Abstract

The "main movement" Matthew Arnold identified in the Victorian mind sought to avert social chaos through the "man of culture and tact" who could construct history, metaphysics, and, especially, different religious "truths" for different social classes. Six centuries before, Averroes had proposed a similar "doctrine of the double truth" for Islamic society; Arnold wrote approvingly of Averroes and his work. Newman's convert and disciple, Gerard Manley Hopkins, believed all being, even socially inconvenient truth, was good. His favorite philosopher, Duns Scotus, had in the fourteenth century opposed the linguistic slippage fostered by Averroism. Scotus insisted on a world not invented by the cultured but available for anyone's discovery through the senses. Hopkins' sensuous poetic language embodies a theory of "inscapes," which correspond to Scotus' formalitates--separable but identifies aspects of things, independent of individual perceivers, but dependent upon the possibility of a perceiving intellect. They are realities, inherently intelligible. Hopkins celebrates intelligibility in language and the world. The conceptions of being and language which found his poetry contrast to Arnold's and challenge our day's post-structuralist criticism