To most observers the publication in 1935 of Coleridge on Imagination signaled a very important change in I. A. Richards' thinking as a literary critic. At the time, most other men of letters interpreted it as a shift away from "positivism." But what seems more interesting now is that it was also a shift toward a condition of mind that is pretty accurately described by the word "romanticism." It was indeed, as John Crowe Ransom once remarked, a kind of "conversion."

Of course, Richards was never a very good positivist—never a very pure one—and much less a scientist, as the standard protests against the pseudo-psychological machineries in the Principles of Literary Criticism have demonstrated. (p. 47)

[In] the Principles Richards wrote about the value of the arts in terms of their theoretically measurable and practical effect of "organizing" our minds, his theory being that through intelligent experiencing of the arts our minds pass from relative chaos to relative order, from a condition relatively wasteful of their inherent resources to one relatively complete in its realization of them. The way the mind gets ordered, whether or not by art, Richards presented as an essentially mechanical process, which was in accord with the nature of his theory. According to his theory, our thinking, as well as simpler sorts of action, is dependent upon the nature and relative organization of our "interests." (p. 50)

It was not long before John Crowe Ransom, reacting as a traditional humanist, reached down his dictionary and in a moment of urbane etymological outrage confronted Richards with the extreme implications of his mechanical interests doctrine: "Inter-esse," he wrote in The World's Body [see excerpt above], "means to be environed, and interest means … to obtain a cognition, to do what Mr. Richards wickedly denies to poetic experience and grants exclusively to science: to seek the truth." The details of Richards' theory did in fact deny the New Critics' doctrine that poetry is knowledge. But in effect Richards had already answered Ransom's protest in the Principles by passing the type of argument it exemplified through the machinery of his psychological reductionism. Because our minds undergo formation and organization when we successfully submit them to high art, Richards' analysis goes, the feeling ensues that we have gained illumination, have come into the possession of new knowledge. Thus the theory of poetry as knowledge and its sister "revelation doctrines." Such feelings of "revealed significance," he concludes, are not evidence of an access of real knowledge, but rather only "the conscious accompaniment of our successful adjustment to life."

In such passages Richards was trying to make distinctions between actualities and feelings of actuality in order to clear up certain discursive misunderstandings. And his famous distinction—psychological, it should be noted, not substantive—between "scientific" and "emotive" uses of language, which asserts that prose, or scientific discourse, is constituted by (factual) statements, while poetry is constituted by "pseudostatements," is of exactly the same order. The attacks on the early Richards—and most of the memorable ones were made by New Critics—centered upon the inflammatory label "pseudostatement." There are unfortunate associations of disparagement, certainly, in the prefix "pseudo," associations that, like the red rag to the bull, so angered the critics that they were unable then or ever again to see what Richards had really said. All he had done, really, was give a name to a psychological distinction that even his attackers have never, to my knowledge, denied is real. (pp. 51-2)

In 1931 Richards tried patiently to explain to Middleton Murry, who had piously risen against him [see excerpt above], that he intended no "contemptuous nuance" in using the term "pseudostatement." It was, he said, "a mere neutral technicality, to stand for a form of words which looks like a statement but should not be taken as one." "For me," he asserted with unmistakable clarity, "a pseudo-statement may perfectly well be true; but, for him, I had implied that it was equivalent to a false statement" (my italics). I am not aware that the critics, or Mr. Murry, ever bothered to understand Richards on this point. And he seems never to have tried very hard to make them understand. True, Richards has now been forgiven for his supposed sin against poetry. Though they have never quite forgotten his early positivist transgressions against poetry, most of the critics viewed the appearance of Coleridge on Imagination in 1935 as the document of a virtual conversion experience. (pp. 52-3)

The change in Richards' work as a critic and theorist of literature is vividly apparent at the level of language. Beginning with the Coleridge, he is increasingly willing to have his terminology mean more, willing, that is, to speak more loosely and emotively in areas where it had been formerly a matter of principle with him to speak, and have others speak, with restriction and precision. This means not only that he is less annoyed with other people's verbal thickets, but that now he seems actually to set about cultivating a few of his own. (pp. 53-4)

Many of Richards' earlier intentions and principles were, of course, verbally adhered to in the later work. But even the old key words nevertheless have a tendency to change their coloration. The Philosophy of Rhetoric, for example, adurnbrates a new "science" of language to correspond with how we actually use it, an intention reiterated in the more recent Speculative Instruments, where one essay urges a "United Studies" "at once more scientifically and more humanely conceived." But the "science" of the first quotation now connotes less the laboratory and protocols than it does a classical sort of pursuit that might be designated by a sense somewhere between "inquiry" and "discipline." And in the second quotation there is no question that Richards would place particular emphasis on the "humanely," locating his humane ideal farther away from the scientistic iconography of the Principles and closer to the idealistic literary mystique of Coleridge. (p. 55)

[In the later works the] anti-behaviorist tendency to stress the difference rather than the likeness between man and the animals, and the assertion that language is more than a mechanical operation ("signalling system") indicate how far Richards has gone in the direction of abandoning his early reductionist motives and assumptions. The comfortable pairing of "sensation" and "intuition," [in The Philosophy of Rhetoric] furthermore, implies some willingness now to regard intuition, or the nonrational, as an avenue of knowing…. It is noteworthy, finally, that in this account of how the mind works with words there is a total absence of the mechanist's jargon of "interests" and "impulses," and that words are now seen to be endowed with a kind of life of their own.

In fact, early in The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Richards complains pointedly that psychological theories identifying "thought" with muscular movement are self-refuting…. (p. 56)

[These changes] implement the dethroning of the scientistic icon, with its attendant statistical and instrumental imageries and its doctrines of precision and objectivity, and the elevation in its place of a modern romantic version of the humanistic icon: Man—sensitive, intuitive, complex, free and creative in his ceaseless quest to realize the fullness and splendor, and perhaps the tragedy, of his own nature. (p. 57)

The new Richards' comprehensiveness and appetite for speculation have pleased most critics, and that has something to do no doubt with the fact that Richards' romantic "conversion" in the mid-thirties prefigured the mythic, the speculative, the quasi-theological interests that have come into full flower in the work of the leading aestheticians and literary theorists of the forties and fifties. Only a few commentators have taken exception—a semanticist here and a logical positivist there, with hardly a literary man in the lot…. [They] are the kinds of objections that poets no doubt hear when their pseudo-statements have been taken as statements.

But I think Richards, about whom so much has been said by so many, ought to be given the chance here to say a final word or two for himself. He has been very patient with his critics, by most of whom he has been pretty consistently misunderstood. In his latest volume of essays [Speculative Instruments] he writes of the Principles that he did not intend in that book to make a defense of scientism, and he cites from it an unequivocal passage which clearly opposes the tyranny of the scientific attitude. He says also, and very rightly, as I believe, that "what influence the book has had would have been different if more of those who have discussed it had read it." He reiterates, too, a contention made more than a quarter century ago, in the Coleridge …, that the differences between his earlier and his later work lie in the language rather than in the thought. In going over the Principles, he writes, he is "more impressed by its anticipations of my later view than by the occurrence of anything to retract. I changed my vocabulary and my metaphors somewhat … to present much the same views again."

Well, this is true enough—if we reduce Richards' later writings to their bedrock paraphrases. But if we have learned anything at all from Richards, we are likely to have learned the principle that the natures of vocabularies and metaphors reflect what is going on in the minds that choose and combine them, that changes in language mean changes in the quality and coloration of the thought they embody—changes, that is, in "sensibility." And sensibility is what we have been examining all along. (pp. 59-61)