Reviewed by:

• Anecdotes of Enlightenment: Human Nature from Locke to Wordsworth by James Robert Wood
• Kristin M. Girten (bio)

It is now common to consider “anecdotal evidence” as second-rate and insufficient—at best a precursor to stronger substantiation, at worst a source of delusion. For anecdotal evidence to become reliable, it must become, simply, evidence. Otherwise, it will always only be “just an anecdote.” James Robert Wood demonstrates, however, that there has not always been such a clear consensus about the inferiority of anecdotal evidence. Though Enlightenment-era philosophers set the foundation for how we moderns evaluate what satisfies burdens of proof, Wood shows that they were not in agreement about how much weight should be given to the anecdote, which he defines as “a self-contained narrative of a single event or circumstance in human life” (13). Wood’s study makes a strong case that anecdotal narratives were crucial to “the Enlightenment’s effort toward reestablishing knowledge ... on the close observations of human beings in the world, seen both as individuals and as components of larger social wholes” (9). Such narratives allowed philosophers, as well as explorers and literary authors, to navigate between the particular and the universal as they sought to subject “human nature” to the same philosophical scrutiny to which they subjected the non-human natural world.

Accompanying Wood on his survey of anecdotes throughout British literature and philosophy across the long eighteenth century, one discovers the ubiquity of their presence in the period. Just this discovery is exciting, for it opens up new possibilities of historical and literary analysis. The anecdote has received relatively little sustained treatment by scholars, and Wood’s study certainly prompts the reader to wonder why. As Anecdotes of Enlightenment shows, anecdotal narratives appear with surprising frequency in diverse works across the long eighteenth century. Wood sets out to understand the reason for such frequency, aiming to assess the anecdote’s broader cultural function while also doing justice to the specificity of each anecdotal narrative he addresses. He is interested in both its “viral communicability” and its “capacity to spark off debate on what [was] or was not natural to human beings” (3). Narrating notable scenarios, anecdotes tend to emphasize that which deviates from the norm—the anomaly and, at times, the extraordinary. However, Wood’s nuanced dialectical analysis allows him to appreciate how the anecdote engages both the deviant and the normative. He reveals that, for Enlightenment thinkers, the anecdote represented both [End Page 475] a challenge and an opportunity: it challenged common assumptions about human nature, and it presented an opportunity to revise theories of human nature to accommodate the furthest “peripheries of the human world” (3).

Anecdotes of Enlightenment takes the reader on a tour through various hot spots of anecdotal activity across the long eighteenth century, beginning with John Locke’s 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding and concluding with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. In the first chapter, Wood provides an important framework for analyzing the Enlightenment anecdote when he contends that “anecdotes work as the human equivalents of natural philosophical experiments” (34). This framework proves useful throughout the book as a whole. Though, as Wood demonstrates, Locke, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Eliza Haywood were pioneers in employing the anecdote “as a literary device for investigating human nature,” various philosophers and authors would follow their lead across the long century (35). Ultimately, in the work of Wordsworth, Thomas Beddoes, and Erasmus Darwin, the anecdote would “become ... a common ground on which men of science, poets, and the wider public [could] meet” (31). According to Wood, it would provide reassurance and even pleasure for Enlightenment writers as it offered “a shared experience that served to bind them to their fellow human beings” (32).

As sites of experiment and social connection, anecdotes helped enable positive philosophical discoveries about human nature; however, Wood also shows how difficult it could be to generalize and abstract from anecdotes. While anecdotes were seen to improve our understanding of...

审核人：

• 启蒙轶事：从洛克到华兹华斯的人性，詹姆斯·罗伯特·伍德（James Robert Wood）
• 克里斯汀·M·吉尔滕（生物）

现在，普遍认为“轶事证据”是次要的且不充分的，充其量充其量是充实证据的先兆，最坏的情况是妄想的根源。为了使传闻证据变得可靠，它必须简单地成为证据。否则，它将永远仅是“只是轶事”。然而，詹姆斯·罗伯特·伍德（James Robert Wood）证明，对于传闻证据的劣质性并不总是达成如此明确的共识。尽管启蒙时代的哲学家为我们现代人评估满足举证责任的方式奠定了基础，但伍德表示，他们对应给轶事赋予多少权重并不一致，他将其定义为“关于证言的自成一体的叙述”。人类生活中的单一事件或情况”（13）。伍德的研究有力地证明了轶事叙事对于“启蒙运动重新建立知识……在世界上对人类的密切观察中的努力至关重要，人类既被视为个人，也被视为更大的社会整体的组成部分”（9）。这样的叙述允许哲学家，

伍德陪伴他对整个18世纪英国文学和哲学中的轶事进行了调查，发现了这一时期它们的存在无处不在。这项发现令人兴奋，因为它为历史和文学分析开辟了新的可能性。轶事很少受到学者的持续治疗，伍德的研究无疑使读者想知道为什么。作为启蒙的轶事展览表明，在整个18世纪的各种作品中，轶事叙事以惊人的频率出现。伍德着手理解出现这种频率的原因，旨在评估轶事的更广泛的文化功能，同时也对他所讲的每个轶事叙述的特殊性做出公正的评价。他对它的“病毒可传播性”和“引发人们关于人类到底是什么还是不自然的辩论”的能力都感兴趣（3）。叙述值得注意的场景时，轶事往往会强调那些偏离规范的事物，即异常现象，有时甚至是非同寻常的事物。但是，伍德的细微辩证法分析使他能够体会到轶事如何使异常和规范同时发生。他发现，对于启蒙思想家来说，这部轶事既代表了[End Page 475] 挑战与机遇：它挑战了关于人性的共同假设，并且为修改人性理论提供了契机，以适应最远的“人类世界的外围”（3）。

启蒙轶事带读者浏览了整个18世纪的各种轶事热点，从约翰·洛克（John Locke）的1689年《关于人类理解的散文》开始，到威廉·华兹华斯（William Wordsworth）和塞缪尔·泰勒·科尔里奇（Samuel Taylor Coleridge）的1800年抒情歌谣作结。在第一章中，伍德认为“启示录是自然哲学实验的人类等效物”，为伍德提供了一个重要的框架来分析启蒙故事（34）。事实证明，该框架在整本书中都很有用。尽管正如伍德所证明的那样，洛克，约瑟夫·艾迪生，理查德·斯蒂尔和伊丽莎·海伍德都是采用这部轶事“作为研究人性的文学手段”的先驱，但在漫长的一个世纪中，各种哲学家和作家仍会沿袭其先例（35）。最终，在华兹华斯，托马斯·贝多斯和伊拉斯姆斯·达尔文的著作中，这部轶事将“成为……科学界人士，诗人和广大公众[可以]见面的共同基础”（31）。根据伍德的说法，

作为实验和社会联系的场所，轶事帮助实现了关于人性的积极哲学发现。然而，伍德还展示了从轶事中进行概括和抽象是多么困难。人们发现轶事可以增进我们对...的了解。