For instance, almost fifty years later, Alexander Gerard, in An Essay on Taste (1759), defines the imagination in terms of the expansive mind: “When a large object is presented, the mind expands itself to the extent of that object, and is filled with one grand sensation, which totally possessing it, composes it into a solemn sedateness, and strikes it with deep silent wonder and admiration: it finds such a difficulty in spreading itself to the dimensions of the object, as enlivens and invigorates its frame: … it sometimes imagines itself present in every part of the scene which it contemplates; and from the sense of this immensity, feels a noble pride, and entertains a lofty conception of its own capacity.”17 The imagination, in Gerard’s view, longs for expansion. “The mind,” he says, “acquires a habit of enlarging itself to receive the sentiment of sublimity” and longs to “expand its faculties.”18 Again in 1759, Edmund Burke expresses this idea of imaginative enlargement in its most powerful extreme. What Burke calls “vastness of extent,” an aspect of the sublime, finds its ultimate expression in the idea of “infinity.”19
In contrast to the expansive, powerful imagination of Gerard and Burke, in this same year—1759—Adam Smith published his Theory of Moral Sentiments, conceiving of the imagination in terms of self-sacrifice, or what he called “fellow-feeling.” “By changing places in fancy with the sufferer,” wrote Smith, “we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels.”20 The popularity of Smith’s arguments can be traced to the heart of distanced imagination. The first part of Smith’s essay, “On Sympathy,” establishes a new role for the imagination, one that enlarges itself in order to be selfless. “Whatever is the passion which arises from any object in the person principally concerned,” he writes, “an analogous emotion springs up, at the thought of his situation, in the breast of every attentive spectator.” Here, Smith thinks in terms of proximity and distance and of the coin-cidence one can feel with another. He continues, “In every passion of which the mind of man is susceptible, the emotions of the by-stander always correspond to that, by bringing the case home to himself, he imagines should be the sentiments of the sufferer.” The imagination allows one to “bring the case home,” implying an intimacy and hospitality in relations between self and other that were, up to this point, unheard of. Clearly, then, the expansiveness of the imagination seen in previous theorists had taken a new turn with Smith, leading to the moral consciousness that would shape the actions and the poetry of the Romantic period.
Since slavery was the most egregious form of suffering, and thus the form of suffering most likely to evoke fellow-feeling, slavery is the first example Smith offers in “On Sympathy.” The imagination may be a mental activity, but it implies a bodily experience, an altering of selfhood on the most fundamental level. “Though our brother is upon the rack,” writes Smith, “it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case.” “By imagination we place ourselves in his situation … we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him.”21 Smith makes the enlargement of the imagination not a selfish but a selfless faculty. One expands the ego boundaries of the self in order to feel for the other. Shelley, following Smith, writes much later, “the imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived” (SP, 490).
If imagination defined the self as both expansive and sacrificial, these qualities also characterized the political realm. But in politics, expansion was again conceived of as motivated by self-interest. Adam Smith himself provides a striking example: he developed The Theory of Moral Sentiments which advocated fellow-feeling and then he turned, less than twenty years later, to champion capitalism, free trade, and the flow of money in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith’s was the first major work of political economy, examining in detail the consequences of economic free markets, such as division of labor, the function of markets, and the international implications of a laissez-faire economy. Though Smith’s two books seem to have opposite emphases—one springing from selfless motives, the other on selfish interests—both, in fact, rivaled one another in popularity for reading audiences. As historian Richard F. Teichgraeber explains, the discrepancy between the assumptions governing these two works has been a problem for Smith scholars ever since the Victorian period, so much so that late nineteenth-century German scholars called it “The Adam Smith Problem.”22
Curiously enough, a version of the Adam Smith problem is currently the focus for historians of British slavery who have discussed at length the ways in which the two opposed forces of sympathy and capitalism dominated the abolitionist movement. A finely tuned and wonderfully nuanced debate by the veteran historians David Brion Davis and Thomas L. Haskell is notable on several counts. Just as self-sacrifice and self-expansion characterized the nineteenth-century British concept of imagination, these historians agree that humanitarianism and capitalism defined British economics of the same period. In fact, what strikes Haskell as significant is the way in which humanitarian and capitalist attitudes dovetail.23 “Capitalism fosters self-regarding sentiments, while humanitarianism seems other-regarding,” writes Haskell. “What can account for the parallel development in history of two such opposed tendencies?” One answer lies in the fact that despite their antithetical aims, both humanitarianism and capitalism “depend on people who attribute to themselves far-reaching powers of intervention.”24 This power of intervention can also describe the relationship between self-sacrifice and self-expansion in the realm of creativity and imagination. Romantic poets, as Coleridge’s poetic exclamation of the spreading self proves, had confidence that their ideas would have national appeal, if not the powers to intervene.
III
One of the best ways to understand the relationships between self-sacrifice and self-expansion of the distanced imagination is, I propose, through the concept of alterity. Alterity means “difference,” but it also encompasses the idea that because the self is responsible, ethical, and human, it preserves the difference of the other and acknowledges the relativity of subjectivity. Alterity was, from the beginning, a concept of the Romantic imagination. Although the word was used sporadically in the 1600s, the OED credits Coleridge for introducing the concept into the language.25 For Coleridge alterity is a mode of self-consciousness. He claims there can be no consciousness, no being, without alterity. Alterity allows the self to distinguish its own being; it is “namely a distinction of the Scitum from the Sciens” (the thing known from the knowing agent). Although alterity gives the self its consciousness, its distinctness, Coleridge clearly grants the alterity of the “thing known” its own integral status. Alterity’s relativity produces “reality”: “outness is but the feeling of otherness (alterity), rendered intuitive … because we find this outness and the objects, to which, though they are, in fact, workings in our own being, we transfer it, independent of our will, and apparently common to other minds, we learn to connect therewith the feeling and sense of reality” (original emphasis) (SWF, 2:929). Further,