1797), Works, p. 382.
90. Works, Vol. 6, p. 443.
91. VW, p. 128.
92. Ibid., p. 129.
93. VM, p. 27 and p. 30.
94. Ibid., p. 7.
95. VM, p. 31.
96. Ibid., p. 33.
97. Ibid., pp. 40–41.
98. Ibid., p. 41.
99. VW, p. 248.
100. Ibid., p. 107.
101. Ibid., p. 206.
102. Ibid., pp. 126–127.
103. Ibid., p. 127.
104. VW, pp. 126–127.
105. Ibid., pp. 106, 118.
106. VM, pp. 9, 48.
107. VW, p. 161 and pp. 207, 218.
108. Ibid., p. 225.
109. Hints, p. 300.
110. Works, Vol. 4, p. 43.
111. VW, p. 23. The great philosopher is Plato. I have discussed Wollstonecraft’s views on the immortality of the soul at greater length in “ ‘Have Ye Not Heard That We Cannot Serve Two Masters?.’ ”
112. Works, Vol. 4, p. 390.
113. VW, p. 160.
114. Ibid., p. 165.
115. Ibid., p. 115.
116. Ibid., p. 165.
117. VW, pp. 267–268.
118. On Macaulay, Wollstonecraft, and education, see Elizabeth Frazer, “Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay on Education,” Oxford Review of Education 37, no. 5 (2011): 603–617; see also Gunther-Canada, “Cultivating Virtue”; Green and Weekes, “Catharine Macaulay on the Will.”
119. Vol. 8 (1790), Works, Vol. 7, p. 321.
120. For an extensive discussion of the importance of education, particularly primary education for Wollstonecraft, see Botting, “Theories of Human Development: Wollstonecraft and Mill on Sex, Gender, and Education,” in Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human Rights. For an account of Wollstonecraft as holding an Aristotelian conception of virtue, see Bergès, Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
121. VW, p. 100.
122. VM, pp. 31–32.
123. Ibid., p. 28.
124. VW, p. 152.
125. Ibid., p. 195.
126. For a reading of Wollstonecraft that underscores the influence of Greek philosophers on her thinking, see N. F. Taylor, The Rights of Woman as Chimera.
127. VW, pp. 195–196.
128. Analytical Review, Vol. 4 (1789), Works, Vol. 7, 141.
129. Letters, p. 75, n.165.
130. See Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue, pp. 45–52, 231–232.
131. VM, p. 7.
132. Letters, p. 130.
133. Ibid., p. 322.
134. Ibid., p. 428.
135. Education of Daughters, Works, Vol. 4, p. 45.
136. Ibid.
137. See Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (London: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
138. VW, pp. 254–255.
139. VM, p. 40.