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PARTISAN REVIEW
contexts so inclusive that they do not permit discourse among peers.
The taste for human and historical reality can hardly be implanted by
an act of will, but we can say that those who deny that individuals
make judgments limited by their own and the collective past should be
told that they have not acknowledged the limitations of the agent who
makes judgments. Those who do make this acknowledgment must
turn for appraisal to the indispensable company of those whose
knowledge is informed by their power to judge.
If
Abrams is right,
these massive appropriations of the world as text-or of the whole
human condition as designed to oppress us!-must be thought of as
attempts to undo the romantic movement. The burden of individual
judgment Kant sought to describe, which Wordsworth in his great
years consciously assumed, is more than these thinkers an bear.
