A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era (Carleton Library Series)

This highly original contribution to Canadian intellectual history examines the course of critical inquiry and its relationship to the assertion of moral authority in English-Canadian thought during the Victorian era.

Concentrating on the thought of Canada's major scientists, philosophers, and clerics - men such as William Dawson and Daniel Wilson, John Watson and W.D. LeSeur, G.M. Grant and Salem Bland - A Disciplined Intelligence begins by reconstructing the central strands of intellectual and moral orthodoxy prevalent in Anglo-Canadian colleges on the eve of the Darwinian revolution. These include Scottish common sense philosophy and the natural theology of William Paley. The destructive impact of evolutionary ideas on that orthodoxy and the major exponents of the new forms of social evolution - Spencerian and Hegelian alike - are examined in detail.

By the twentieth century the centre of Anglo-Canadian thought had been transformed by what had become a new, evolutionary orthodoxy. The legacy of this triumphant intellectual movement, British idealism, was immense. It helped to destroy Protestant denominationalism, provide the philosophical core of the social gospel movement, and constitute a major force behind the creation of the United Church of Canada. Throughout the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, however, the moral imperative in Anglo-Canadian thought remained a constant presence.

The Carleton Library Series is an enduring and significant initiative to publish and reissue documents and texts important to the history of the place we now call Canada. Begun in the 1950s at Carleton University, the series was intended to be a non-fiction counterpart to the New Canadian Library. In the new millennium the motivations for, and thus the mandate of, the series have shifted. While the CLS remains committed to humanities and social science research on the long histories of the territory called Canada, it now takes as its primary purpose the reimaging of how Canada understands itself. The series does not seek to define what Canada should be but rather invites scholars working on questions about the country's history, present, and future to reassess persistent mythologies and to imagine just shared futures. The CLS publishes books that engage in the transformative diversification of knowledge; that examine local and regional knowledges and experiences; that explore the relation of Canada to the world within and across borders; and that draw on a range of disciplines, theoretical traditions, methodologies, and epistemologies.

The CLS publishes original manuscripts and reissues out-of-print materials that are accompanied by new scholarly introductions and other editorial apparatuses. Manuscript proposals may be sent to the editorial board chair, Jody Mason, at jody.mason@carleton.ca or to any member of the editorial board.

CLS board members: Martha Attridge Bufton, Vandna Bhatia, Sheryl Hamilton, Jennifer Henderson, Laura Madokoro, Jody Mason, Pat Moore