MOTION, SOUND, COLOUR, AND FIGURE
HARRIS, James.
Three Treatises the first concerning Art the second concerning music painting and poetry the third concerning happiness … The second Edition revised and corrected.
London, John Nourse and Paul Vaillant, 1765.
[with:]
—. Hermes or a philosophical Inquiry concerning universal Grammar … The second Edition revised and corrected. London, John Nourse and Paul Vaillant, 1765.
Two works, 8vo, Three Treatises: pp. [2], 377, [18], [1 (blank)], with copper-engraved frontispiece by Basire; bifolium I Cc3.4 inverted; marginal paperflaws to lower corners of C3 (with loss) and S4 (closed), some spotting; Hermes: pp. xix, [1 (blank)], 441, [28], [3], with copper-engraved frontispiece by Basire and final advertisement leaf; some spotting; bound in uniform contemporary speckled calf, morocco spine labels (numbering-pieces defective), spines rather dry, headcap of vol. I chipped; armorial bookplates of Lord Sandys (either Samuel Sandys, Baron Sandys (1695–1770), or his son Edwin Sandys).
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Three Treatises the first concerning Art the second concerning music painting and poetry the third concerning happiness … The second Edition revised and corrected.
Presentation copies, inscribed ‘From the Author’, of the revised second editions of these two works on art and language by the philosopher and latterly politician James Harris.
Three Treatises (1744) was written in the form of dialogues conducted in the Earl of Pembroke’s Gardens at Wilton. Harris argued that ‘motion, sound, colour and figure’ are the four expressions of art and thus became an influential predecessor to Lessing’s Laokoon (1766). Hermes (1751) was one of the most important and influential eighteenth-century works on language and earned its author the nickname ‘Hermes’ Harris.
Harris was an anti-Lockian, and distinguished sharply between the faculties of sensation and reflection. Language, for him, is associated primarily with reflection, and although it can be used to express thoughts about the objects of sensation, this is inessential to it. His idea of a universal grammar has naturally led to comparisons with Saussure and Chomsky. Though also sold separately, these two volumes were evidently conceived of as a set (and are here numbered as one); Harris presented a set to the British Museum, of which he was a trustee, in November 1765.
ESTC T71082 and T116396.
