In existographies, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) (IQ:165|#512) (Cattell 1000:46) [RGM:354|1,500+] (Bloom 100:6|Wisdom) (CR:3), aka “Dr. Johnson” (pen name”, was an English poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, and biographer; noted for []
Dictionary
In 1755, Johnson completed his Dictionary of the English Language, which he had spent eight years on, which for the next 150 years, until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary, became the status quo reference.
Religion
Johnson was a devout Anglican.
Quotes | On
The following are quotes on Johnson:
“It was in the eighteenth century that the conception of the universe as a ‘chain of being’, the principles which underlay this conception – plenitude, continuity, gradation – attained their widest diffusion and acceptance. The faith in speculative a priori metaphysics was waning, and the Baconian temper (if not precisely the Baconian procedure), the spirit of patient empirical inquiry, continued its triumphant march in science, and was an object of fervent enthusiasm among a large part of the general educated public. There has been no period in which writers of all sorts — men of science and philosophers, poets and popular essayists, deists and orthodox divines — talked so much about the ‘chain of being’, or accepted more implicitly the general scheme of ideas connected with it, or more boldly drew from these their latent implications, or apparent implications. Addison, King, Bolingbroke, Pope, Haller, Thomson, Akenside, Buffon, Bonnet, Goldsmith, Diderot, Kant, Lambert, Herder, Schiller — all these and a host of lesser writers not only expatiated upon the theme but drew from it new, or previously evaded, consequences; while Voltaire and Samuel Johnson, a strange pair of companions in arms, led an attack upon the whole conception. Next to the word ‘nature’, the ‘great chain of being’ was the sacred phrase of the eighteenth century, playing a part somewhat analogous to that of the blessed word ‘evolution’ in the late nineteenth.”
— Arthur Lovejoy (1933), The Great Chain of Being (pgs. 183-84) [1]
Quotes | By
The following are quotes by Johnson:
“Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.”
— Samuel Johnson (c.1760), Publication (Ѻ)
References
1. Lovejoy, Arthur. (1933). The Great Chain of Being: a Study of the History of an Idea. Harvard University Press, 1936.
External links
● Samuel Johnson – Wikipedia.
