Secondary Qualities and Masculine Form in <i>Clarissa</i> and <i>Sir Charles Grandison</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article aligns the formal strategies of the eighteenth-century novelist Samuel Richardson with eighteenth-century empirical science. In his mechanical or corpuscular philosophy, the chemist Robert Boyle theorizes the difference between imperceptible particulate materiality and perceptible attributes like colour, later renamed by John Locke the difference between primary and secondary qualities. Primary-secondary difference structures Richardson's formal approach to the problem of masculine desirability as it is broached in his second novel Clarissa and imaginatively resolved in his third novel Sir Charles Grandison. While Lovelace, the protagonist of Clarissa, adheres to an empiricist model of objecthood and its apprehension, Sir Charles Grandison cannot be resolved into primary and secondary qualities, offering a collapse of primary-secondary difference that transforms masculine virtue into immediately perceptible appearance. This article argues that Richardson's engagement with empirical philosophy reflects the importance of the discourse of secondary qualities to the formal development of the eighteenth-century novel.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".