The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [10]
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.’67
There could be nothing more disingenuous, however, than Johnson’s acquiescence in what he must have been aware was Boswell’s travesty of the propositional content of Berkeley’s philosophy, and nothing more sophistical than his assertion that kicking a stone constituted a refutation of that philosophy.68 (Berkeley never contended that our perceptions of solidity were false, simply that it was not clear how one could move beyond such perceptions reliably to infer the presence of material substance.)69 So it was natural for Johnson to prefer chastisement over encouragement as a motive to improvement, be it educational or spiritual.
It was a strand of character which could also take less sombre forms. A melancholy Johnson, wandering through Paris in the company of the brewer Henry Thrale and his vivacious wife, and suddenly mindful of the absence of his own, dead, wife (who would he thought have taken pleasure in the magnificence of the city and its palaces), resolved his own indifference before splendour, not into any stoicism, but rather into a consequence of his emotional isolation: ‘Having now nobody to please, I am little pleased.’70 Energetic interaction was for Johnson a mode of being, not just in the sense of being a settled disposition of character, but more deeply because it allowed him to discover the contents and trace the boundaries of his own mind. Take this fragment of conversation between Boswell and Johnson on the subject of respect:
JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, we know very little about the Romans. But, surely, it is much easier to respect a man who has always had respect, than to respect a man who we know was last year no better than ourselves, and will be no better next year. In republicks there is not a respect for authority, but a fear of power.’ BOSWELL. ‘At present, Sir, I think riches seem to gain most respect.’ JOHNSON. ‘No, Sir, riches do not gain hearty respect; they only procure external attention.’71
The distinction between respect and attention is a fine insight. It is forged by the heat of contradiction (‘No, Sir…’), and draws other fine distinctions in its wake, for when Boswell introduces the subject of ‘riches’ to the conversation, Johnson’s imagination moves from politics to money and his language is suddenly impregnated with fiscal figures (‘gain’, ‘procure’) – figures which, in their own suggested gradations of worth, capture and express something of the difference between genuine respect and mere attention which Johnson wishes here to convey. The practice of desyn-onymization – the careful separating out of the different shades of meaning between words which custom has confused – was plainly as central to Johnson as it would later be to Coleridge.72 This is why the the Dictionary is the pivotal work in Johnson’s canon, and why also Boswell’s praise of Johnson’s writings, as furnishing ‘bark and steel for the mind’, is deserved.73 Combativeness contributed powerfully to these achievements.
But, inaddition to these external collisions, for Johnson the cardinal principle of conflict also possessed a more intimate aspect, expressing itself asan internal