James Usher

"Scarce first edition of Clio : or, a discourse on taste, James Usher's most popular publication, which had run through eight editions by 1809. 'Usher remains distinct from [two main currents of eighteenth century thought] first, by his downright opposition to the value of Locke's empiricism and the associationist psychology based upon it; second, by his downright opposition to the value of the principle of self-interest. This means that Usher's philosophy opposes the utilitarianism implicit in Scottish philosophy and also that his aesthetics oppose the conclusion of Edmund Burke, that "the sublime is an idea belonging to self-preservation". For these reasons Samuel Monk’s history of mid-eighteenth century aesthetics finds James Usher unclassifiable in his time. But it is for these same reasons that a certain J. Matthews of Bristol annotated and republished Usher's aesthetics in 1803 and 1809: Matthews was reviving a text which, however unclassifiable in its own day, coincided after a lapse of some forty years with the exotic aesthetics of Thomas de Quincey or Charles Maturin.' For a full discussion of Usher's aesthetic see Kevin Barry, 'James Usher (1720-72) and the Irish Enlightenment', Eighteenth-Century Ireland, Vol. 3 (1988), pp. 115-122. James Usher (1720–1771), Roman Catholic priest and schoolmaster, was born in Co. Dublin, but later moved to London, and inherited a legacy of £300. This enabled him to open a school for Roman Catholic boys at Kensington Gravel Pits in January 1769, in partnership with his friend John Walker (1732–1807), whom he had converted to Roman Catholicism. Walker subsequently withdrew from the undertaking, and Usher became sole master of the school. Usher published several other works, including two philosophical treatises: A new system of philosophy, founded on the universal operations of nature (1764) and An introduction to the theory of the human mind (1771). ESTC records three copies in the UK, at Cambridge, Sheffield and the BL, and two copies in North America, at Princeton and Northwestern; OCLC adds two further copies, at UC Irvine and Yale." (Pickering & Chatto, cat. 799, lot 91).… (mer)