The character of Thomas Jefferson, as exhibited in his own writings.

Mode of access: Internet.

Relation concernant les évènemens qui sont arrivés à Thomas Martin : laboureur à Gallardon, en Beauce, dans les premiers mois de 1816.

Bibliographical footnotes.

Works of Thomas Hill Green ...

v.3 dated 1889.

The constitutional history of England since the accession of George the Third, 1760-1860,

Mode of access: Internet.

The old farmer and his almanack; being some observations on life and manners in New England a hundred years ago, suggested by reading the earlier numbers of Mr. Robert B. Thomas's Farmer's almanack, together with curious, instructive, and entertaining, as well as a variety of miscellaneous matter,

Mode of access: Internet.

The men who made the nation; an outline of United States history from 1760 to 1865,

Reprinted 1904.

The constitutional history of England since the accession of George the Third, 1760-1860 /

Vol. 2 has imprint: Boston, Crosby and Nichols; New York, O.S. Felt.

Memoirs of the life and writings of Thomas Carlyle, with personal reminiscences and selections from his private letters to numerous correspondents,

v. 1, 1795-1846 v. 2, 1847-1881.

Akrasia and the Aesthetic: Human Agency and the Site of Literature, 1760-1820

This study focuses on a series of foundational stylistic and formal innovations in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, and argues that they can be cumulatively attributed to the distinct challenges authors faced in representing human action and the will. The study focuses in particular on cases of “acting against better judgment” or “failing to do what one knows one ought to do” – concepts originally theorized as “akrasia” and “weakness of the will” in ancient Greek and Scholastic thought. During the Enlightenment, philosophy increasingly conceives of human minds and bodies like systems and machines, and consequently fails to address such cases except as intractable or incoherent. Yet eighteenth-century and Romantic narratives and poetry consistently engage the paradoxes and ambiguities of action and volition in representations of akrasia. As a result, literature develops representational strategies that distinguish the epistemic capacities of literature as privileged over those of philosophy.

The study begins by centering on narratives of distempered selves from the 1760s. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey narrate cases of knowingly and weakly acting against better judgment, and in so doing, reveal the limitations of the “philosophy of the passions” that famously informed sentimental literature at the time. These texts find that the interpretive difficulties of action demand a non-systematic and hermeneutic approach to interpreting a self through the genre of narrative. Rousseau’s narrative in particular informs William Godwin’s realist novels of distempered subjects. Departing from his mechanistic philosophy of mind and action, Godwin develops the technique of free indirect discourse in his third novel Fleetwood (1805) as a means of evoking the ironies and self-deceptions in how we talk about willing.

Romantic poetry employs the literary trope of weakness of will primarily through the problem of regretted inaction – a problem which I argue motivates the major poetic innovations of William Wordsworth and John Keats. While Samuel Taylor Coleridge sought to characterize his weakness of will in philosophical writing, Wordsworth turns to poetry with The Prelude (1805), revealing poetry itself to be a self-deceiving and disappointing form of procrastination. More explicitly than Wordsworth, John Keats identifies indolence as the prime symbol and basis of what he calls “negative capability.” In his letters and poems such as “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817) and “Ode on Indolence” (1819), Keats reveals how the irreducibly contradictory qualities of human agency speak to the particular privilege of “disinterested aesthetics” – a genre fitted for the modern era for its ability to disclose contradictions without seeking to resolve or explain them in terms of component parts.

Less popular but more democratic? Corrie, Clarkson and the dancing Cru

The central cultural experience of modernity has been change, both the ‘creative destruction’ of existing structures, and the growth, often exponential, of new knowledge. During the twentieth century, the central cultural platform for the collective experience of modernising societies changed too, from page and stage to the screen – from publishing, the press and radio to cinema, television and latterly computer screens. Despite the successive dominance of new media, none has lasted long at the top. The pattern for each was to give way to a successor platform in popularity, but to continue as part of an increasingly crowded media menu. Modern media are supplemented not supplanted by their successors.

Thomas Young's contribution to visual optics : the Bakerian lecture "On the mechanism of the eye"

Thomas Young (1773-1829) carried out major pioneering work in many different subjects. In 1800 he gave the Bakerian Lecture of the Royal Society on the topic of the “mechanism of the eye”: this was published in the following year (Young, 1801). Young used his own design of optometer to measure refraction and accommodation, and discovered his own astigmatism. He considered the different possible origins of accommodation and confirmed that it was due to change in shape of the lens rather than to change in shape of the cornea or an increase in axial length. However, the paper also dealt with many other aspects of visual and ophthalmic optics, such as biometric parameters, peripheral refraction, longitudinal chromatic aberration, depth-of-focus and instrument myopia. These aspects of the paper have previously received little attention. We now give detailed consideration to these and other less-familiar features of Young’s work and conclude that his studies remain relevant to many of the topics which currently engage visual scientists.

Thomas Young’s contributions to geometrical optics

In addition to his work on physical optics, Thomas Young (1773-1829) made several contributions to geometrical optics, most of which received little recognition in his time or since. We describe and assess some of these contributions: Young’s construction (the basis for much of his geometric work), paraxial refraction equations, oblique astigmatism and field curvature, and gradient-index optics.